Does anyone find this annoying?

[Multijointed Monster Maker]

How whenever a game had huge sprites, the fluidness of the animation always suffered? Stupid little kids look at game magazines and get impressed by giant sprites, but I always knew that big sprites always meant the animation is going to be crap.

[roland p]

Never thought about it that way. What games are you refering to?

[Kripto]

Bigger sprites also mean less space/time to see obstacles and enemies before you make contact. This is one of my biggest issues with the libraries of systems like the Super Nintendo and Genesis.

[mbd30]

Never thought about it that way. What games are you refering to?

 

"Sword of Sodan" comes to mind.

[gdement]

They probably could have good animation with big sprites, but they didn't since it would take a huge amount of ROM space.

Games designed that way were probably just designed to look good in screenshots. Any game that achieved huge sprites without a bigger ROM was cheating somewhere to make up for it.

 

There was some game on the PCEngine I saw reviewed once which looked like an extreme example of this. All the enemies pretty much used the same huge sprite, with almost no animation. I think they even slid off the screen when they died (no real death animation). But hey, the sprites were almost as tall as the screen so it must be awesome, right?

 

Sword of Sodan is a good example on the Genesis. I think that's a 512KB game. Big sprites, but few of them and badly animated.

Compare that with Streets of Rage, also 512KB, which used smaller sprites but were well animated, and it was actually a good game. Same story also for Golden Axe.

 

Then on the Sega CD you have Final Fight, which is back to big sprites but ALSO good animation. That only became possible because the ROM size wasn't such a limitation anymore. Active graphics still had to fit in the onboard RAM, which I think was a bit over 512KB, but the background and other "regional" graphics could be swapped out between levels.

Edited March 15, 2010 by gdement

[Eltigro]

 

There was some game on the PCEngine I saw reviewed once which looked like an extreme example of this. All the enemies pretty much used the same huge sprite, with almost no animation. I think they even slid off the screen when they died (no real death animation). But hey, the sprites were almost as tall as the screen so it must be awesome, right?

 

 

 

 

China Warrior... and no, it's not awesome.

 

[Multijointed Monster Maker]

Another question, in most fighting games of the time, why did punches and kicks only use one frame? There could've had been at least 3 frames if they recycled the first two frames for every different type of punch, and only have the last frame differentiate between punches.

Edited March 15, 2010 by Multijointed Monster Maker

[gdement]

 

There was some game on the PCEngine I saw reviewed once which looked like an extreme example of this. All the enemies pretty much used the same huge sprite, with almost no animation. I think they even slid off the screen when they died (no real death animation). But hey, the sprites were almost as tall as the screen so it must be awesome, right?

 

 

 

 

China Warrior... and no, it's not awesome.

 

 

Yeah, that's the one. I thought it was Japan only, but I see they exported it to the TG16 also. How kind of them.

[Video]

I hate huge ass sprites, I mean, sure their pretty, but I'd rather tone that down a bit and have it smooth. Remember, photo realistic, and a jittery framerate kinda kills the effect I don't mind large sprites, if their well animated, or at least smooth, but take a fighting game, where you have like three frames of animation for a punch, for a little sprite, that's fine, but for a big sprite, you really see the jump between the different frames.

 

Add to that, some systems can only do a certain size sprite (like many 8 bits did 8x8 sprites, or maybe up to 24x24, I seem to remember C64 doing 24x sprites) but if you use a bigger sprite, you're just using multiple sprites to make one big one, and if it's done wrong, you can have all kinds of tearing and alignment issues added to the mix....but then, sometimes, I like to see my ass above my head in a game

Edited March 17, 2010 by Video

[Multijointed Monster Maker]

In my opinion, all 2D games should have at least 15fps of animation. 99% of 16-bit games don't follow this rule.

Edited March 21, 2010 by Multijointed Monster Maker

[kool kitty89]

It's not only ROM space but DMA time limitations of the VDP. (limiting how much data can be updated to VRAM per frame) I know in the genesis's case it's a lot worse in 60 Hz than in 50 Hz where there's way more DMA time (more vblank lines per frame), unless you clip the screen a whole lot. (so it's letter boxed)

[Multijointed Monster Maker]

It's not only ROM space but DMA time limitations of the VDP. (limiting how much data can be updated to VRAM per frame) I know in the genesis's case it's a lot worse in 60 Hz than in 50 Hz where there's way more DMA time (more vblank lines per frame), unless you clip the screen a whole lot. (so it's letter boxed)

 

And the size of the vram.