GIFs of cool visual effects in old games
- Thread starter Phediuk
- Start date
Yeah I'm aware it's a GBA, I was talking about Aladdin on Master System
I was going to post this! I think it looks better than DKC snow, although it doesn't have the transitions/parallax that DKC does.
Flat shaded polygon rasterizer.
Pretty much only difference to modern graphics is that the shading was usually done per polygon and with predefined colors instead of a small program per pixel.
Should not be confused with early vector/line displays which couldn't actually show rasterized graphics.
Yup.
Rotoscoping artists are also the unsung heroes of the CGI film industry.
They separate foreground from background for each frame and allow occlusion to happen with animated graphics.
I never owned a Megadrive, but from those gifs, I actually find the games more impressive than what I had on snes. Now I want one...
Dark Alliance is still one of my favorite games on how to exploit hardware and bypass it's weaknesses,
Textures were baked in low enough resolution to reduce shimmer from Ps2 bad texturing.
Game was supersampled to allow better quality and why not as Ps2 had huge fillrate and game didn't have much overdraw due to top down camera.
Lot of polygons were used in environment to give surfaces depth and lighting information for stones and other elements.
Water mesh was highly dense and simulated in VU1.
The Water and the Daokas (portals) in the game were mesmerizing stuff for it's day, 1999. All software based with no GPU support.
Sadly, no gif just youtube:
Yup, it was nice.
In hindsight voxel engines would have been perfect candidates for screen space reflections, as it would have been easy to do and holes could have been filled with voxel raycast. (As there was no view rotation it could have been done very fast for each vertical line at time.)
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It's truly 3D with depth testing and all. Yoshi's Island is one of the rare games to embed a SuperFX2 co-processor.
I don't see what the island in the title screen is doing that couldn't be done with mode 7 to be honest. Maybe the SFX2 chip is being used for the distortion effect in the logo? I have no idea. :P
Yeah, I mean there are polygonal 3D objects in many of the levels, like the spinning cylinders and the falling planks, so I don't doubt the game can do 3D. Those objects don't look anything like what I'm seeing on the title screen though, so are you absolutely sure it's not just mode 7 and sprites there?
That's incredible. You can imagine that anyone who attended/participated in that event probably had their minds blown. Fast forward to modern times and we have the drone racing league.
The video below shows what happens when the SNES' S-PPU is on the way out. That's just the default chip in the SNES, which is responsible for Mode 7. The Super FX chip is what does the sprite scaling (as the S-PPU could only do background scaling) and in the video below they're fine. So to me that indicates that the island is Mode 7 and the sprites use the Super FX chip.
Even without that it makes more sense from a development perspective to do that as it's a hell of a lot cheaper in terms of time and resource to do
I got one of those when they launched being blown away by the system and its graphics.
Keith Courage! One of my favorite games back in the day.
Totally regretted it 6 months later when I saw the Genesis and Altered Beast. I somehow convinced my parents to get me a SNES at launch and eventually got the Genesis for cheap 3 years later (I needed one for Phantasy Star and greatly enjoyed many other games with it).
I can only imagine how much more impact the TG would have gotten if it had come out 1-2 years earlier in the US.
I thought Shadow Fighter was even better, with the same "ground parallax" as seen in SF2 (and Elfmania) and tons of additional real layers of parallax for the background.
Shame for the horrendous artstyle, these guys' engine could handle an impressive SF2 port minus the # of colours onscreen.
Then I probably messed up quoting messages, i was strictly talking about Iridion 3D on GBA using "fmv" as backgrounds.
As for Aladdin, that's really impressive, i'd imagine those bricks are animated characters, hence the repeating pattern, but there's a lot more to it.
Yeah, Contra: Hard Corps looks incredible.After the SNES, few genesis games impressed me the same as a typical mode 7 effect... but OH boy with Batman and Contra Hard Corps.
They are both insane.
I guess I really like sprite-rotation.
I remember reading about the game when it was in development and one of the reasons it ran so well was, if memory serves, because it only actually used around 8 colours onscreen rather than the usual 32 (I think!). They used the equivalent of cross-hatching/stippling to make up the various shades so it appeared to have more.
On the other side you have the likes of Lionheart that managed to get 1000's of colours onscreen at once, parallax scrolling and also managed to run interlaced in parts.
I love pseudo-3D effects/sprite scaling and rotation, so this thread is my kind of thing. Here's a bunch of my lesser known favorites that haven't been posted yet:
The 3D Battles of WorldRunner - NES (1987):
Ace o Nerae! - SNES (1993):
Panorama Cotton - Sega Genesis (1994):
Dark Edge - Arcade (1994):
The 3D Battles of WorldRunner - NES (1987):
Ace o Nerae! - SNES (1993):
Panorama Cotton - Sega Genesis (1994):
Dark Edge - Arcade (1994):
And there's also the music, which to this day I hear playing in my head when it's snowing :D That level is just perfect.
the thing that's really impressive about hard corps is that it doesn't have sprite rotation at all - everything that looks like it rotates is made up of smaller bits that orbit and have a few variations for different angles that when put together give the impression of smooth rotationAfter the SNES, few genesis games impressed me the same as a typical mode 7 effect... but OH boy with Batman and Contra Hard Corps.
They are both insane.
I guess I really like sprite-rotation.
mode 7 is only able to scale and rotate one layer. In this scene, the soil of the island is rendered in mode7, but the rest is still rotated, scaled and depth tested.
Exactly. The island soil is a tilemap rendered in mode7 while the sprites are rendered by the superfx into the super nes's video memory.
After beating the game, the title-screen change:
What an interesting port. Looks like it took more cues from the SNES game than the Genesis one.
If it indeed uses the SFX2 for sprites, then that's weird, because I have to be honest, I don't see any sprite scaling or rotation in the title screen, never did.
I was going to say this. I'm almost certain the sprites don't rotate or scale there. Doesn't mean the SuperFX chip didn't process them. Maybe it performs some tricks to make sure they are Z-ordered properly as they spin around the centre?
That's actually true, probably just the mind filling in the gaps. The thing is though that you could still use the Super FX to move the sprites around and pass them between the foreground/background layers. Again, cheaper in terms of system resource to offload that to hardware designed to do that kind of thing.
8 colours..hmm..It uses very few but 8 doesn't sound right.
Per layer maybe ?
Lionheart was incredible.
It was basically using several layers of the infamous Amiga copper effect, masked as to replace selected shades of the colours used for the foreground.
Also on Amiga
Or this
I've always liked the abstract visual effects used during battle in the PS1 FF games, just from an aesthetic POV I guess.
Yeah probably doing some stuff that isn't immediately obvious.
Justice League Heroes (2006), among other "dungeon crawlers" used that same engine and had a PSP port - it doesn't run at 60fps there but it looks excellent on a handheld for it's time and plays really quite well for how much is on screen and the quality thereof (including water mesh). I kind of wish all of the Snowblind engine games had mobile ports like Bard's Tale, I'd play them.
I quite like the sprites in the GBA version of Dark Alliance, water effects are less impressive though...:P
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Wow!!!I love pseudo-3D effects/sprite scaling and rotation, so this thread is my kind of thing. Here's a bunch of my lesser known favorites that haven't been posted yet:
Ace o Nerae! - SNES (1993):
This one looks fantastic!
Chiming in with some that I think haven't been posted.
The water in the Sinking Old Sanctuary level of Castlevania: Bloodlines.
Character selection morphing from Contra: Hard Corps.
The special stages in Sonic 2.
The water in the Sinking Old Sanctuary level of Castlevania: Bloodlines.
Character selection morphing from Contra: Hard Corps.
The special stages in Sonic 2.
Cliffhanger: Edward Randy is another great game if you love knocking dudes into the foreground/background.
Astrix for GBA was some magic
Holy crap I thought this was a PS1 game when I first saw it.
OP
OP
At least include the game titles!
First two are Mr. Nutz Hopping Mad (first is main gameplay, second is the 3D bonus stage), and the last one (with the bee) is Apidya.
yeah, first game to use cinematic cutscenes throughout the entire game to tell the story instead of just text/in game sprites.
Here's Wizard of Oz on the DS:
Why is Dorothy dressed like a waifu? Her skirt wasn't close to that short.
It was made by Media.Visions, who also developed Wild Arms, the last two Valkyria Chronicles, Digimon Cyber Sleuth, and the Chaos Ring series for Squeenix on mobile.