Coder shows possible way in which some elements of Street Fighter 2 might be possible

[skan]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Doesnt really matter what the characters are themed on, it needs to follow the established norms and "rules" of a beat em up, otherwise it fails.

Elfmania failed.

God forbid some innovations!

Tastes differ and I honestly liked it back in the day.
Oh, and rules are made to be broken anyway.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by skan

God forbid some innovations!

Tastes differ and I honestly liked it back in the day.
Oh, and rules are made to be broken anyway.

Innovations are great when they are a benefit.

Pretty much everyone agreed back in the day it really was a great looking game, well programmed and utilising the Amiga to the fullest on OCS/ECS.

But everyone also remembers the game mechanics let it down. I didn't mind the coin collecting and all that stuff, but the floaty characters just didn't do it for me.

I personally feel it would have been better received to be more traditional in how it played.

Shadow Fighter for me got everything right.

[DanScott]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Shadow Fighter for me got everything right.

Yeah, I was looking at that last night.. great use of dual playfield, with the graphics and background designs made to work perfectly with the method... that level on the girders with the sprite chains etc, looks lovely!

Also, they do the scroll at 50fps (that's the cheap part) but the characters are running at 25fps, and it gets away with that nicely!

[Havie]

Originally Posted by DanScott

Yeah, I was looking at that last night.. great use of dual playfield, with the graphics and background designs made to work perfectly with the method... that level on the girders with the sprite chains etc, looks lovely!

Also, they do the scroll at 50fps (that's the cheap part) but the characters are running at 25fps, and it gets away with that nicely!

Completely agree and the Shadow Fighter engine would have done a great version of SF2 (not perfect but more playable). Was the only one on one fighter I bought for my 1200.

[skan]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Innovations are great when they are a benefit.

Pretty much everyone agreed back in the day it really was a great looking game, well programmed and utilising the Amiga to the fullest on OCS/ECS.

But everyone also remembers the game mechanics let it down. I didn't mind the coin collecting and all that stuff, but the floaty characters just didn't do it for me.

I personally feel it would have been better received to be more traditional in how it played.

Shadow Fighter for me got everything right.

Yeah, I admit gameplay has its quirks, but I always thought it's been underappreciated too. The two things I didn't like: way too short and not a lot of characters to choose from (there was a data disk planned, some artwork surfaced on the web years ago IIRC).

And yeah, Shadow fighter was pretty impressive!

Back on topic, funny how we could fulfill our long lost dream of a proper SF2 clone on Amiga not only on AGA, but OCS as well! Good times!

[Havie]

Put together simple Blitz basic demo using the concept of dual playfields and AGA 64 pixel sprite. Thanks to Master for the background, used SNES sprites but not optimised palette so Chunli just uses Ken's palette and sprites don't match the background. Could use some properly sorted graphics but quite pleased with the effect.

https://eab.abime.net/zone/Streetfigher2test.adf

[vulture]

cool!

[tarr]

Besides Elfmania and Shadow Fighter there was another well coded Beat 'em up for the Amiga: Fightin' Spirit.

ECS version
[ Show youtube player ]

AGA version
[ Show youtube player ]


It was an Italian production, like Shadow Fighter.

[Retro1234]

Originally Posted by tarr

Besides Elfmania and Shadow Fighter there was another well coded Beat 'em up for the Amiga: Fightin' Spirit.

ECS version
[ Show youtube player ]

AGA version
[ Show youtube player ]


It was an Italian production, like Shadow Fighter.

I always preferred Fightin Spirit the only thing was the matches seem to be over very quick.

[Retro1234]

how many colours is Fightin Spirit? OCS nice big characters good playability and backgrounds good selection of moves and iirc a Turbo mode and presumably there Bobs not sprites.

[d4rk3lf]

Well, listing Amiga titles, there's also Body Blows from Team 17.
[ Show youtube player ]

And Brutal Paws of Fury (I really love this one).
[ Show youtube player ]
--------------

And, as with Fightin' Spirit, they both have locked Bg's (non parallaxed (and I personally don't mind)).

But Shadow Fighter seems to do all kinds of Parallax as Street Fighter 2 on Arcade.

[vulture]

@Retro1234

I think Fighting Spirit is either 32 or 64(EHB) colours. I can't see much difference between the ECS and AGA versions tbh, only minor stuff, like bg anims. Very nice indeed and the pixel art is fantastic while keeping 50 fps for the ECS version as well, but Shadow Fighter is still the better game imo (gameplay-wise) and I love the parallax effects too.
Btw you've posted the CD32 video instead of ECS, here's one:
[ Show youtube player ]

[DanScott]

ECS version is definitey less colourful. Probably 32 colours maximum. Still quite impressive althrough can't tell frame rate from that video

[vulture]

@DanScott

iirc I had checked both versions (AGA and ECS) with WinUAE and they were both full (scrolling and sprites) 50 fps games

[Master484]

I am curious though (sorry, I am sucker for automatization ), what will happen, if I take your palette, and force automatization process to use it.... how that will turn on?

This depends on the program, and how smart the re-coloring logic inside it is. But most likely it looks at the picture and thinks alongside the lines of: "okay, that's a dark red, so I need to find a dark red or brown to replace it".

The problem is that the automatic process can't actually understand what "looks good". Even if you tell it to use a certain palette, it'll just try to match colors with the closest possible replacement, based on RGB values.

I think that the conversion tools in Photoshop and XnView are meant mainly for high resolution photgraphs, which they can actually convert really well to 16 colors and even 8 colors, because they can use automatic dithering algorithms, that can produce really good results in high res images. But for low res pixel art, they're usually in trouble.

When I was doing my conversion, in the beginning I actually used the automatic converter process of XnView a lot, with many different settings, to get the general idea of how it could look, and what characters suffered the most in the conversion, and so on.

And then, I took the characters one by one, and used GIMP to do the color swapping, one color at a time. The SNES characters have a 16 color palette (just like the arcade), and at this point I had my own 16 color "mega palette" ready. So all I needed to do was to pick the colors manually and tell GIMP to swap them one by one.

Did you converted (back then) all the characters and all the frames of SF2?
If yes... then.. it's great... I am not worried for the coders.... they already have the best option.

Yes, I converted all characters. But all frames, no. I only have Ryu and Zangief fully converted, for the others I have only have one frame.

The full set of characters can be seen in the first post of this thread:

https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=96990

I'm not claiming that this is the perfect palette, but in my opinion it works quite well.

[Havie]

HI Master - is there anywhere I can download your Ryu and Zangief sprite sheets to plug into my demo?

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by Master484

and what characters suffered the most in the conversion

Blanka for me.
It just looses so easily that green tint he have, and becomes sort of monochromatic yellowish Blanka.
And Yokozuna sun highlights on the body... it's so tricky making it good with 8 colors.

Originally Posted by Master484

https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=96990

I'm not claiming that this is the perfect palette, but in my opinion it works quite well.

Looks great.
That Chinese fighter (don't know his name) looks even much better then Snes version.
The small issue I see here is lack of green in the palette, and Blanka and Guile suffer most of that. Ryu also should be less magenta and more white.
Since you have 2 magentas in your palette, I wonder if one can be swapped for green, so Guile and Blanka make use of it (and other characters).

But as you said, it's a lot of work, and these are minor things, and sprites already looks amazing... and mine looks waaaaaaay worse.

Oh and btw, you converted the super street fighter 2... original street fighter 2 had less characters, so probably palette could use of the fact not being screeched on so many characters.

Cheers!

[DanScott]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Blanka for me.
It just looses so easily that green tint he have, and becomes sort of monochromatic yellowish Blanka.
And Yokozuna sun highlights on the body... it's so tricky making it good with 8 colors.

That's the compromise you HAVE to make reducing them to a fixed 7 colour palette. Once you try to sneak a green into that palette, you lose another colour, and then essentially lose detail on every other character. You just have to forget the green, and recolour Blanka to the palette that fits best generically across all characters.

When converting down to 15 colours, you might be able to slip a couple of greens in there... but you'll definitely need to be on point with your hand-dithering to get the best results

[Havie]

Updated my demo especially for Dan! You can now choose between two backgrounds by pressing 1 or 2.

Graphics have just been converted in PP so not great but you can see that Blitz is looking capable of doing this.

https://eab.abime.net/zone/Streetfigher2test.adf

[IMG]
moustache[/IMG]

[DanScott]

Originally Posted by Havie

Updated my demo especially for Dan!

I'm not going anywhere near AGA I don't consider it as much of a challenge, given the wide sprites and the 2 x 16 colour playfields.

The video that this thread was started with, shows (in my opinion) the real way to go

However personally, I don't believe hardware sprites are the way to go for characters. The dahlsim "problem" on it's own is just one reason to avoid that!!

Even though you get your own palette offset for hardware sprites, I think for attached 16 colour sprites, they all have to come from the same bank of 16, so there's no way to pick a seperate palette for each fighters