How graphics are stored in games?

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by roondar

Yeah, sorry about that.

Been reading far too many posts with people claiming any and all Amiga games that had shortcomings always had them due to developer laziness.

Dont' worry Mate, I have great respect for all programmer since I know very well How it take to do a game, even a simply demo.

With some graphics we can do some good test, just to have a fun

[Brick Nash]

Quality information folks, thanks!

I was actually playing Amiga Final Fight recently and I was surprised at just how fast it could get in places although I counted SIX enemies PLUS the player on screen at one point later in the game so slowdown is inevitable.

I was going to start a new thread asking if those sorts of games like Final Fight and Double Dragon II on the Amiga used bobs or sprites for all the characters but I assumed bobs becasue you can do more with them and sprites for small things like hitsparks or tiny background animations.

I could be wrong but I'm still learning, though I think I've learned more about the Amiga this last week than in the last 25 years haha.

Wonderful forum, wonderful people!

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by Brick Nash

Quality information folks, thanks!

I was actually playing Amiga Final Fight recently and I was surprised at just how fast it could get in places although I counted SIX enemies PLUS the player on screen at one point later in the game so slowdown is inevitable.

I was going to start a new thread asking if those sorts of games like Final Fight and Double Dragon II on the Amiga used bobs or sprites for all the characters but I assumed bobs becasue you can do more with them and sprites for small things like hitsparks or tiny background animations.

I could be wrong but I'm still learning, though I think I've learned more about the Amiga this last week than in the last 25 years haha.

Wonderful forum, wonderful people!

Maybe with sprites they could have be done some enemies. Ok that would have only 3 colors, but with copper...

[Mrs Beanbag]

sprites are often used for things like score overlays

[Codetapper]

Originally Posted by Brick Nash

I was going to start a new thread asking if those sorts of games like Final Fight and Double Dragon II on the Amiga used bobs or sprites for all the characters but I assumed bobs becasue you can do more with them and sprites for small things like hitsparks or tiny background animations.

Sprites are generally useless for those sorts of games as any object that is drawn lower down the screen must obscure the object "above" it to maintain the perspective. And then if multiple bobs can obscure the sprite it gets messy so it's generally easier just to use bobs in the first place and save sprites for a parallax background, bonuses, energy meters, score etc.

[Brick Nash]

Again, great info, thanks everyone!

I take it things like energy bars are just simple coloured rectangles that are drawn to the screen and the length of which is linked to the health variable? That's how it works in Game Maker on windows anyway.

I've seen some games use actual pre drawn images of varying lengths used for healthbars but that doesn't seem memory efficient.

Also, as I was playing Final Fight I noticed the score/energy meters were above and outside the play area. Is that a separate screen/playfield or is it just out the way and easier to draw on a black background or help with scrolling?

[idrougge]

If the game is scrolling, a separate score bar is usually a separate screen.

[Brick Nash]

Originally Posted by idrougge

If the game is scrolling, a separate score bar is usually a separate screen.

Good to know. I take it that it just eases the load on the main play screen for scrolling and can have different palettes etc.?

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by Brick Nash

Good to know. I take it that it just eases the load on the main play screen for scrolling and can have different palettes etc.?

Correct. Mainly because of the Copper being able to alter the palette and independently have an unscrolled region.

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by Codetapper

Sprites are generally useless for those sorts of games as any object that is drawn lower down the screen must obscure the object "above" it to maintain the perspective. And then if multiple bobs can obscure the sprite it gets messy so it's generally easier just to use bobs in the first place and save sprites for a parallax background, bonuses, energy meters, score etc.

Do you think that we could have a better version of Final Fight for ECS/OCS, or they hit the limit of this chip set?

[Codetapper]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

Do you think that we could have a better version of Final Fight for ECS/OCS, or they hit the limit of this chip set?

It could definitely have been better yes. It should have been 1Mb only, clamp the frame-rate (as it's very frustrating when it seems to be 50fps when there's nothing on the screen, then multiple enemies come on and it slows to what seems like about 5fps!); there should never be so many enemies that the game slows down so much. Storing the enemies in 16 pixel high blocks makes each enemy a lot slower to draw too, particularly when a lot of them contain empty rows. I also think the colour palette choice was poor.

Because of time constraints they didn't want to resize the graphics, but I would rather have had smaller enemies and a better frame rate, but that's just personal taste. I was thinking Double Dragon size fighters.

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by Codetapper

It could definitely have been better yes. It should have been 1Mb only, clamp the frame-rate (as it's very frustrating when it seems to be 50fps when there's nothing on the screen, then multiple enemies come on and it slows to what seems like about 5fps!); there should never be so many enemies that the game slows down so much. Storing the enemies in 16 pixel high blocks makes each enemy a lot slower to draw too, particularly when a lot of them contain empty rows. I also think the colour palette choice was poor.

Because of time constraints they didn't want to resize the graphics, but I would rather have had smaller enemies and a better frame rate, but that's just personal taste. I was thinking Double Dragon size fighters.

16 or 32 colors? Would be great to do a thread like We did with rygar, just to share idea about it

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

16 or 32 colors? Would be great to do a thread like We did with rygar, just to share idea about it

If I were doing it, I'd make the display window short, wide, and 32-colors. We can use a separate screen with only a few bitplanes to indicate health of the characters. That would free up some blitter time for the BOB drawing.

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

If I were doing it, I'd make the display window short, wide, and 32-colors. We can use a separate screen with only a few bitplanes to indicate health of the characters. That would free up some blitter time for the BOB drawing.

somenthing like 288*200 px? With 20%-30% less bigger bobs..

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

somenthing like 288*200 px? With 20%-30% less bigger bobs..

I might go shorter yet and just use bigger scoreboard at the top in yet another screen of 2 bitplanes+coppershades. Like 288*160 with 50% smaller BOBs. That would make the play area big enough that we could have 2 human players or something and more time for blitting yet.

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

I might go shorter yet and just use bigger scoreboard at the top in yet another screen of 2 bitplanes+coppershades. Like 288*160 with 50% smaller BOBs. That would make the play area big enough that we could have 2 human players or something and more time for blitting yet.

Someone have some good Graphics? We cold put it into test. I could use rygars' source code

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by roondar

I haven't looked at the Final Fight Amiga code, but it does have pretty big bobs and lots of them. I wouldn't be surprised if the slowness is mostly due to the Blitter not being fast enough to deal with all the bobs and not due to programmers being 'lazy'.

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

About Final Fight Amiga Ecs, it is the real Amiga limit, or lazy programmers? Would be great to see if ECS/OCS can move all that Gfx with better colors and better velocity

Not so much lazy but rather constrained by a very tight deadline. When you do not have time, you select the fastest to code solution that is efficient enough but not the most efficient one.
It is fairly clear that Richard Aplin was a very competent coder but if I recall correctly he had between six and nine months by himself to code the whole thing and took some of this time to rip the arcade graphics straight from the ROMs. He did as best as could be done under these constraints but that means that indeed the game is not as good as it could have been, far from it.

Originally Posted by Codetapper

Sprites are generally useless for those sorts of games as any object that is drawn lower down the screen must obscure the object "above" it to maintain the perspective. And then if multiple bobs can obscure the sprite it gets messy so it's generally easier just to use bobs in the first place and save sprites for a parallax background, bonuses, energy meters, score etc.

If the palette allows, and if the drawing algorithm supports swapping bobs palettes on the fly (not that hard since that is just blitter setup) one can also draw the topmost object using sprites. This does not work with all objects given sprites limitations but for some games that would make sense.

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

Do you think that we could have a better version of Final Fight for ECS/OCS, or they hit the limit of this chip set?

There is room for improvement. Lots.
Look at the sprite map: it is full of holes, about one third of its memory could be reclaimed by using a better splitting-and-positioning algorithm. This could have been used to allow a triple buffering screen which would help to smoothen frame rate in games where the gameplay can be predicted a few frames in advance, like in a brawler for example.
Also, bobs are huge which means that there are lots of opportunities to do pure copies rather than masking (I am under the impression that Richard Aplin at least considered this optimization but I am not sure he got to implement it).
Finally, Final Fight background layout leads itself extremely well to copper gradients and the palette used for the background could thus have been more reduced allowing more variety for the bobs.

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

If I were doing it, I'd make the display window short, wide, and 32-colors. We can use a separate screen with only a few bitplanes to indicate health of the characters. That would free up some blitter time for the BOB drawing.

Noooo, not another a-la Tiertex banner again.
Sprites are perfect for scores and player bars, no need for another screen and there are rarely any bobs drawn there anyway so the bitplanes number can be lower most of the time without any ill consequences.

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

Someone have some good Graphics? We cold put it into test. I could use rygars' source code

I would humbly suggest to finish Rygar first.

I know from experience that trying to do multiple things at the same time is the surest way to finish none of them so if you could learn from my mistakes that would save you some time and effort and frustration.

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by ReadOnlyCat

I would humbly suggest to finish Rygar first.

I know from experience that trying to do multiple things at the same time is the surest way to finish none of them so if you could learn from my mistakes that would save you some time and effort and frustration.

[Samurai_Crow]

I was thinking that the sprites could be character images in 4 bit color on a 2 bitplane screen for status and health.