Metro Siege: new arcade quality a500 brawler!

[alpine9000]

Originally Posted by redblade

Hi great audio.

Any chance of a screen grab of one of the character sprites to see how you have them set up??

Thanks

You mean like a sprite sheet ?

[saimo]

You're welcome
I've noticed that Skillgrid also shares similar sensitivities

Indeed Unfortunately, I've read a few times comments along the lines of "What? No techno? Not good...", so I wish you won't get the same - and I'd be very surprised if that happens, because, again, I think the track and the level you shared match nicely.

[Tsak]

Originally Posted by redblade

Any chance of a screen grab of one of the character sprites to see how you have them set up??

Thanks

I plan later on to do a breakdown of how we setup and use character sprites (with examples included)

[skan]

Originally Posted by saimo

Indeed Unfortunately, I've read a few times comments along the lines of "What? No techno? Not good...", so I wish you won't get the same - and I'd be very surprised if that happens, because, again, I think the track and the level you shared match nicely.

Are you serious?!? Amiga game + prog(gish) mod = instant love!

I just can't believe I would have seen the day of this match in heaven!

[Marchie]

I just hope it's finished before my son is 'too cool' to play it with me!

[vulture]

Great tunes Tsak! Congratulations!

[saimo]

Originally Posted by skan

Are you serious?!? Amiga game + prog(gish) mod = instant love!

Yes, I am. But not to derail this thread (again), I've posted a comprehensive answer (which also deals with the subject of originality touched on earlier in this thread) here.

[skyzoo73]

July 14th 2020 game progress update for DaemonClaw and Metro Siege.










[ Show youtube player ]

[Samurai_Crow]

Just saw it! Really cool though you have to be a patron for less pixelization. (You'll see what I mean when you watch.)

[redblade]

Originally Posted by alpine9000

You mean like a sprite sheet ?

Originally Posted by Tsak

I plan later on to do a breakdown of how we setup and use character sprites (with examples included)

Great thanks for that. This game looks Amazing. Can't wait for the demo.

[torturedutopian]

What's super interesting in this video is the way they are re-using / exchanging / shifting body parts to create very different characters with less memory (and more efficiently). Do you know if other well known games use this technique ? And the fact those tools made for this purpose will be shared with the community (and reused in further project). That's amazing !

[roondar]

That technique was used extensively in Arcade games and console games. Not sure about the Amiga though, it seems to me most Amiga games used more simplistic animation systems. If I had to guess, I'd say that probably some of the later Amiga fighter games did use something like this (or their animations would just not have fit in memory).

[Retro1234]

I might be wrong but although they might use same body parts for different characters during design, Arcade games probably stored the characters as one large sprite maybe only changing the palette to create another character- console games are probably the same.
Anyway very clever

[skyzoo73]

I follow BitBeamCannon as their patreon, and Mike is using this tool to create characters in a modular way, which will be further updated. Tool that will allow him to create other games after Metro Siege and DaemonClaw. I don't remember if he plans to make it available to everyone in the future. However, I can guarantee you that once the game demos are made public and people can see the fruits of their work, you will be amazed at the quality achieved.

[Samurai_Crow]

Spriter 2 won't be free but it will be available soon.

[Tsak]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

I might be wrong but although they might use same body parts for different characters during design, Arcade games probably stored the characters as one large sprite maybe only changing the palette to create another character- console games are probably the same.
Anyway very clever

Exactly. Basically some arcade games could also do sprite flips on the fly so they generally had much more versatility and space for character moves. I guess reusing parts might have been the case with some arcades but -afaik- I've never seen any doing modular animation (at least the way and to the extend we do it).

Originally Posted by skyzoo73

I follow BitBeamCannon as their patreon, and Mike is using this tool to create characters in a modular way, which will be further updated. Tool that will allow him to create other games after Metro Siege and DaemonClaw. I don't remember if he plans to make it available to everyone in the future. However, I can guarantee you that once the game demos are made public and people can see the fruits of their work, you will be amazed at the quality achieved.

The tool we use is Spriter-beta, which is a windows based program and predecessor to the commercial Spriter 1 and 2. Spriter Beta was available to the public for some time from Erik's Scorpion engine repo. But I think it has been removed since the inclusion of his new build-in animator editor.

Erik is creating for us a Spriter-beta replacement tool code named 'Retroanimator' (the new animator used in Scorpion is in fact a stripped and simplified version of the same program). Retroanimator is (more or less) a copy of Spriter-Beta and allows for modular animation but it's much more stable, bug free and easier to use. We plan to release this once it's ready (and that's what Mike was talking about).

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Tsak

Exactly. Basically some arcade games could also do sprite flips on the fly so they generally had much more versatility and space for character moves. I guess reusing parts might have been the case with some arcades but -afaik- I've never seen any doing modular animation (at least the way and to the extend we do it).

I freely admit I can be mistaken here, but I'd still like to share the reason I feel that some kind of partial animation is in use on Arcade and console games. It's simply one of storage space.

On the SNES, Street Fighter 2 takes up 2,6MB of cartridge space. On the Amiga 500, even though the fighters miss out a ton of animation frames compared to the SNES, the game takes up 4,3MB of disk space. Similarly, Final Fight on the Amiga takes 1,7MB and only 1MB on the SNES. Of course, it's possible there are other reasons here but it very often seems to be the case that despite usually having more animation frames and/or bigger objects the consoles needed a lot less cartridge space.

Anyway, I think it's best if I drop the subject - this thread is about your work. Not about this kind of stuff. And the animation system in Metro Siege is great stuff, so please don't misunderstand me there

[Tsak]

Hey, no prob

[DamienD]

Guys, can you please get back on topic? This is a News thread.

There's numerous posts about Street Fighter II, the Amiga / SNES / X68000 / Neo-Geo graphics handling techniques etc...

I'm sure like me, most people don't really care about the above discussion and are coming here to read information about "Metro Siege"... end of.

roondar has created a new thread about this where you can discuss graphics handling techniques until the end of days: Console sprite hardware/animation vs Amiga/other home computers

@GMods, please move all these Off Topic posts out of this thread... I would have done it myself but you know

[roondar]

I've been binging some metro siege videos on YouTube. It's looking really polished so far!

Watching the last few videos, I did have a question or two about the art design (not criticisms, just questions ). The first is that the characters seem to be rather tall or perhaps rather thin, is this a Metro Siege specific choice or was that look inspired by an existing game?

The second is perhaps a bit more technical, or perhaps still style based. Am I right in saying that the lower leg area (to the point of the knee joint) is separated by the modular animation from the rest? Or is it simply a stylistic choice?

And to be clear, this is in no way criticism of the the design - I'm just interested