Hardware sprites

[smiffy92]

Hello,

Does anyone know which arcade system could handle the most hardware sprites?


Thanks

Smiffy

[trap15]

Probably one of the later Sega or Taito boards.

May I inquire as to why you'd like to know

[smiffy92]

Curiosity mostly - I'm also curious as to which game displayed the most sprites on screen at the same time and whether sprite multiplexing was ever used in the arcades.

[trap15]

Multiplexing was only done on really really old hardware where they couldn't keep enough RAM to hold all the sprites they wanted to display. Millipede, for example, tosses an interrupt every 64 lines for the game to reload the sprites.

Probably one of the Sega scaler games (Galaxy Force II, etc.) uses the most sprites at once, considering the environment is composed almost entirely out of sprites.

[kamiboy]

If you stick two polygons together you have basically a sprite. So in that sense powerful arcade 3D hardware can handle the most sprites. Too bad developers rather waste those polygons on 3D graphics instead.

[Ed Oscuro]

But pure sprites don't scale very well, especially if there's fullscreen filtering (i.e. bilinear filtering, and most of the "pixel filters" seen for emulators are simply awful in all cases) applied, nor do they animate as well. Collision can be better with polygons too (although typical collision boxes for 3D aren't usually very sophisticated).

[kamiboy]

All those things are optional. You can arrange polygons to give you 1 to 1 unfiltered pixels from your sprite onto screen. You wont see any difference between hardware sprites and polygons. I am not sure what you mean about animation. When sprites animate you are just changing the sprite on screen to with the next one in the frame. You would do the same with polygons displaying the same sprites. It would look exactly the same.

Using polygons to display sprites has nothing to do with collision either. That is a seperate system that you have to implement manually, so polygons are just a means of putting something in texture memory on the screen.

[Ed Oscuro]

I am not sure what you mean about animation.

Meaning creating animation using polygons allows for more flexibility in responding to program states than sprite animation, and doing so more cheaply.

No complaints about the rest of it, except to say that the usual upscaling challenges will remain if attempting to cover upcoming 4K formats. 4K resolutions are less than 4x 1080p in horizontal resolution, so a fixed integer scaling factor won't work. Line skipping could work. Of course, polygons won't erase this problem of mapping texels 1:1 with onscreen pixels, either. However, polygons offer another solution as simple as using a more detailed texture, mesh, or animation, as desired, or starting out with more detail than can be resolved at the given resolution, whereas sprites must all be redrawn in order to better fit a new resolution.

[Fudoh]

4K resolutions are less than 4x 1080p

actually no. Consumer 4K at home is exactly 4x 1080p. 4K at the cinema is a little bit wider.

[Ed Oscuro]

4K resolutions are less than 4x 1080p

actually no. Consumer 4K at home is exactly 4x 1080p. 4K at the cinema is a little bit wider.

1080 * 4 = 4320, no? That's not the resolution for any of these formats, nor for the sets further down the page.

[Fudoh]

4x 1080p (think of the full area) = 3840x2160 and that's what new 4K TVs have.

You're actually thinking of 8K, but that would the area of 16x 1080p.

[Ed Oscuro]

You're actually thinking of 8K, but that would the area of 16x 1080p.

Doh, of course.

Still, we're back to my previous criticism (or at least a concern) - you still can't use a simple integer scaling factor to scale from 1080p to 4K. Whether this is a real problem or not depends on the scaling - it'd be nice to see non-integer scaling for high-resolution sets, along with letter- or pillarboxed integer scaling on sets as well.

[Fudoh]

math and summer temps don't mix, do they ? (or was it my bad for the typo above - 3840 <> 3860).

Displaying a 1080p image on a 4K Screen is an easy 1:2 scaling, both on the horizontal (1920x2 = 3840) and the vertical (1080x2 = 2160).

But this said, with a solid scaling engine, integer multiple vs. any resolution doesn't matter.

[Ed Oscuro]

Ha, I got horizontal and vertical resolutions backwards...another fine job! I hope they keep this divisibility for future devices (but will there be a future problem with 4K -> 8K?).

[Fudoh]

I think we'll be fine. They already adjusted the home formats for true 16:9 instead of going for real 4K cinema resolution (4096×2160p).

[kamiboy]

I am not sure what you mean about animation.

Meaning creating animation using polygons allows for more flexibility in responding to program states than sprite animation, and doing so more cheaply.

No complaints about the rest of it, except to say that the usual upscaling challenges will remain if attempting to cover upcoming 4K formats. 4K resolutions are less than 4x 1080p in horizontal resolution, so a fixed integer scaling factor won't work. Line skipping could work. Of course, polygons won't erase this problem of mapping texels 1:1 with onscreen pixels, either. However, polygons offer another solution as simple as using a more detailed texture, mesh, or animation, as desired, or starting out with more detail than can be resolved at the given resolution, whereas sprites must all be redrawn in order to better fit a new resolution.

I think you misunderstand what I mean when I say display sprites using polygons. The way it worka is you load your flat sprite image into texture memory then you display said sprite on screen using two triangles that each show half of the sprite. The triangles face the camera at a distance that give you 1 to 1 sprite pixel per screen pixel.

There is no animation advantage. Only advantage is 3D cards can show millions of triangles per second and they have a lot of texture space. Most modern games using sprite graphic display sprites like that.

[Ed Oscuro]

I think you misunderstand what I mean when I say display sprites using polygons. The way it worka is you load your flat sprite image into texture memory then you display said sprite on screen using two triangles that each show half of the sprite. The triangles face the camera at a distance that give you 1 to 1 sprite pixel per screen pixel.

No, really, I do know that. The confusion comes from...

There is no animation advantage. Only advantage is 3D cards can show millions of triangles per second and they have a lot of texture space. Most modern games using sprite graphic display sprites like that.

I was just speaking about doing things the modern way, with models, i.e. with the way the new Strider is being done, with a polygonal character. I made an error in thinking that was obvious. Polygonal characters can evince just as much detail as sprites, and animation is much easier, once you get to a certain degree of complexity or detail (and given how much time can be spent even on NES-era or earlier graphics - Karateka's graphics are realistic because they were rotoscoped, after all) it's going to be easier just to manipulate the animation or details directly. Creating polygonal game elements just requires different skills on the part of the model artist than would 2D. I suppose one can say that sprites more clearly identify game states because of the lack of inbetween frames. There's definitely advantages to each, but if the goal is to have consistent graphical quality with lots of frames of animation and lots of character, polygonal character design offers designers a lot.

Of course there are hybrid computerized approaches to 2D graphics that use computers to help in the design of 2D graphics (which are good enough for Disney to use, for example, even in their rare "traditional animation" projects, and which in fact might have made them economically feasible again), and with modern computers memory shouldn't be an issue for most any traditional type of game.

[kamiboy]

Personally I think the new Strider game looks like dogshit, and given the developer it will play like one too. Same with any older Japanese franchise that has been rebooted by western devs. Well, with the exception of Donkey Kong Country, but that is because Nintendon puts a magical leash around their developers regardless of their origin.

I generally dont like 3D graphics, especially for 2D games. Sprites, even with their limited frames have an unmatched charm, and just generally work better for platforming games. Then again I have a sprite fetish. But we digress.

Why even bring 3D models up in a technical discussion about which hardware can put the most sprites on screen? That is what threw me off.

[trap15]

Because 3D hardware can put sprites on-screen. And generally 3D systems can put much more of them on-screen than dedicated sprite hardware.

[Ed Oscuro]

I wish I knew how to actually quantify (maybe it can't be done) the limit of diminishing returns for making sprites in abundance or making them large - both things the type isn't well suited for, versus the limit for making polygonal models look more natural. It does seem difficult to get that crisp look with polygonal models, but again I don't think it's impossible. Arguably, even for 3D-view games we're in an era where they're still experimenting getting basic looks down, though, so maybe it's asking a lot.

Probably the easiest accurate thing to say about this is that there's no beating making a concrete artistic decision per-pixel, at the point of designing a sprite. However that decision closes off other avenues and complicates other matters later on, whereas 3D models allow more people to follow an artistic playbook and do their job to implement it. Game characters don't necessarily exist at the same brightness in an unchanging world with which they have limited interaction, after all. You can do colored lighting on sprites, but pretty soon implementing effects on sprites starts to be pretty ad-hoc and hacky compared to 3D models (and keep in mind that even 3D graphics implemented on modern gaming systems are hacky and ad-hoc in comparison to something like ray tracing).

Because 3D hardware can put sprites on-screen. And generally 3D systems can put much more of them on-screen than dedicated sprite hardware.

I wonder if GPGPU developments will help this trend - because a lot of the design of current GPUs is dedicated to specifically 3D tasks and GPGPU has apparently had a slow start getting traction in part because of this, as has video transcoding.

[kamiboy]

Because 3D hardware can put sprites on-screen. And generally 3D systems can put much more of them on-screen than dedicated sprite hardware.

Yeah, that was my original point, it is still unrelated to full on 3D models though.

Anyway, even with the sprite capabilities of modern 3D hardware i can hardly think of any examples of it being used to great effect.

Sprite art looks best at sub SD resolutions anyway. In HD there are simply too high a pixel density per sprite making asset creation expensive. Hell even if modern devs decided to make sprite based games these days all they'd accomplish is shitting the bed. Disregarding game design shortcomings there is issue of being lazy and going with hand drawn art over pixel art, which gives games an atrocious flash like look. 

Only old school Japanese developers knew how to do that sort of game justice and that region seems to have lost the magic touch, if not interest as well, except in rare cases like them faux 8-bit Mega Men and those Konami Rebirth games for the Wiiware etc.

Still, those were not exactly endowed with lavish production values, but beggars cannot be choosers as the saying goes. We are lucky to get any good games featuring pixel art sprites from Japan in this day and age. It is pretty much a dead artform today. 

With Japan out of the equation what remains to pick up the slack is a bunch of nostalgic indie devs in the west and for the most part they can only imitate the classics, and when they do it usually feels more like a parody than a clone.

Anywaste, the sprite capabilities of modern hardware remains largely theoretical. Hell even arcade hardware stopped pushing sprites and shifted focus to 3D polygons by the midt 90's.

That being said bullet hell arcade shooters are a good bet for most impressive sprite count since each bullet is a sprite.