You are nothing to me but just an additional victim.
METAL STORM NES SPRITES FULL
I am experienced in guerilla campaign and I’m the most qualigied sharpshooter in the full US armed forces. What the procreate did you just fornicating say about me, you little hallion? I’ll have you cognize I graduated most elite in my division in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been enmeshed in multifarious undisclosed incursions on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 habituated executions. If I can explain anything further, let me know. I was never a great game developer back then, and I'm out of the space now, so hopefully someone has a better explanation.
METAL STORM NES SPRITES SOFTWARE
I used some Nintendo software to make the spritesheets and mappings to the sprites themselves so it was pretty easy to import. The memory you load the images into is fast VRAM, and there's no complicated vertex math or anything to compute. They continued using this architecture for a while, because it's super fast. From scrolling backgrounds to forced perspective, they basically used sprites for everything, and did all of that with just software. Now, since these are all just 2D images, it looks like they designed and managed all of the necessary animations. As such, you basically load sprite sheets into memory and build the objects that you wish to display. When you want to draw anything on screen, you take little chunks of that loaded image and say, "alright, put that square here" (if I recall, it was 8x8 pixel squares for the DSi). All of their visuals are based off of an image that is loaded into memory. Nintendo's 2D games don't have this luxury. As such, the views of a ship flying over a canyon are created by making a canyon and placing the camera above it and moving forward (this is a gross simplification). I developed for the DSi when I was an intern, and if I recall, the basic 2D architecture for Nintendo consoles was still in place, so I can give my experience if you'd like.įor 3D games, you create 3D structures and have a camera (obviously). At the extremes the "deepest" tiles counterscroll until they're barely moving at all. Tiles further out get shifted against the scroll direction, so they change less each frame. Tiles in the foreground are static and scroll with simple hardware scrolling. The background tile map stays the same - but the tiles get redrawn in video memory so they scroll from frame to frame. The really complicated stuff happens in Metal Storm and Crisis Force. There's no trick there, aside from the complexities of getting arbitrary pixels onto a tile-mapped screen and the unforgiving math of software 3D rendering. Same deal with the ground falling away in Klash Ball, albeit in the opposite direction.Īnd then there's games like Elite which are just drawing lines to a buffer and updating like a modern game. It starts off showing every second or third scanline, then expands frame-by-frame to show all of them. Vertical scrolling between scanlines can be used for scaling, as with Kick Master. So the dark yellow of the closer cloud layer covers up the sprites of the further layer, but the identical dark yellow outside that layer lets the "distant" sprites show through.
You can also see some distant clouds below those lines, which is why the clouds are only three colors: the NES used four-color palettes, and the first palette color could be treated as "transparent" on sprites and backgrounds. You can see a few glitchy lines where the scanline effects are mistimed. It should be impossible for those clouds to overlap - but the developers used sprites for the tips, which is why (at least in an emulator) the tips don't quite follow the background. The NES did not have layered backgrounds. The shortcomings of this "parallax scrolling" can be hidden, as in Gaiapolis, with sprites pretending to be backgrounds. With every "scanline" offset slightly, it's simple to have a floor that shifts with the camera, or a road that bends ahead of your car, or clouds that move slower "in the distance." (It's still damned impressive when Super Spy Hunter uses this for curved roads.) However, since oldschool graphics were generated on-the-fly from 8x8 tiles, it was easy (relatively speaking) to scroll the background on every single row of pixels. Games could trivially scroll the background in any direction (since the map was larger than the screen resolution) and move sprites accordingly. The NES could only draw a "tile map" background and some sprites on top of that. The vast majority of these are scanline effects.