2D Capability of Modern Machines. (2 Part Question)

1: Surely 2D tech did not die with the Saturn and the Neo Geo. How capable are today's machines at doing 2D?

2: How powerful was the Saturn, really? 2D monster, etc etc. But it couldn't do transparency, something I think was even possible on the SNES.

 

1) WONDERFUL capabilities that will never be used i'd love a sf:alpha or a king of fighters in High resolution ....
2)the problem with saturn's trasparency were on 3D graphics.

 

Not that I don't want to believe you, but I seem to remember a few old "shoot outs" between Playstation and Saturn, where 2D sprites were transparent on the PSX, but not on the Sat.

I think I even saw one recently, a fighting game, where the clouds in the sky were transparent on the Playstation.

Hmmm.

So, in regards to 1, it's safe to say that 2D is easily handled on new hardware?

I like what I see with Odin Sphere, btw.

 

As has been said elsewhere on this forum, the reason that some saturn ports of transparency-enabled PSX games don't have transparency is simply because it has to be done on the CPU. That makes it harder to program, so a lot of developers just don't bother. That doesn't mean that transparency isn't possible on the Saturn though; even some very early saturn games used transparency.

 

hehe, i hate it when stuff like this turns into an academic debate. "How powerful is the Saturn really?" -> in what terms? MIPS? Dhrystone? or relative consumer-talk terms?

 

Saturn can do transparency and translucent effects if programmed in. The SFC and PlayStation had hardware chips to do them which is why they are "over used" at times. Early Saturn games such as Astel has some very nice 2D transparencies and Welcome House (PlayStation conversion) has 3D transparencies. Cotton Boomerang by Success has 3 layers of translucent effects on top of each other !! Very impressive stuff.

Yakumo

 

The problem would be that you won't see a lot of libraries, tools, and middlewear to make devloping bitmap based 2d games easier. Thus, you won't see many of them (demand set aside). If you want to get technical, and hit the problem head on, the 360 and PS3 processors don't support the low res signal (240p) that those old games are displayed on. The result is an interlaced mess. May not be too bad on an S-Video machine but in RGB, it's ugly. Not everyone cares, but for those of us that do, it makes XBLA unplayable.

 

360 Actually has pretty nifty 2D capabilities. I mean, I've only dev'd using the XNA toolkit, but the 2D stuff is great on it.

I imagine the official tools are even better, and would easily allow for 2D. The issue is that it doesn't really sell all that well anymore.

 

in this day and age 2d does not stand as it used to.

With the power of polygones you can make a polygone engine for sidescrolling and handling more and better things than sprites could ever do. Zoom, scale, rotate and have any number of them on-screen to your heart's desire. Overlay them, merge and do whatever with them.

Polygones are much more flexible than sprites, and as indicated the 360 for example can do amazing things.

 

Feature set and flexibility is a matter of perspective. Techniques for manipulating sprites and bitmaps are different than those for polygons and meshes. While current hardware is more than capable of doing pretty much anything you want to do on a 2D bitmap basis, it is more a problem of "what does the API support?"

I would love to see someone go ahead and make a true HD 2D sidescroller. Think of what could be done with the pre-rendered backgrounds. Really, the only problem would be with scaling, but mipmapping or using multiple levels of detail can easily take care of that.

 

See XBLA, There is a game comming out called castle crashers that is all in 2d and renders in HD.

 

Oh, no. Please, not that era again!

 

I assume that's for "new" 2D stuff right? The irony is, it can't do the old 100%.

Anyways, if you want to see some lovely high res 2D shit, check out Arcana Heart.
Thread

 

Uhh just texture quads. I don't think any recent 2D game, outside of the NeoGeo, would use the old method.
As was said rotation, scaling etc costs nothing and if you mess around with the transform, projection etc you can barely tell the difference.
The only issue with 2D games is the memory the large sprites take up. I'd love to see a 1080p or even 720p 2D game but to match that resolution you would need plenty of frames of animation and that would chew through the memory.

 

I think one obstacle here is:

1: Old school 2D game makers won't never use the new method
2: New developers are mostly polygon whores

So, we're damned either way.

 

Hey guys,
A few months ago I was planning on making a Sonic fangame on the PC and DC, but I'm only really a VB coder (I havn't really learnt C++ yet) so I had to put it on the rocks. The Xbox and DC would be perfect consoles for something like this, because its easy to make and run apps on them and they can both spit out a progressive scan picture. If anyone here's interested in helping me out with coding of any kind, it'd make a cool community project. Hell, it doesn't even have to be Sonic, a 2D fighter would be awesome too. I know that this is one of the rare places which has a bunch of hardcore gamers and people with dev-kits, so maybe we could all join up and churn out something great?

Hope this isn't counted as spam.

 

You're jumping too far out there for a first major project.

My opinion is to start via Direct-X on pc first before you consider progressing any further.

 

i say screw DX , winners code in OpenGL

 

Lies! Direct X ftw

 

mode 13h pwns all!!!!1!!!111oneoneone :110: