The battle backgrounds in Earthbound were created by Shigesato Itoi pressing his palms hard into his eyeballs, screaming, and describing to his programmers what he saw.
this is one reason i love old tech. 1. it's so accessible today that you could just spend like >100 bucks to get yourself everything you need to build, program, and use your own 8 bit computer. 2. the hardware is simple and slow enough to actuall work with and debug without emulation or just hoping that the hardware works. but at the same time it's complex enough to pretty much write everything you could want. 3. you really start to appreciate the work of the programmers and designers of such old systems. because of how creatively they go around limitations... nowadays that seems like a dead skill. and you can even see how much the Programmers learned during the life time of a system. for example on the NES, Super Mario Bros 1 was pretty simple... Super Mario Bros 3 ran on the exact same hardware and even today some people still mistake it for a SNES title... another example, the C64... at the strat barely anyone used the powerful SID chip for music, it was mostly just for sound effects, MULE was one of the first games to use it for music, and just compare it to other titles from much later... MULE Theme, each channel was giving a single waveform and it stayed that way the whole song: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-VBDxUR7rIhs.html Supremacy, Programmers noticed you can change waveforms on the go and... just listen: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Bdz5X814bNQ.html
TheRedCap Honestly, when you're dealing with DMA writes and color palettes to draw graphics on a daily basis, throwing some fun math into your algorithms to see what happens just kind of happens. Heck, sometimes stuff like this would happen as a happy accident, because of an off-by-one bug or similar. This type of stuff is much harder nowadays where most common operations are abstracted away, and you tend to only see simplified APIs. I started my career in 2007 working on Nintendo DS games, and (since the DS was largely based on the GBA), many of these kinds of techniques were still relevant.
Time gates are most likely using the same effect. Upper/lower part can be mirrored and distorted just like in this video. The wobbly circles are most likely just palette animations again.
@@smzig Yes, exactly. Mode 7 allows scaling and rotating of a background layer, combined with the methods from this video, modifying the scale/rotation for each individual scanline you get the typical fake depth effect/3D transformation for a single plane.
The time gates were made with Mode 7 mirrored up and down. Above the Mode 7 layer, the entire screen is filled with sprites doing a translucent glowing effect just with color animation.
The time gates were actually explained on Boundary Break: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-2Ja3TdujlDg.html (relevant part starts at 2:23). It's basically a scrolling background layer that's clipped into a circular shape (probably using HDMA, if the knowledge I acquired from this channel serves me well :D)
Also noteworthy how Game Boy games such as Link's Awakening or Pokemon used similar techniques with even more limited capabilities (such as only having 3+1 colors only).
Now I want to know how they actually _computed_ the sine waves..... I imagine it was probably just a LUT but that stuff's expensive to be doing every single scan-line....
HDMA transfers/copies values from one memory region (likely the work ram) to another location (likely video ram). I guess the values for the waves are already in memory, maybe combined (interleaved) with other values that are copied to the video ram.
Almost certainly pre-computer LUT's in ROM. There's little to no reason to calculate such a thing dynamically in most situations. And because HDMA copies a list of values per scanline... All you need is an appropriate list for the effect in question stored in ROM. Since most effects are static or vary very little over time, that's all you need. Same thing applies to mode 7 perspective effects. since mode 7 doesn't actually do perspective, you'd have to calculate the perspective transform parameters for each scanline. Except, since this never changes the whole time you're using the effect unless you alter the nature of the effect, you can just use a pre-computed table for the effect.
If you're just polling equally-spaced points of the sine function, you could pretty inexpensively simulate an oscillator from its differential equation much more cheaply than independently evaluating points of the sine function. Pretty sure Castlevania's Medusa heads did that every frame, but it's probably cheap enough to do every scanline.
In addition, the SNES supports fast multiplication which it internally uses to calculate the mode 7 transformation but can be used for your own calculation on any other background mode.
You only need to store a quarter of the sine LUT since it's got a lot of nice symmetry, so they probably went for that approach (speed over space)... I've seen that the first three Sonic games did the same to handle all the loops/slope geometry efficiently so it probably was a common technique in those days.
An overview of how "raster roads" work, like the ones in Rad Racer, Top Gear, or the Mad Hatter fight in Batman and Robin for the Genesis, would be excellent.
This was simply great. I'd love to see a video on the effects used in Terranigma. Both the first overworld's warping effect and the several different text effects and movements. Another good one might be an explanation on how the music with lyrics is accomplished in Tales of Phantasia.
This is such a good in depth video thank you , earthbound was definitely ahead of its time visually graphically it didn’t age that well but I still love it.
It's really amazing how seemingly simple HDMA transform algorithms (which in result is a primitive oscillation trick - something you can do with actual trigonometry math in modern shader programming) and palette cycling can make up a trippy yet nice backgrounds. I think this is good reference for those who just started in learning shaders.
oh wow so all the backgrounds are images, i could see most of the ones that were a single image but i thought some used animation but its just effects dome by the console. really cool video and would love to see a mother 3 version of this if there are any differences
well explained, thanks! your videos are amazing, and those battle scenes always looked like some demoscene effect to me, so kudos for the reengineering and making it understandable, how they work!
Fantastic! I always wondered if there was a breakdown out there about this specific effect in that game, and I assumed nobody cared enough to go into it. Thank you for making these videos!
I think NES techniques like CHR-RAM tile swapping and shifting to produce faux parallax scrolling and CHR-ROM bank switching can be interesting, as well as how exactly the Battletoads drum sounds are created which is apparently some sort of digital synthesis pushed through the 7-bit DAC of the 5th sound channel.
One thing that I've always been curious about is the many extra chips used in Nes games. Things like the Vrc6 and how they work are not very well documented (in video form).
Chrono Trigger's spell effects might be worth looking at, they make good use of windowing. And of course, if you're doing a video on Chrono Trigger's effects, you'd have to cover the time warp and time gate effects, too.
Indeed. It's got some pretty impressive variety of effects using various layers and modes. Did you know windowing updated via HDMA was used to draw the keyhole animation during secret level exits in SMW?
Gotta love screen scrambling effects (think the Subrosian Portal from Zelda Oracle of Seasons or Psychic type attacks in Pokemon). On systems with limited memory like the Game Boy, these visual effects take up almost no space in comparison to actual game graphics, as they're done using code rather than graphics data.
I know many people have commented this before, but we need a video on Yoshi's Island. Especially one focused on the bosses. It is absolutely insane how the devs managed to make that all work on a 16 bit console and a chip or two.
Thanks for the breakdown, love to see you in my sub menu:) also, it may be too new, but I always loved how black smoke effects looked on ps1 games. Tomba 2 and Threads of Fate/Dewprism come to mind.
Would love to see how the water effects were done in DKC3's Lakeside Limbo, especially with how the kongs can intersect through the middle of the water sprite!
Glad I watched this video. I'm making a game and thought of some backgrounds and animations and stuff and thought I had to draw everything pixel by pixel lmao
The battle backgrounds are canonically energy waves sent from enemy attacjs there's a secret dialogue when you make a phone call mid battle where the phone reads their mind and tells you what their thinking or gives translations of dialogue connected to their side of the fight as there's mentions of enemies talking or making sounds
Like the stalwart trees if you do this Easter egg you apparently hear sign language being read aloud to you and the in game character looking at the screen seeing a emoticon being read out in individual components of the enemy's POV showing it sees you as a invisible wall
This is a testament to the fact that limitations can often stimulate ingenuity. It's incredible to think what can be done with a "simple" palette rotation. Case in point: www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/
In the Famicom game Pooyan, the intro song features a lot of percussive and sound effects which seem to be made by updating the frequency of the pulse channels at a rate faster than 60Hz. It'd be interesting to know how this was done, considering a majority of other NES games don't use this effect much. I think some other video referred to it as the "linear counter" but it didn't go in depth at all about it.
Your video is very interesting and I learned a lot thanks to it :) I'm looking to make a video game and I have an idea to make a secret boss fight where we would play in the style of mother 3. I needed to know how the funds in battle worked in this game, thank you a lot! Mother 3 is a beautiful game
Honestly these effects could work really well for a photo editing websites. You upload an image and can use the 6 effects mentioned here to modify the original image.
Maybe can you do the special stages from Sonic 1? The stages had some kind of rotation effect, but the Genesis/Mega Drive had no background rotation support in hardware.
would be interesting to see the actual process. Based on what the MD was good at my guess is it's sprite animation; due to hardware horizontal/vertical flip, a single assymetric sprite would give 4 rotation angles. do about 4 rotated versions of a single object and you have 16 directions due to the hardware. Now all you need to do (well, I say all, but it's a nontrivial calculation for a CPU of that era) is determine how the scene is rotating, place all the sprites appropriately onscreen, then do a lookup to get the appropriate rotated version of each sprite making up the labyrinth. The nice thing is since the whole 'background' rotates at the same rate, you can work out the angle once and use it for all sprite lookups. Only the coordinates to draw each sprite at (and which sprites need drawing) has to be calculated. I could be completely wrong of course, but I'd be very surprised if it's anything other than sprites...
@@KuraIthys The flip functions only reverse the graphics in one direction. The only rotation that you can achieve (by combining both horizontal and vertical flip) is 180 degrees.
It’s amezing how those background layers along with different effects don’t cancle out eachother, am mean, for instance if the first background layer tells the light beam to draw white pixels while the second background tell the light beam to draw only black pixels all at the same time, they’re supposed to cancle out eachother because the light beam will probably interpretate as half black,half white,thus ending up generating color gray, same thing should happen with all other colors,but not sure about this theory. Either way i just really can’t wait for the fully documented audio department because am really impatience & curious about that.
I love your channel! I wondered how they made some of the late game spell effects in Lufia II and if similar looking effects in the Enix games were also made by Oscillation stuff. Also a video compilation about some small animation tricks would be really cool! Subpixel animation, but also like different cycling methods of frames. I love the way you manage to how different things can look that way in this video, simply by combining two things. It is so much easier to understand! I know it is probably done by Palette Cycling but I was always really fascinated by the healing/spell effects in Secret of Mana and Evermore! And I wonder how it is done to make the game "stop" while spells were casted. Man I have great respect for the people who made games back then. So many limitations and yet they were able to make amazing stuff with it.
This might seem basic, but I've always wondered how exactly the "sunrise" and "lights on" effects were done at the beginning of EarthBound. I know it's color math, but did they have a look-up table for each color as it smoothly transitions? Because that sounds crazy. But the alternative is actually procedurally calculating the color change in runtime, which also sounds crazy.
