Videogame trivia: WTF???

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FrankenGraphics
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Re: Videogame trivia: WTF???

Post by FrankenGraphics »

Sumez wrote:but had to sketch them out on paper
I don't know exactly at what point Nintendo stopped using graph paper and number punching for graphics, but 8-bitguy demonstrates the whole process here. Only imagine doing that with more than one bit plane. It's not exactly WYSIWYG.

https://youtu.be/Tfh0ytz8S0k?t=305
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Re: Videogame trivia: WTF???

Post by DRW »

FrankenGraphics wrote:Since animation, at least. The whole thing about animation is tricking the eye and getting away with it.
Yeah, making a 24 frames image and play it like a fluid animation. That's what tricking the eye is supposed to do.
But when was there ever: "We draw something into the animation that can only be seen in slow motion. And the thing is not supposed to actually be there, so what we're actually drawing doesn't count for the plot"?

If Disney animators sneak a picture of a nude woman into one of the windows of a house, it might not be noticeable with the bare eyes. But the thing that it was included means that it is there.

Especially when it's the other way around, like in "Super Mario World": When you have a controversial theory, but closer inspection reveals that the controversial thing doesn't hold up and the scene is ultimately harmless, you cannot say that the controversial, out-of-character thing is still canonically supposed to exist in that scene.
FrankenGraphics wrote:I think i agree with Bregalad. It's not about any specific frame. It's about the change and movement between frames during playback and how they are percieved on average.
If there's a piece of animation that obviously disproves that this was intended the way fans speculate, then you cannot say we have to ignore this frame because people wouldn't notice it.

I mean, seriously, do people really think they intended Mario to be such a dick as to punch Yoshi on the head? Really? That's what they had in mind? That's what fans believe? That Nintendo consciously made Mario punch Yoshi without any reason at all? (Don't forget that Yoshi is not like a simple horse who can be controlled by whipping and by spores. He's designed as a sentinent, intelligent being who can write notes on his mailbox and who can talk to you. Punching him to make him do stuff would not fit with the story anyway.)

The in-game animations disprove it.

Mario's hand is consciously not drawn like this regular fist, but with a gap in the outlines that seems to imply a finger.

And the official artwork couldn't be any clearer:
Pointing.png
Pointing.png (40.94 KiB) Viewed 2738 times
Those are three clear proofs. And what does the other side have? Those stupid fan theories and now another piece of bullshit statement from the developers that are known to lie or forget stuff.

As I mentioned, the same guy said that Mario riding Yoshi was an idea that originated during the time of SMB3 and it originated as the idea of Mario riding a horse, then a lizard, then a dinosaur. But on the other hand, we have concept art from the time of SMB1 that already has Mario riding a dinosaur whose head and neck look pretty much like Yoshi. That's where the idea comes from. So, his trivia about getting the inspiration from a drawing about Mario riding a horse and later coming up with a dinosaur cannot be true.

Likewise, I doubt his story about Mario punching Yoshi. Maybe it was an original thought of him that was immediately rejected by the higher-ups. This might be the sliver of truth to that story. But this doesn't mean that Mario punching Yoshi is now somehow confirmed.

My graphics artist suggested that if Amy attacks Rachel, the girl that gives you an item in my game, with her taser, that Rachel lets the item fall and it's lost.
I immediately shot this down because Amy would never do this and I don't want the player to be able to let Amy act out of character by consciously including an event that would never happen in the story.
And now imagine an interview with my artist titled: "Confirmed: Amy attacks Rachel with a taser."
Bregalad wrote:However, the animation as a whole still looks like Mario is punching Yoshi
Well, how would Mario pointing towards something and Yoshi reaching out to it have to look like then?
tokumaru wrote:This doesn't prove anything... Synchronization errors in object animations happen all the time.
Yeah, let's just assume that Nintendo included a big out-of-character moment for Mario and screwed-up the animation and forgot to close his fist, so that it looks like a pixel of a finger and forgot to tell the artist about it. That's of course much more probable than simply assuming that Mario punching Yoshi is fucking bullshit.
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Re: Videogame trivia: WTF???

Post by FrankenGraphics »

DRW wrote:making a 24 frames image and play it like a fluid animation. That's what tricking the eye is supposed to do.
But when was there ever: "We draw something into the animation that can only be seen in slow motion. And the thing is not supposed to actually be there, so what we're actually drawing doesn't count for the plot"?
No, probably not and i agree, but there's lots of "if we use this spare sprite cel we've already drawn or already use for something else, and we time it right, it will appear as if..." and "well, it's an approximation and it works". Those are in the domain of compromises and games in general sure are full of them. I don't think we ever can assume that everything we see is perfectly intentional.

But what i'm really saying is that frames in themselves can't be fully understood unless they're put into the context of timing and position. Cels can be pretty vague without these domains. Examples: Is the cartoon falling asleep, or blinking?

===

Regarding yoshi, i think we're on the same page. I don't believe punching yoshi ever left the drawing board, if it even was there. I'm like 90% sure.

The way i'm imagining how this urban legend came to life and then got strengthened is this

-SMW is released
-Kids play it
-Kids laugh and point, "look, it looks like mario is punching yoshi". Because it kind of does and because it's the kids' version of physical comedy and comedy toying with moral norms.
-A meme (in the sociological sense) is formed from a lot of kids having the same experience.
-It finally distorts potentially influential and/or authoritative peoples' memory of what happened.
-Someone who was hired at nintendo states said distorted memory as truth.
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Re: Videogame trivia: WTF???

Post by DRW »

FrankenGraphics wrote:No, probably not and i agree, but there's lots of "if we use this spare sprite cel we've already drawn or already use for something else, and we time it right, it will appear as if..." and "well, it's an approximation and it works".
None of which is the case here.
FrankenGraphics wrote:But what i'm really saying is that frames in themselves can't be fully understood unless they're put into the context of timing and position.
That's why I listed all frames of that animation. Frame number 4 shows Mario's arm strechted out next to Yoshi's head.

This either proves that they did a major screw-up by miscalculating one frame and putting the arm and the head in the same location, even though the arm is supposed to punch the head and move it downwards.
(Furthermore, they would have done another screw-up because Yoshi already uses his tongue when his head is still in the normal position, even though the tongue coming out is supposedly the result of Mario hitting his head.)

Or it proves that the next frame cannot mean that Mario punched Yoshi's head since the arm is supposed to be next to the head, not directly above of it. Therefore, in the last frame it only appears as if the fist hit the head because their y position seems to match up for such a scene.

It's the other people who take this frame out of context and claim that Mario hits Yoshi, not me.
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Re: Videogame trivia: WTF???

Post by tepples »

Case in point: The Curse of Possum Hollow (4 Mbit) has 15 KiB of CHR data just for Donny and Tami, while Super Mario Bros. (320 kbit) has to mirror the bottom half of Mario's standing cel to make everything fit.

But CHR size isn't the only limit. The limit of 64 sprite pixels per scanline (25% coverage) is another. A horizontal tongue drawn as sprites would have caused suspicious flicker on any mapper. If Yoshi is to use his tongue in mid-air, the cartridge would need some sort of compositor coprocessor to render the tongue as background. And by the time that became practical on a cartridge, the Super Famicom was already being designed with over four times the sprite coverage.
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Re: Videogame trivia: WTF???

Post by DRW »

Why do you think the tongue would have been necessary in SMB1? As of now, all we're talking about is the NES' capability of making Mario ride a dinosaur, nothing more.

Would you have to cut other parts from the game if you implemented this? Absolutely.

Is it a "hardware limitation"? Definitely not.

Unless you also count "not having a separate sprite for Luigi" as "hardware limitation" in the way that the NES only supports 256 sprite tiles and another Luigi sprite would have required more graphics. But in this case, everything is a "hardware limitation":

The score only having six digits instead of 10? "Hardware limitation." (The NES has a resolution of 256 pixels, so there's a limit on how much you can display in the status bar if you also want to fit other information.)

The soundtrack consisting of several looping parts? Hardware limitation. (Because composing more sounds would have required more ROM space.)
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Re: Videogame trivia: WTF???

Post by Bregalad »

I don't see the need to defend your position so energically since almost everyone seems to agree on it. It wasn't intended for Mario to punch Yoshi, but they screwed up the graphics and it looked like he punched Yoshi. Case closed. There's no need to discuss this further.

For "hardware limitation", as you noted yourself, it's a pretty void and meaningless word intented for people who don't understand the working mechanism of a gaming console and how games works internally.

Doesn't some NES game like "Mario's Missing" have Luigi riding Yoshi on the NES ? That would easily disprove the "hardware limitation" thing, even for people with no knownledge of NES hardware.

The real limitation here is the 8-sprites per line, I guess a Mario riding a Yoshi would already take at least 5 if not 6; that's A LOT and only one enemy would be allowed on the same line before flickering appears. Because SMB games are usually horizontall driven that would typically mean only one enemy on the screen at the time where Yoshi is there.
This effect may even be intentional in some cases. In traditional animation, much like in video games, there are usually less actual drawings than frames per second, so alternating the animations of characters in the same scene is a cheap way to improve the overall perception of smoothness, because something will change every frame.
In both traditional animation and video game animation, the "proper" way to limit the FPS is to filter the frames that would be there and blend them together, usually by the mean of motion lines (or equivalent). Ideally, what is shown on screen during an animation is what it would be if a picture was taken during the whole time those frames were in place, and as such, the moving parts are supposed to be intentionally blurry. Lack of doing so creates a time-aliasing in the motion.

The result is that, when an animation is "properly" drawn, the animation's frame does NOT look like still frames. However, it doesn't seem like SMW had high quality enough graphics to use any motion lines (or equivalent).
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Re: Videogame trivia: WTF???

Post by tokumaru »

tepples wrote:The limit of 64 sprite pixels per scanline (25% coverage) is another. A horizontal tongue drawn as sprites would have caused suspicious flicker on any mapper. If Yoshi is to use his tongue in mid-air, the cartridge would need some sort of compositor coprocessor to render the tongue as background.
That didn't stop games like Astyanax from spending the entire sprite budget of several scanlines on the player sprite alone in some animation frames. Many pirates also deliberately ignored the sprites-per-scanline limit when porting some popular 16-bit games to the NES, and to be honest, in most cases, the flickering was hardly the worst problem with these games.
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Re: Videogame trivia: WTF???

Post by Pokun »

I read in an interview in an old magazine (Super Power) during the SNES era where Miyamoto clearly said that he gave Mario a cap because he wasn't confident in drawing hair. It sounded like the cap was a design decision to make things easier for himself. Although it wasn't clear if he was talking about the concept art or the sprite graphics (the interview came with pictures of early concept art which made me initially interpret it as it was about the concept art). I guess this eventually somehow turned into the "hardware didn't allow animated hair" misinterpretation which is of course either BS or badly phrased sentences.

The moustache and overalls are probably about the sprite graphics though as it possibly made him stand out more with such limited resolution. So I think it could be said it's about techniques to make art despite the hardware constraints, rather than incapable hardware.
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Re: Videogame trivia: WTF???

Post by tepples »

Benefit of doubt: Keeping the hair in place with a cap probably uses fewer CHR tiles than having it blowing around when he runs or jumps. The cap itself wasn't animated until Super Mario World, where it was drawn looser after the peak of a jump.
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Re: Videogame trivia: WTF???

Post by FrankenGraphics »

The moustache and overalls are probably about the sprite graphics though as it possibly made him stand out more with such limited resolution. So I think it could be said it's about techniques to make art despite the hardware constraints, rather than incapable hardware.
I recall reading some interview where someone (who? probably miyamoto) said the moustache was specifically easier to draw than a mouth, which is understandable given the resolution.
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Re: Videogame trivia: WTF???

Post by Pokun »

Yes I think he talked about moustache and overalls as well in the said interview. It was most likely a design decision to make things easier to make look good or to stand out more.

Miyamoto never said anything about animation IIRC and frankly there's no need to animate the hair in the first place. It will look fine static.
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Re: Videogame trivia: WTF???

Post by tokumaru »

Yeah, it's not like everyone was animating hair back in 1985... I seriously doubt this kind of realism was a concern at the time... I mean, look at Mario's walk/run cycle in SMB, there's a frame where his knee bends backwards for fuck's sake.
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