How’s it going? I know, it feels like it’s been forever since the last update. I’ve been working on wrapping up my own pet project, namely 3 Themes and a gamer pic pack for Xbox Live featuring all the characters of Puzzle Fighter (basically Street Fighter and Darkstalkers). I just sent those off to someone else to handle the submission to MS. They should be available later this month. I’ll post a little preview of what they’ll look like pretty soon, but I think you’ll be very pleased with how they turned out. I know I am. I don’t want to spoil it, but let’s just say that everybody who voted for their favorite characters to appear in the gamer pic pack will get what they want…

Well, Rey, the producer on Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, was able to get me another update this afternoon. I’m just now getting around to posting it because I’ve been working on everything above plus a whole lot more today. So, let’s get right to it.

I have lots of feedback from Rey, plus some brand new Street Fighter art for you to drool over.

Click through to continue reading and see the exclusive new artwork.

[More:]

Hey all you Street Fighter heads, this week I would like to show more information on how we’re creating animation frames for the project. A few weeks ago, I showed you how the rendering of each frame is done. This week shows how the design of each frame is handled with a frame of the biggest Thai guy I know, Sagat.

Like you’d imagine, we start off with the original sprite. In this case, we have Sagat performing his standing Roundhouse, as seen above.

The next part is key to the frame design. We lay the tile boundaries under the sprite. That boundary is shown in gray above. In order to explain what the tile boundary is, I need to explain how the art is stored. The art for each frame is cut up and stored as a bunch of rectangles, or tiles. When the game needs a piece of art, it calls for the specific tiles it needs and reassembles the frame. This is more efficient because many of the sequential frames only have slight changes in them and the code will only call for those changes.

This is very key to the design of the frame because the art cannot extend outside of the tile area or else it will not show up and the size of the extra space of the tiles sometimes is much smaller.

This picture above shows a proposed design of the new frame. You’ll notice that Sagat was beefed up a bit. The problem with this frame though is that his kicking foot extends past the old one because his proportions have been increased. This will mess with the hit detection, making it seem like Sagat’s foot is halfway into the opponent before connecting. As a result, the artist will have to make adjustments to the pose in order to make the foot fit in the hit detection area, without looking like he has a short leg.

Just so you can see it clearly, here is the line art of the the proposed frame seen in the 3rd image, isolated from the underlying original image. I don’t have a clean version of the adjusted one that came after this. But I know some of you like to try your hand at rendering, so I wanted to give you this as something to play around with in Photoshop or whatever your favorite image editing program is. Here’s the full-size version, a bit bigger than what will fit here on the blog.

Now, let’s see if I can get to some questions/comments. Again, sorry if I don’t get to yours, but I’m looking at a lot of places for these questions.

– Chun-Li from last week was, as stated, a work in progress. Her animation has been tweaked to make it look like she’s not smelling her hand, as some of you have commented.

– My send off from last week of SF4EVER meant SF For Ever. Some people read a little too much into that.

– The game will display in a 4:3 aspect ratio as the original version did. I’ve been reading some interesting ideas to make it 16:9 on the Capcom BBS. I’m not going to say that it’s impossible to do, but right now, it’s not something we have planned.

– Right now, we have not announced any official sticks coming out for the game. It’s something we may be considering, but there’s no announcement about it at the moment.

– There will be no tech/parrying in the game. This is Super Turbo and we’re not trying to change what’s already a great game. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

– We plan to keep Akuma as someone that you have to get using a code. We also plan to make it an option on whether he can be selected for online play. For those of you that don’t know, Akuma is extremely strong in Super Turbo (by design), and all things being equal, he’s not exactly fair to fight against. That’s why he’s banned practically all tournaments of Super Turbo.

– The custom win quote is pretty interesting, but I think it’s something that would just be abused way too much. We’re already planning to have voice chat support and think that’s enough exposure to the ahem- interesting dialog that goes on.

I know that before I go I have to show you guys a new rendered sprite. So this week it’s T. Hawk. I really like how he came out. I have the old sprite there are reference also. Just so you know, we tried keeping to the original proportions and he looked like a giant troll. That’s why the head was moved up and made a little smaller. Not to say that the old sprite isn’t awesome because it is, but in the new style and in better resolution, it just didn’t look right.

Also, I know you guys are dying for full game screens and such, but we’re just not ready to show you that just yet. I hope that these teasers will suffice until then. That’s all for now and thanks for checking in on the blog.

—Rey

Click for original size

There you go. We can’t wait to read your comments. Have a great weekend!!

—Brian