oh and you may want to look in online play support. kaillera’s SDK can work with any emulator should work with your engine.
if your going to make a unique character. Make them practical to use.
but I fear what would happen if a majority of SRK banded together to make a fighter…
we would make a fighter that was balanced(most characters are competitive/about to win at high level aka a VERY big mid tier) I guarantee that.
I do think that there is interest within the community to make a fighter. I know this thread proves that there are people who want to do it.
First there are always control issues. Everyone here wants their own idea to get through. Secondly a fighting game does not need a large base of coders. In fact, due to integration issues being such a paramount risk, I think that only a few coders at most (read 3) should be attached to any project. No to counteract this, we would need a very large art team. I strees the word team because a continuity between the artists is very important in the characters all appearing natural in their interactions with one another.
We are in a unique position as fighting gamers. We rip our genre apart in ways that no other gamer does. We know information about how the individual frames impact our play. We strive to understand all the little issues with our systems. This puts fighting gamers at an amazing position to consider and design a reasonable system for their games, but knowing a game is VERY VERY different from coding one yourself.
A lot of people have come through in this thread that seem to know their stuff, but I stress for the people who think this is something easy to learn, that writing game code is its own little world beyond normal coding. There will be things you like, and things you don’t like, and if you don’t like it you won’t have your heart in doing it. I personally hate writing 3d render code, so now the task goes to somebody else. I hate working with the GBA hardware, it’s a damn nightmare in my eyes, but I was good at it. I was good at it, but willingly I would never work with it again. I love writing gameplay code, I love writing AI, and I love learning systems AI. I have never written any more than the most simple physics code. I think I know how it should work, but I have never done it. I guess the point of this little speech is that people who do this have seen more failed game attempts than successful ones, and many more failed “game designers” than ones who make it. I can admit that I am afraid of the follow through of any independent project, because most times that code will go into my already too large “could have been” folder.
Oh and as an after thought, the balance of the game is through testing, and I know we have the base of people here to test the hell out of a game. If I owned a company that was going to produce a fighting game, this would be one of the first places I turned for people to break my game down and tell me what’s wrong.
It is true, there probably is no better community to straight up beta test a game to hell than here. Loke tests work ok, but if a company could start a fighter and have testers as good as many on here, at every playable phase of the project, the end result could be amazing for the hardcore. Thing is, there is a huge chance the regular gamer (scrubs) might not enjoy it, hence it being a crap profit project.
Though I would love to see something done in this way. Would be great if something ignited the scene like SF2 did back in the day, that my friend is what got me back into gaming. I am still here because of it, and still playing fighters the most. But these days it’s all FPS’s and shit that get the hype.
Maybe, just maybe, when netcode gets better and broadband speeds pick up, it can happen again. It is possible this gen of consoles, but most likely next one, where lag free happens. That mixed with a good fighter could boom the genre once again.
I dream…
Your poorly researched enthusiasm will fall on deaf ears
I’ve got some ideas for a game (most likely just using Mugen, because I’m not much of a programmer)… I know that if I ever get around to making it, I’ll be planning on offering it to SRK for playtesting. People here know their stuff.
ACtually, I thought he was right on all counts. I’ve joined a few different “community” based game projects, from here and from other sites. They all tend to suffer from the same problems, such as poor communication, lack of experience, loss of interest, etc.
Community-based fight games developed on a volunteer basis are big on the “loss of interest” category. For example, discussions about “What type of cancelling should we use” can go on for pages, but when topics like “Who’s going to draw 1200 frames of animation for this character” come up, everyone suddenly remembers previous commitments 
Windlord’s comment about letting the community test the game was right too. I know the Skullgirls team releases a new demo every few months to let people test, and it seems to be working pretty well for them. I think their game has a pretty good chance of getting finished.
Now I draw pretty well (average level comic style) but drawing 3200 frames by one person is insane. I mean factoring error correction,coloring,shading,effects. One person isn’t going to cut it.
Now there’s an easier,extremely faster more efficient way.(any better looking). Break the 2d sprites into pieces(limbs,joints,body,head etc).Then use stretching and squeing to simulate distance from the camera.A type of blurring and transparency map for connecting joints. Draw 300(degrees) frames for all the angles of the body parts.Draw different facial expressions.
Take this is as a flash generated puppet. You just adjust the flash objects like claymation’s stop-go technique.
Then you can optimize even further with 32 frame animated 28frames redundancy.Then you can reuse frames and alter them.
You can code most of the engine in PowerBASIC (very fast almost as fast as C but its basic so its noob easy to learn EXAMPLE:PRINT= put ASCII letters on the screen…easy weasy.).
I agree as well
Ofcourse it would take some time and effort for 1 person, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible or probable. Who mentioned one person making the entirety of a game’s animation?
I really disagree with “better looking.” If you want to see why I disagree, just look at TRF. Ofcourse I’m a big supporter of traditional animation.
You mean scaling? Of the likes thats been used in 2D games since the SNES (and probally before), to pan the camera out?
Do you mean 360 degrees? I seriously doubt you understand the technology behind game development.
There is quite a bit of difference between a print method, and an engine that properly manages resources, without using up every last bit of ram you’ve got.
I really wish you would do actual research behind your statements, because people who don’t understand the technology might end up believing you.
for the art, why not just animate in flash and then turn the frames into sprites. it saves a lot of time and you won’t have to redo the images pixel by pixel. at the moment i’m making a 2d game but because of all the animation i have to put into it i’m using flash to save time. it doesn’t look as good as a high res pixeled sprite but beggars can’t be choosers. check it out
Try converting vector art into low-resolution 8-bit color mapped images, doesn’t look too good. In addition, you can not have multiple costume palettes/palette effects without 8-bit color. Even if you render the images at 16-bit, thats still a large chunk memory being used up.
i’m not a programmer or anything so i have a few questions. with today’s mainstream computers why isn’t it possible to create a 2d engine that can handle more than 8 bit sprites? i don’t know shit about programming but i would like to understand it better. also, maybe do all animation on flash then let pixel artists draw over it? just trying to come up with a faster way to do the art part.
Looks pretty good Pootnannies.
thanks
So do you expect to voluteer spriters to draw and color 3000 frames per character?
Powerbasic doesn’t use an interpreter so no more overhead
than normal. Its about as fast as C.
What is TRF?
see agian use flash to the animation it easier…
don’t use sprites. Not everyone has 1-2GB of RAM.
Use flash.