I think in the case of most modern FGs, this is because there is a nontrivial chance the person you’re playing may be running the game in an environment where they may experience performance hiccups(poor setting config, multitasking, etc) that are unlikely to appear on console. So all of a sudden lag is not the only factor that can create underwater play.
Skullgirls does not use vector art as seen in Flash. The characters are sprites, with their native resolution being twice of what’s onscreen. Scaling them down to half-size(and some other wizardry) is what makes them appear as smooth as vector art. Upscaling will yield pixels.
Good point. But I guess maybe games could make a requirement to get a perfect score in benchmark or one in performance mode (in which if you receive sub60fps at any point of the game) you can’t play online, at least with consoles.
No, it uses “tradigital” animation that modern cartoons like Family Guy, Simpsons, and Archer use. Just watch this video. They draw the sprites (either on the computer or they do it by hand and trace the lines) and fill in the color in some Flash-like program. Nothing will look pixelated. They only draw them so big so they can put in more detail in their animation (this is what most cartoonist do). Questioning it upscaling is like questioning how “The Simpsons Movie” will look when it comes out on Goldray for 4K TVs in the future. Trust me, I animate pretty much the same way they do as a hobby. I even have the exact same drawing tablet as they do.
I’m not going to presume how the assets are produced 100%, but what’s in the game are not vector images but sprites. You can easily test this for yourself by playing the game on a 1080p display. The 720p assets get upscaled, and you can discern pixels with greater ease. The coloring itself is done by a shader at runtime which is novel in context, but the source image itself is still raster and not vector.
The wiki has some easy examples as well, since they have native-resolution screenshots:
Peacock shouldn’t lose this level of quality when downscaled unless she’s a raster image.
You don’t have to look farther than the edges and her shadow.
I think some Reverge artists posted some stills of the native res sprites earlier on as well. And in general, you should be able to search for this topic and see posts by Ravi/Mike confirming the method. I think it was brought up in the Q&A thread a while back.
The characters aren’t “100%” sprites. They’re actually textures on flat 3D objects. This is why the lines appear to be smooth. Even if the characters weren’t twice the size of the screen, the lines will still appear to be smooth/blurry, but you’d lose a great amount of detail when playing it on a big HD TV set. The shadows of the characters are real shadows from the 3D lighting engine, they’re not a mirror sprite duplication.
EDIT: The texture being tied to a 3D object is not directly related with it being smooth or not. Most 2D images undergo bilinear filtering when they’re used as (technically 3d) objects in games for smoothing; without that they can easily appear ‘pixellated’ unless some filter to compensate for that is applied(which afaik SG has some custom filters for that).
Mike Z said on stream that the game will be using Steamworks. They had a choice between GFWL and Steam and they went with steam.
Also, Origin does sell Steamworks games.
So don’t go freaking out about Origin having the game up for pre-order soon.
thanks, though isn’t the volume in the video is a little hard to hear?
I’m really excited for skullgirls on steam, and even more with the cross platform feature, will be able to play with some friends who only own a PS3.
And it’s really cheap too. Just awesome.
If I recall correctly, most of the shading is still from a flat shading layer. The depth map is only used for the real time lighting effects (which are separate from the shading).
