Haggar is a classic character from the good old Final Fight days. It does seem that when he stars in any recent fighting games, that they suck.
Like Final fight 2D fighter for Sega Saturn, Capcom all-stars, and he might have been in final fight: streetwise, which I thought was lousy.
Update:
While I have written a handful of new sections regarding characters and backgrounds, I have taken it under advice not to post them. Therefore, I apologize for the lack of updates in the last week.
Private Shoryuken messengers, I will respond to each of you. Sunday is mail day!
Alrighty⌠a brief mention of a specific background I was intimately familiar with, and then an (hopefully,) interesting insight into what might have been.
Letâs skip to backgrounds quickly, and then a look back at the project as a whole.
CHARACTER PIPELINE
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THE BACKGROUND ON BACKGROUNDS
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BISONS LAIR
One of the things that the film version of Street Fighter the Movie did right was the sets. The carpentry, construction, detailing, and finish work on the stages was absolutely incredible. Of these masterworks, Bisons Lair (AKA: his bedroom,) was one of the most elaborate and convincing. The room was filled with all manner of high quality props befitting an egomaniacal dictator: champagne glasses with the Bison logo imprinted on them, an authentic looking painting of him on his horse, the red winged skull sconces and so forth. It was truly something impressive to stand there and drink in. I was happy to have worked on that background for the game. Perhaps I am biased, but though more than a decade has passed since I worked on that asset, I feel that in some ways it still holds up and am proud of the result.
On set, the room was octagonal, so representing that as an in game asset was a challenge; fighting game backgrounds of the day were simple affairs, consisting of a floor plane, a backdrop, and some mid plane objects to give the illusion of depth. It is important to remember that texture mapping a photo of a wall onto the interior of a polygonal octagon wasnt something we were really able to do efficiently. This was also not only before the time that we were blessed with Photoshops fancy, pseudo 3D/distortion effects; it was before we had access to Photoshop at all. All of the perspective in that room was completely faked the hard way. We took a large volume of photography on set, which were scanned in and knocked down to the appropriate bit depth. All perspective or appearance of 3D was completely faked by the scaling and editing of the image data in 2D applications.
In game we pulled some pretty neat tricks off with Bisons Lair. We did a full color, palletized shadow in order to create a reflection on the floor. The area on the wall around the wall sconces was a data solution, (animation,) to simulate flickering of the fire. The lighting pass on the background art was faked and baked in, in 2D, so that the environment was brighter on the right hand side near the fireplace. I campaigned management to grant engineering time towards tying the characters to the environments in terms of lighting. This was granted, and the programmers delivered an awesome palette shifting technology: as the characters moved into the darker areas of the playfield, the palette color registers for the player and shadow, (reflection,) art were adjusted in real time to better match the background art. While subtle and only appearing in Bisons Lair due to time restrictions, this was trailblazing work; no other game was paying so much attention to lighting at the time. (FUN FACT: Speaking of lighting, I hid my initials in the texture of the wall near a sconce. I believe they are in the upper leftmost corner of the scene.)
How many colors were used in each character palette?
âTaken it under advice not to post themâ? Is this like a legal issue or something, as in weâll never get to see what you wrote? Or is this just going to come later?
I just realized how terrible the acting in the movie was. Check out Chun-Li âhmm, Iâm thinkingâ or Zangief âIâm angry roar!â. Kenâs Shoryuken is just ridiculous.
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And Balrog/Vegaâs mask looks like a kid made it from aluminium foil.
Also why canât Guile, the typical American soldier, speak English properly.
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Warning OVERACTING!
Ooohh oooh! Can I answer!
Because heâs a typical american? 
If thereâs character info that can only be received via PM, allow me to sign up to the list, thanks.
âCome HOUT frahm behind dee curtahn WIZART!â
I forgot about that line! It was my favorite when I was younger 
regarding the PM, same here.
count me in on that.
I want in on the PM action, please.
This is the best thing on SRK, anoon, thanks a lot! =)
-Josh
I havenât been keeping up, but what the hell Iâll take a PM and read backwards later.
Bison: âYou have made me a happy manâ
Guile: ânext Ahh mayk you ah dead wonâ
Yeah I got a chuckle out of that line back in the day.
If there is any Private Message only info being passed out Iâd like to receive it as well.
^Indeed add me to that list. anoonâs posts are really interesting.
Hey guys, sorry, Iâm not going to post or PM the âmissingâ sections. I apologize. It really was rather dry anyway. I had made mention of some of the software we used along the way as we took the raw art data and put it in game. Itâs largely irrelevant these days anyway, so you arenât missing much. If youâre one of the guys that PMâd me for advice regarding cleaning up your own data for something youâre working on now, trust me: the tools are much better these days. Iâd be happy to make some recommendations centered around a modern toolchain.
I think I briefly mentioned this earlier and somebody may have answered already, but to be sure: Each charater had a 256 register palette. Register 0 was the background color, (transparent,) and register 255 was an invisible color that we used to line the art up, frame to frame in our proprietary frame data tool.
lol, no. First off, I wouldnât be surprised to find that every SFTM was converted into something else, so there probably arenât any around. Second, I wouldnât want to wake up every morning to Jean Claudeâs visage staring me in the face from on high, looking down and silently mocking me as if to remind me of my failures!
Seriously though, I do own two marquees. One really thick, huge plexiglass one that was meant for the giant SSFT2 style cabinet marquees, and another, âtypicalâ cabinet marquee, which a buddy got off of ebay and had framed for me as a gift.
Ok, one more fun background section. A glimpse into what might have beenâŚ
A TECHNOLOGY TOO LATE?
During the development of SFTM, Virtua Fighter and the 3D games were first hitting the scene. While we werent exactly fond of the low poly, untextured artwork, we saw that there was something amazing about moving around the arena in 3D. I believe it was this exciting new revelation that fueled one of the most interesting developments I saw during my time at I.T. One of the programmers devised a way to simulate a 3D arena just by layering and scaling various pieces of 2D artwork. The demo he put together was a simple box, not unlike a boxing ring without ropes. On this he had placed our Zangief and Cammy art facing off. By scaling the assets by differing factors, he approximated the effect of the camera swinging back and forth from character to character. While apparently fairly performance intensive, it really was convincing as a 3d scene, and we had digitized, recognizeable characters rather then Virtua Fighters flat shaded, shoe box men. Unfortunately, this development came too late in the project for us to implement across the game. Who knows what it would have done for SFTM? It was absolutely, undeniably stunning for its day.
Damn, what a gold mine of a thread. Sorry Iâm all late to the show, but many thanks anoon for the info and insight.
âHeez pra-bubbly hiding!â
Interesting insight into gaming and how it comes to be. I can only hope anoon has been able to work with better people, and on better games.