EarthBound Battle Backgrounds - Audiovisual Effects Pt. 01
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 มิ.ย. 2024
- EarthBound enemy battles are styled like classic RPGs where you just see a static picture of the foe at hand. To spice it up, the backgrounds were made extra colorful and animated. How does the SNES display these wavy and wobbly effects? It's all explained right here.
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The battle backgrounds in Earthbound were created by Shigesato Itoi pressing his palms hard into his eyeballs, screaming, and describing to his programmers what he saw.
source on this?
@@indejcriptible @rockcock64 on twitter twitter.com/rockcock64/status/1160544595622748160
I just pressed my palms into my eyeballs and you are so right
@@b0mbware same rn
i saw trippy stuff.
The screaming is the most important part.
I'm a programmer. Doing this on 20+ year old hardware makes my head spin.
I have so much respect for those older programmers.
this is one reason i love old tech.
1. it's so accessible today that you could just spend like >100 bucks to get yourself everything you need to build, program, and use your own 8 bit computer.
2. the hardware is simple and slow enough to actuall work with and debug without emulation or just hoping that the hardware works. but at the same time it's complex enough to pretty much write everything you could want.
3. you really start to appreciate the work of the programmers and designers of such old systems. because of how creatively they go around limitations... nowadays that seems like a dead skill.
and you can even see how much the Programmers learned during the life time of a system. for example on the NES, Super Mario Bros 1 was pretty simple... Super Mario Bros 3 ran on the exact same hardware and even today some people still mistake it for a SNES title...
another example, the C64... at the strat barely anyone used the powerful SID chip for music, it was mostly just for sound effects, MULE was one of the first games to use it for music, and just compare it to other titles from much later...
MULE Theme, each channel was giving a single waveform and it stayed that way the whole song: th-cam.com/video/VBDxUR7rIhs/w-d-xo.html
Supremacy, Programmers noticed you can change waveforms on the go and... just listen: th-cam.com/video/Bdz5X814bNQ/w-d-xo.html
TheRedCap Honestly, when you're dealing with DMA writes and color palettes to draw graphics on a daily basis, throwing some fun math into your algorithms to see what happens just kind of happens. Heck, sometimes stuff like this would happen as a happy accident, because of an off-by-one bug or similar. This type of stuff is much harder nowadays where most common operations are abstracted away, and you tend to only see simplified APIs.
I started my career in 2007 working on Nintendo DS games, and (since the DS was largely based on the GBA), many of these kinds of techniques were still relevant.
Let's talk about the fact this was done using assembly
If you think this is impressive, I hope you're subscribed to GameHut.
@@23Scadu oh I am pal. I am...
Fun fact, the dev team's internal name for these backgrounds was "video drugs." heh
IIRC, "Video drugs" was an actual thing in Japan! It's similar to these backgrounds too.
Where does it say that?
@@alanbrito141 In this interview it was translated as 'video relaxant'.
yomuka.wordpress.com/2009/06/21/weekly-famitsu-september-9-1994/
I think there was also an unused item with the same name, where using it will bring up a text box saying: "what the hey is this?"
Hi Vince
I can still hear those backgrounds even without the music.
Do, do, dooo! Da! Da! Do, do, dooo! Da! Da!
Removes backgrounds from Earthbound.
**Weird Music Stops**
I love how that somehow makes perfect sense
@@bobisnotaperson try playing Earthbound Beginnings
@@bobisnotaperson no battle backgrounds in mother 1 and almost all the battle songs you hear are dwananananaooooo…
dee dee dee…
the battle backgrounds added so much personality to earthbound, the fact that almost every fight looks different was a really nice touch
I love how these old consoles can achive such complex animations with only a few hardware tricks. It would take a ton of CPU power to get a similar result with a framebuffer-based console.
Couldn't similar effects be acheived using pixel shaders?
@@muizzsiddique You can do that, but it would require way more advanced hardware.
this is not a trick
@@slap_my_hand Pixel shaders are different, because they're a fully programmable pipeline that acts on the per-pixel level instead of per-scanline. Not to mention this is fixed function hardware. The registers you're offered are a direct result of the hard circuitry they were able to build into the machine while still keeping it affordable.
I'll be honest, it kinda upsets me that I haven't seen any game at all try to really milk pixel and vertex shaders and framebuffer feedback loops and distortion effects to create the same level of insanity that old-school developers pulled on their hardware, but scaled up to the horsepower and flexibility of a modern PC (I've experimented a bit with such things in Unity, but didn't get to develop anything big with that just yet. Still a noob at programming shaders). We really take our GPUs for granted nowadays (and I'll be honest, loading videos into the shader texture slots will never fail to mesmerize me).
I wouldn't mind also seeing a game audio engine get closer to a full-on DAW, allowing you to have the game partially synthesize and mix the entire soundtrack (and SFX) in real time. Imagine mixing FL Studio's performance mode automations and patterns with dynamic game triggers and events. But actually, more than that, I would really love to see sound cards get the same treatment as their graphical cousins, and become these standardized flexible powerful multichannel dynamically programmable megasynths. They've been neglected a lot lately, instead having the CPU do all the work and just blast in the result... same deal with merging modelling tools into animated vertex shaders to exceed the boundaries of regular bone animation. All the wacky bending, squashing and stretching effects you could layer over the polygons themselves after the normal bone animation has been applied. And all the color math to play with... There's really a lot that can be done here that I've yet to see anyone do.
And finally, it's no longer a thing for games to physically ship with their own coprocessors (if anything, because systems are no longer that open-ended and the media we save the software on can't hold chips in it anymore). The closest thing to that is some of the traditionally CPU work being offloaded to the GPU like physics, encryption math for processing and mining cryptocurrencies, DRM for things like Netflix and video decode/encode acceleration. That's great, offloading and parallelizing even more out of the CPU's hands so we can go back to exclusively running the core logic.
Modern games just use the hardware for playing back prerecorded sound and all the graphics work is pushed towards making things look as realistic as possible. Where's the dreamlike trippiness in 3D space?
@@3lH4ck3rC0mf0r7 Regarding the music: The problem you have is that there's a greater demand for performed music over synthesized tracks. The iMuse engine LucasArts developed did all that and more, bit relied on MIDI synthesis to actually perform the music. The Unreal engine supported tracker music, probably due to Alexander Brandon's work, but aside from Deus Ex, I've never really seen it used well.
Ultimately, it seems people just prefer static music that's performed well, over dynamic tracks that sound artificial. And it's a shame that people forget what we had.
Earthbound, where every fight is it's own unique psychedelic nightmare.
Yoshi's Island, one of the SNES games with many effects, would make an interesting topic. In particular, the layer 2 (i.e. most bosses) and layer 3 sprites (e.g. the polygonal sprites, big ghosts) are rendered dynamically so it looks like they're using Super FX magic (i.e. plotting a bitmap)... Except, they cheat as plotting a bitmap is a difficult process (in fact, the only time Super FX uses plotting is for rotating, growing and shrinking sprites, the title screen, the PAUSE and GAME OVER letters and the credits scene and only the first point is even gameplay!).
Yoshi's Island is indeed interesting. Many of the bosses and 3D looking objects are made up of a background with a linear looking pyramid graphics, where 0 pixels is 0 pixels width, and 255 is 255 pixels width, each vertical offset making the pyramid 1 pixel wider. That is a graphical representation of a look-up-table, so that if you want to draw a shape in a specific size, you just add vertical offset to the background, and the shape is intact but bigger. There are limits to what art patterns can be drawn, but the result is close to vector graphics! I mostly worked with the 3D objects like the falling doors, and they are calculated with 3D perspective points (same LUT as the title screen 3D depth) and linear interpolation, then HDMAed to screen (double buffered of course).
Interesting. I didn't think Yoshi's island would be using effects like that.
It's how the Mega Drive tech demo released a few years ago does 3d cubes at 50 fps though.
Two background layers are used which contain a pyramid like you're describing.
Then per scanline each background is scrolled horizontally and the vertical scroll is used as a lookup index to the length of line needed.
So each background layer draws a face of the cube as a series of line segments.
I did some quick estimates of this effect on the SNES using the principles from that demo and it occurred to me that using background mode 0 + the hardware windows could give you roughly 7 distinct lines per scanline, in two blocks.
Needless to say this is an absurdly high hypothetical polygon throughput, though there's severe constraints on the geometry you can construct using this method.
Even so, that a trick like this would seem to allow a SNES to appear to display a few hundred to a few thousand polygons with no extra hardware, running at 50 fps is kinda crazy to think about.
When I was a kid, I marveled at the fancy-pants 3D polygon objects that the game used the SuperFX chip for. As an adult, I now marvel at how it uses to chip to do things like stretch specific parts of a 2D sprite in response to Yoshi's weight.
I'd really like to know about the battle in the frog's stomach in particular, it always blows my mind how ever they achieved the effects there.
@@suicideposter To keep it short, it's a mixture of the HDMA rendering which MissNorington mentioned with transparency (for the stomach itself) and the horizontal and vertical oscilation which we know from the Earthbound battles (for the background).
How the hell do you edit these videos? It's outstanding.
He actually made a video about that. Check his channel.
@@CathodeRayKobold th-cam.com/video/yuVx4QI6fIM/w-d-xo.html this one I think
TL;DR: After effects suports a programming language to generate the visuals, so you can import the recordings of the processor instructions that the game generates on the emulator and convert it to ghraphics
@@lugui K. I watched the video. I completely forgot about it before. Now I get it and respect the amount of effort put into these videos!
Limitations breed creativity indeed. My respects for the Nintendo programmers for creating this neat and curious visual effects!
You missed a Giygas phase, with interlaced horizontal!
And the phase after that, which has scrolling and vertical oscillation
Would love to see an explanation of Chrono Trigger's time gates, as well as possibly the backgrounds during the Lavos fight!
Time gates are most likely using the same effect. Upper/lower part can be mirrored and distorted just like in this video. The wobbly circles are most likely just palette animations again.
@@Smaxx Time gates use mode 7 as well.
@@smzig Yes, exactly. Mode 7 allows scaling and rotating of a background layer, combined with the methods from this video, modifying the scale/rotation for each individual scanline you get the typical fake depth effect/3D transformation for a single plane.
The time gates were made with Mode 7 mirrored up and down.
Above the Mode 7 layer, the entire screen is filled with sprites doing a translucent glowing effect just with color animation.
The time gates were actually explained on Boundary Break: th-cam.com/video/2Ja3TdujlDg/w-d-xo.html (relevant part starts at 2:23). It's basically a scrolling background layer that's clipped into a circular shape (probably using HDMA, if the knowledge I acquired from this channel serves me well :D)
I was always curious on how they've done this!
I always wondered how the backgrounds worked, it's surprisingly simple.
it's
actually surprisingly simple
EthanCGamer HooRay
🍄 Take this Yumyum-Mushroom
I'm just impressed they came up with this shit. And they did this pre 1994!
Also noteworthy how Game Boy games such as Link's Awakening or Pokemon used similar techniques with even more limited capabilities (such as only having 3+1 colors only).
I've played both of those, when does anything like this happen in them?
When does anything like this happen in those games?
@@timmydirtyrat6015 Various transitions, in Link's Awakening most notably when using the Dream Shrine or the Ocarina.
@@SmaxxOh, my bad, I'm still playing through Link's Awakening and I haven't gotten to those yet.
@@timmydirtyrat6015 No worries, just wait and you'll see. :)
Never played the game myself, but I seem to recall some of the attacks in Super Mario RPG having some wacky visual effects. Perhaps that'd be worth a look at?
They do, but they seem to have the same effects. The attack Mario's final smash in Smash Bros. is based on just uses some Horizontal Oscillation and a Palette Swap to make it look like everything is on fire.
5:34 I remember fondly referring to this as the 'Lava Lamp'. :)
Earthbound is still a heavily underrated game...
>heavily underrated
It absolutely is not
@@wonderguardstalker Earthbound still does not get nearly enough love for everything it is and is not, is still sharply and unfairly criticized.
Maybe one day...
@@AmyraCarter Criticised for what out of curiosity? All I've seen is positive reception for the game. It just had poor marketing at the time.
For a game that was obscure for its time, I would say it's most definitely not underrated. 😊
@@wonderguardstalker The franchise is underrated though. There is still no Mother 3/Earthbound 2 release in North America so far I believe. When that time comes I will be first in line.
Now I want to know how they actually _computed_ the sine waves..... I imagine it was probably just a LUT but that stuff's expensive to be doing every single scan-line....
HDMA transfers/copies values from one memory region (likely the work ram) to another location (likely video ram). I guess the values for the waves are already in memory, maybe combined (interleaved) with other values that are copied to the video ram.
Almost certainly pre-computer LUT's in ROM.
There's little to no reason to calculate such a thing dynamically in most situations.
And because HDMA copies a list of values per scanline... All you need is an appropriate list for the effect in question stored in ROM.
Since most effects are static or vary very little over time, that's all you need.
Same thing applies to mode 7 perspective effects. since mode 7 doesn't actually do perspective, you'd have to calculate the perspective transform parameters for each scanline.
Except, since this never changes the whole time you're using the effect unless you alter the nature of the effect, you can just use a pre-computed table for the effect.
If you're just polling equally-spaced points of the sine function, you could pretty inexpensively simulate an oscillator from its differential equation much more cheaply than independently evaluating points of the sine function. Pretty sure Castlevania's Medusa heads did that every frame, but it's probably cheap enough to do every scanline.
In addition, the SNES supports fast multiplication which it internally uses to calculate the mode 7 transformation but can be used for your own calculation on any other background mode.
You only need to store a quarter of the sine LUT since it's got a lot of nice symmetry, so they probably went for that approach (speed over space)... I've seen that the first three Sonic games did the same to handle all the loops/slope geometry efficiently so it probably was a common technique in those days.
navbox:
0:20 Titlecard
0:30 types of effects
0:50 Palette Cycling
1:43 Background Scrolling
2:25 Horizontal Oscillation
3:36 Interleaved Oscillation
4:32 Vertical Oscillation
5:53 Transparency
7:04 Giygas
I think this pace of a video is perfect. Too much information can be hard to absorb in one shot. Thanks for making this!
I always wondered how much it confused my eyes on a SNES and surprise my ears at the final boss on a SNES.
0:40 Ah, I was wondering how I could possibly describe what I see when I close my eyes and squint real hard. Good to hear it has a name
Earthbound's background are the kinds of things you would see in old tech demos. Crazy stuff.
I always love learning new things about my favorite games
There’s so many video game related videos where the intro drags on for too long because the creator talks about ‘I played this game so much when I was a kid so it has a special place in my heart blah blah blah’, so it’s nice to watch a video that cuts the crap and gets straight to the point. Not forgetting to mention that this is a great video, I love how you talk in a way that’s so easy to understand for people like me who aren’t experienced in this particular subject :)
Dude, as a game developer in practice, please, never stop doing these, they are so helpfull and amazing to watch
An overview of how "raster roads" work, like the ones in Rad Racer, Top Gear, or the Mad Hatter fight in Batman and Robin for the Genesis, would be excellent.
Yes! Earthbound backgrounds. Those things tripped me out, I always wondered how they worked
I've been waiting for a video like this! I've always wondered how these types of effects were done.
I love these videos! You have a great way of showing how things work, and I love the detail that you go into for the explanations.
Keep em’ coming!
I want PSI Audiovisual Effects
I think those are just animation frames, nothing fancy.
Fantastic as usual. Supporting you is something I’m glad I can do.
Oh man, this is an amazing video! I've been waiting for this ever since I read about you doing this at some point on your website!
well explained, thanks! your videos are amazing, and those battle scenes always looked like some demoscene effect to me, so kudos for the reengineering and making it understandable, how they work!
Man, I have always wondered how this was done. Thanks for making this!
I learned yesterday that RGMEx is narrated and run by the legendary Dotsarecool. Keep up the amazing work, dude!
i am so glad someone talked about this!! i have always wondered about these
As always, I am amazed by the amount of video editing that probably went into this.
Your editing is amazing and your explanations go so well with them
Amazing video. It's mindblowing what they achieved there with the SNES. And very inspiring to try and recreate. I use processing to make visuals and stuff and it's a quite tough challenge, but that's the fun of it. Your explanations made much clearer what i should try to do
This is a wonderful video! I knew iwata and his team were talented but to have it explained expertly is even more cool!
Fantastic! I always wondered if there was a breakdown out there about this specific effect in that game, and I assumed nobody cared enough to go into it. Thank you for making these videos!
I love your Videos man!
This is such a good in depth video thank you , earthbound was definitely ahead of its time visually graphically it didn’t age that well but I still love it.
thanks for always providing such unique and fascinating content
I freaking love this channel so much.
gorgeous! I was curious how some of these effects were achieved and this video was exactly what I wanted to see.
Thank you so much for this!
Earthbound was certainly made to take advantage of SNES hardware!
I was just thinking about this a few hours ago. Glad I found your video! Trying to implement something similar on the Genesis for an art project. Thanks for explaining it!
Always absolutely love the videos, keep it up
Thank you for another great video
Damn impressive explanation on how the effects were achieved!
oh I am so ready for this series, this is my favorite aspect of older games!
I'm making an RPG with similiar backgrounds and this video helped me a lot. Thank you!
Just terrific, thank you
Favorite game near and dear to my heart, so it is beautiful when you can learn more about something so amazing.
I've been wanting someone to explain these for a very long time! Aside from "It uses HDMA", I had no real clue how it worked
Just jumping in before I start the video to say how excited I am for a video on the Battle backgrounds of Earthbound!
As always, great work!
This was simply great.
I'd love to see a video on the effects used in Terranigma. Both the first overworld's warping effect and the several different text effects and movements.
Another good one might be an explanation on how the music with lyrics is accomplished in Tales of Phantasia.
I was going to suggest that too. Terranigma has effects seemingly unique to that game.
Love ur channel!
I didn’t know I needed this video but I needed this video
This is awesome thank you for this
These visualizations are amazing!
I'm surprised that the backgrounds doesn't hurt my eyes and it's still pleasing to see.
Man I LOVE earthbound’s battle graphics!
Amazing video!
I love the backgrounds of EarthBound! I don't feel like they get the respect they deserve!
TH-cam just recommended this video to me on a whim and I gotta say, idk exactly everything thats going on here but I'm hooked
Awesome, please make more!
Thanks for the breakdown, love to see you in my sub menu:) also, it may be too new, but I always loved how black smoke effects looked on ps1 games. Tomba 2 and Threads of Fate/Dewprism come to mind.
1:30 oh god, this background forces my eyes to do the thing that lets you see the image in Magic Eye pictures.
Finally, I have the answer I've been waiting so long to hear.
I always love these
I don't care what anyone says, this is the 3rd best video about graphics on TH-cam.
I never figured that I would learn the reason for the classic yet complex Mother 2 backgrounds. Thank you!
Amazing work :D
Why don’t you have more subs? You are great at this stuff!
This is amazing how so little is used to make something so big!
This is seriously the coolest thing I've seen in a long time. I probably sounded like Owen Wilson through the whole thing. :)
oh wow so all the backgrounds are images, i could see most of the ones that were a single image but i thought some used animation but its just effects dome by the console.
really cool video and would love to see a mother 3 version of this if there are any differences
Thanks, it's very helpful to learn some graphical mechanics
Now I wanna play Earthbound again and savour just how much love and effort went into the game.
Cool, gosh, finally someone explains it really well
It must've been a headache for the devs to figure this shit out. Mad respect for doing it
Really cool!
This is art!
Love it and I haven't even started watching it yet.
Finished now. Was always intrigued by these background animations. So glad to learn about them.
Earthbound! Heck yes!
Perfect video about one of my perfect games!
You're a legend.
It's really amazing how seemingly simple HDMA transform algorithms (which in result is a primitive oscillation trick - something you can do with actual trigonometry math in modern shader programming) and palette cycling can make up a trippy yet nice backgrounds.
I think this is good reference for those who just started in learning shaders.
Superb.
Pretty cool! Since your title says audiovisuals, I'd also love to hear about how music and sounds were composed, in Earthbound or other games.
God i love these videos! Can i request you look at the backgrounds of Mother 3? Or perhaps how the beat system works! Anyway keep it upo, i love learning new things about my old favorite games.
this was very cool
Glad I watched this video. I'm making a game and thought of some backgrounds and animations and stuff and thought I had to draw everything pixel by pixel lmao
This is neat, I really, really appreciate your visual explanations. They make it so much greater to understand ^^
My request would be for "Tales of Phantasia (Super Famicom)". It has a fully voiced song in there, and a rather extensive music player, which seems rather ridiculous for a SNES game
I recently purchased a copy of Tales of Phantasia, and was so impressed by the voiced intro song that I dumped the ROM and a started manual disassembly so I could find out how it was done (I've only disassembled a few hundred bytes, so I haven't found out).
Also, there were only three programmers? The game's intro credits mention "total programming," "audio programming," and "expression programming" (whatever that is), which is impressive considering that it's the biggest SNES game (6 MiB).
Interesting video concept...
YOU ARE BREATHTAKING