VF2 impressions from GAF

http://forums.gaming-age.com/showthread.php?t=15885

"Virtua Fighter PS2 Port Impressions #1
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"You do it right, or you don't do it at all."

I would like to extend a big middle finger to Sega for fucking up yet another Sega Ages 2500 game. VF2 is listed as being 100% complete, so I assume I played the final version at the TGS today.

Gameplay:
Dead on, as far as I can tell. Natch with the sound. I saw Arcade Mode, no Versus Mode, and options.

Graphics:
BOOOOO. Background textures have been downsampled -- DOWNSAMPLED FROM A FUCKING 8 YEAR OLD GAME -- and if that's not bad enough, THEY'RE NOT EVEN ALIGNED CORRECTLY ON THE GODDAMN MODELS. (Look at the first stage -- you know those neat temple thingies in the background? Yeah, they're in 3D, but their textures are clearly, visibly OFF-CENTER in the PS2 version.)

Frame rate: 60, or 57.8, or whatever weirdo speed the arcade one ran at. I did not notice any frame drops and it looked like a solid 60fps with no slowdown (I used to work in video design and compression, BELIEVE ME, I CAN TELL).

Disclaimer: I own a Virtua Fighter 2 arcade machine, which is on in the other room right now.

I think there's a flicker filter, but certainly no FSAA. This isn't an Xbox game.

Anyway, it's 90% there, but the attention to detail in the conversion is nothing but pure slop. Sega needs to stop farming out their classics to college students."

 

what's the problem if it plays pefectly?
*shrugs*

 

well it plays perfectly at least, but still disapointing,
still awaiting perfect vf port then. maybe they should have gone for a vf1 remake instead pffft.

 

that review is funny

"THEY TOTALLY FUCKED UP THE GAME!!
First, the graphics are off center. Everything else is fine. FUCK YOU SEGA"

 

Still, no reason to get the graphics of such an old game wrong!

 

just a note, "those neat temple thingies in the background" are tomes that hold the bodies of elder monks who have pass on to heaven.
Who cares about ps2 vf2 anyways.. for the hardcorers just buy the arcade. For the rest just download it somewhere. Like people are actually gonna pay $$ for this.... okok.. i might, but you shouldn't.

 

i played it at TGS, its fine to me...

btw, there were some l33t VF2 players!

 

Shangster just realize that we have been pwned by Sega once again and that you will have your copy on the first day just like me /versus/images/graemlins/confused.gif

it's ok... come, hug me - we've been pwned.

 

[ QUOTE ]
Jeffahn said:
Anyway, it's 90% there, but the attention to detail in the conversion is nothing but pure slop. Sega needs to stop farming out their classics to college students."

[/ QUOTE ]

So AM2 (we were told they ported it) are college students now, eh?

 

[ QUOTE ]
hikarutilmitt said:
So AM2 (we were told they ported it) are college students now, eh?

[/ QUOTE ]

who stays at a job for over 10 years these days???

besides loads of old scholl am2ers went to genki right???

what about GE entertainment?

 

"HOLY SHIT WHAT HAPPEN"...indeed

http://ga-forum.com/showthread.php?t=19027

way to go, sega. whoever made this must have put more time into power-drinking and downloading porn than on the actual game itself.

 

Re: "HOLY SHIT WHAT HAPPEN"...indeed

That port looks horrible.

This is a 10 year old game and they still can't get the textures right? /versus/images/graemlins/mad.gif

 

Re: "HOLY SHIT WHAT HAPPEN"...indeed

I can't for the life of my work out why the textures look so bad. Surely they haven't downsampled them? Why would they? The amount of frame buffer space required to render a single frame of VF2 must be quite small.

Let's see, model 2 resolution is 496x384 with 16bit colour, so:

496x384x 16 = 3047424 bits

->> 3047424 /8 = 380928 bytes
->> 380928/1024 = 372k

That's under half a meg, and PS2's graphics synthesiser has 4MB DRAM at its disposal.

I wonder if the higher output resolution of the PS2 is distorting the textures somehow?

Another possibility is the original texture format for Sega's model 2 stuff no longer exists. That would have meant the team might have scanned the textures from screen dumps of the arcade version before converting to PS2 format. That could result in the quality drop.

 

Re: "HOLY SHIT WHAT HAPPEN"...indeed

496 by 384 dosent automaticly mean its half a meg, if it was a big 2d wallpaper, then yea you'd be right, but the thing is 3d, so theres a whole other textures and stage you cant see but is there in memory,

besides, come on, vf2 used a vga style monitor, so for a start it will lookbetter as its "progressive scan"

who cares about how it looks, did people diss snes sf2???

as long as its better then the pc one gameplay wise, its worth the £20

 

Re: "HOLY SHIT WHAT HAPPEN"...indeed

372k is the size of frame buffer required to render at that resolution and colour depth. I wasn't saying that was the total memory imprint for a VF2 stage - this would clearly be greater.

Even if VF2 were chock-full of 128 x 128 textures, which it probably isn't, the PS2's 4MB DRAM on the GS could accomodate over 120 textures of that size.

My guess would be only large textures like the arean floor and some surfaces in the background would reuqire that detail of texture.

128 X 128 X 16 = 32k

4M/32k = 128 textures.

Most textures in VF2 are on the character models themselves and are probably only small 32x32's.

 

Re: "HOLY SHIT WHAT HAPPEN"...indeed

I thought this link would be interesting, we need a japanese reader to really do much with it:

http://www.sega.jp/community/segavoice/041014/01_4.html

Credit to sudden_de (or whatever the nick is currently) for pointing it out, and sorry if it's already been posted elsewhere.

The bits I can milk from the shitty altavista translation:
The project has been on hold for like 10 years ("You're ten years too late!#!" says Akira) because they couldn't get the original ROM or data for VF 2.1. Then they saw that the PS2 hardware might theoretically be able to handle a direct emulation of the model 2 hardware. It's hard to read what's being said exactly, but apparently handling the sound was really easy and they had lots of room for handling the direct CPU processing and partial graphic processing. So the sound is spot on and stuff like collision detection, floats, timing, etc should be spot on. GreatD got a copy and tried various tests and said that the speed felt just right and the irritating major counter float damage bug is fixed in the 2.1 version. He also tried a few of the easier tests to confirm that this doesn't have any of the saturn's problems... he confirmed you can only do one or 2 low punches in an after death float (saturn allowed 3 or more) and he tried several times to do kage's TFT, knee, PPPK combo vs wolf and jeff and always failed (in the saturn it's easy, in the arcade it's quite difficult).
More definitive tests would probably require godlike fingers to do combos that approach the limits of what's possible in the VF2 float system, for example it was suggested that in a true VF2 port, you could do stumbling trip --> SJK --> knee --> iaigeri kick --> 1 P,K,G --> m-dbpm. In the saturn version you could get 3 (or more?) P,K,G's before the double palm.

Anyway there's also some information on the limitations they ran into trying to port the graphics, and some excuse about the downsampled textures (something about a lack of memory which means some parts had to be handled during the CD's pre-fight load time). It also explains how the textures were handled... grayscale versions were mapped onto the polygons, then lightning effects applied, then each part was colored ... the coloration process sounds weak, like they had to use their own judgement or 'eyeball it'. Anyway there is a line about how the processing and handling of polygons between the two is quite different, so it could not be emulated the way the other stuff was.

Hope someone can do a proper translation of this informative article. Having at least arcade perfect gameplay would be nice, I can live without 100% graphics after having seen the next two or three generations of 3D technology for the past decade.

 

Re: "HOLY SHIT WHAT HAPPEN"...indeed

after playing the 'port' pretty much all day yesterday, I'm quite convinced it's emulation, not a port, which is pretty impressive in its own right - full speed model 2 emulation on a ps2 is nothing to be scoffed at: just look where similar efforts stand today on a wintel platform.

the standard screen format is a cropped one, fitting what I believe to be the default m2 resolution in the center of the frame, with slight letterboxing above and below. there's the option to stretch it partially, or fully.

of course, a code rewriting from the ground up would have been preferrable, but since they apparently didn't have the raw code data, it would probably have been a very laborious task to redo it all. since this is, after all, a budget release, maybe they didn't consider it justifiable to farm out as much resources as would have been ideal.

in any case, yes, the backgrounds look bad, sporting truly appalling lack of detail and utterly trashed textures in some cases (kage's and pai's come to mind), and the character textures are quite degraded as well. also, there seems to be less lighting influence on the models, or at least it's much less noticeable. I think the most faithful of the stages (or, at least, the least botched one) is shun's.

the voices and sounds are pretty much identical to the arcade, which is a relief to anyone who has suffered through the atrociously bad sounding saturn port. there's the saturn remix bgm available also.

the playability though, as far as I could tell, is pretty spot on compared to arcade: speed, controls, etc. this is the main point, and what most strongly leads me to believe this is indeed emulation - the saturn and pc 'true' ports were both quite off the mark. although, I have to say, in my playsession today there were quite a few elbows that would simply cleanly whiff crouching opponents. I don't recall that happening often at all in the arcade. then again, I was playing 2.1 and, as my arcade experience is limited to 2.0, I couldn't render definitive judgement. I'll have to play 2.0 next time and observe this more carefully.

all in all, in my opinion, there's two ways to look at this: as a technical feat, the simple fact that it is indeed full speed model 2 emulation on the ps2 is impressive, even given the drastic texture downgrading. however, for those who were expecting a fully recoded port which would recreate the arcade experience exactly, are going to be disappointed.

more importantly, it is a faithful rendition of the actual gameplay, something that can't be said of the other, earlier ports.

in any case, it's worth the 20$. of course, those who own the boards aren't going to stop plugging them in because of this.

 

Re: "HOLY SHIT WHAT HAPPEN"...indeed

[ QUOTE ]
Mr. Bungle said:

http://ga-forum.com/showthread.php?t=19027


[/ QUOTE ]

I know I´m in minority here, but that looks way much worse than the SATURN VERSION! Excuses are very welcome. Sorry for interrupting anything.

 

Re: "HOLY SHIT WHAT HAPPEN"...indeed

Please play it Neonmide thanks

/versus/images/graemlins/grin.gif

 

Re: "HOLY SHIT WHAT HAPPEN"...indeed

Having finally got my PS2 VF2 working, I have to say that I agree very much with GreatD's comments. Your suspicions of the emulation, as opposed to a port, I think are spot on. Case in point - the fractional slow down during Akira's low reversals and the timing and feel to reversal jamming. Both are completely intact and are, imo, identical to the arcade experience. I've had a chance to mess about with the game for about 1 hour and I think it's a brilliant release. It's a far greater experience than the Saturn. In my opinion, I can overlook the graphical shortcomings - to me, I could give a shit about the textures of the backgrounds while I'm trying to land senbon-iai-double palm in a float /versus/images/graemlins/smile.gif TFT combos have the appropriate VF2 feel and landing swipe combos are arcade perfect - much more difficult than Saturn.

It will never replace my VF2 arcade board - but it will allow me to indulge in a quick rendition without compromising the gameplay experience that I will always love.

Now I get to capture some of the fun stuff and get my 'godlike' fingers up to snuff /versus/images/graemlins/smile.gif Can't wait!

<font color="yellow">.cheers.</font>