Why must premium and Elite owners have to pay the price for MS and their
stupid freaking core unit? 150mb downloads for arcade games but unlimited
for movies and demos? Bullshit!
http://blog.capcom.com/archives/998#more-998
Long time, no see Street Fighter fans. Sorry for not writing in a few
months, but hopefully David Sirlin's articles have been keeping you in the
loop on HD Remix news. The reason I haven't posted in a while is that there
has been a lot of changes in HD Remix and we really had to focus on what was
going on with the game. But now, I think it's time I give you guys the run
down on what's been going on the past few months.
First of all, creating HD Remix has turned out to be a much more difficult
task than we could've anticipated. There have been many recent challenges
ranging from developing rock-solid netcode from the ground up to creating
super-polished art for that truly lives up to the name Street Fighter. If we
had gone the "good enough" route, you probably would be playing the game
right now, but that wasn't the route we wanted to take here at Capcom.
The first major revelation I have for you is that we've done a fairly large
facelift to the character graphics. If you guys have been keeping up with
the SFHD news, you probably remember Ryu looking like this:
As you can see below, we've changed the look a little bit (or maybe a lot,
depending on how you look at it):
(Please note that this screen has not gone through the edge clean up process
the other one has gone through, so it may seem a *little fuzzy.)
There are a number of reasons we decided to change the art and here's the
run down of how we came to that decision: As a necessary part of
development, we had to outsource a lot of the work to an outside company
that based their work off of Udon's key frames. This company has an
excellent reputation and ability as an outside art contractor and we were
very impressed with their overall resources and their infrastructure.
Without going into the nitty-gritty of it, the art they were producing just
wasn't up to par or schedule of what we needed. To be honest, a lot of their
art was looking pretty good, but just not "good enough." It just wouldn't
satisfy the quality bar that both Capcom and Street Fighter fans demand.
So, we turned to Udon to help solve this problem. First, they identified
that all of us (Capcom and Udon) were aiming way too high with our render
style. In the original style, we were going using at least 6-8 tones to go
from the darkest to the lightest values of a particular color. This, as some
fans actually pointed out, is extremely hard to do. We decided to stick it
out and go with that route and unfortunately, it didn't work out too well.
Udon's suggestion was to take the tones down to about 4. So now, a
particular color will go through about 4 shades when going to light to dark.
Some tweaking was also done to the line art to match this new rendering
style as well. The overall result is a different style that is still going
to be in full HD, but will be more efficient to animate and therefore get
the game to you guys sooner. It also looks pretty damned good.
Once Udon and Capcom agreed to go with that route, we had to essentially
reboot the whole art pipeline. The character art pretty much started over
from scratch with new reference art from Udon. Using lessons we learned from
the start of the project we are now using a team that utilizes more Udon
talent and an outsource partner (still very necessary) that uses a smaller,
but more focused group of artists.
We know that it sucks that we all have to wait longer to play HD Remix, but
the plus side to all this is that with the extra time needed to reboot the
art pipeline, we have extra time to: a) cram in tons of cool features that
weren't planned from the onset of development and b) further refine and test
features that we had planned all along.
One of the coolest features of the game is the new "HD Remix" mode in the
game. As you guys have read from David Sirlin's posts, we've been doing some
changes to the game to create a mode in Super Turbo using input from some of
the best Street Fighter players in the world. As I'm sure David would tell
you, this is not as easy as it may sound. It's taken many revisions,
sessions of playing with pros, and further refinement to get it to where it
is now, and it still may see a few more changes before release time. (From
what I'm hearing, after a session of playing HD Remix, the pros are finding
the changes so fun that it's hard to go back to normal Super Turbo when they
get home, which is super cool!)
As previously mentioned, we've also been hard at work on the online
features. Recent tech solutions dedicated to online play have really raised
the bar on what it means to have lag-less input during online play. We've
put a ton of time in meeting this expectation and are confident that SFHD
will provide the best online console experience to date.
I've seemed to be getting pretty long in my post here, so before I bore you
to death, let me give a quick run down on a few more features that this
extra time has allowed us to put in:
.. 8-man Tournament Mode. This has been especially challenging with the new
netcode
.. Both Remixed and Classic music
.. Hit Box Display. (Woohoo!)
There are more that we'll announce later on, but I really wanted to mention
the hit box feature as I know the guys at SRK would love to hear about that.
The last thing I'll mention is concerning the talks the have been occurring
online concerning the file size of the game with respect to features on the
360 and the PS3 versions. I can officially say that the file size will not
be an issue. With great help from the guys at Microsoft, we will be able to
offer the same features on both platforms to the same quality as each other.
To use the term I've been reading on the forums, neither console version
will be "gimped" due to any kind of limitation.
Overall, the project has proved to be extremely challenging, something that
I'm sure that all those involved at Capcom, Backbone, and Udon would readily
admit to. I think in the end, the product you guys get in the end will be
the most ambitious title put into the console download space and be well
worth the wait.
Stay tuned to the Capcom-Unity blog for more updates on SFHD. I promise to
not wait months until the next update and to stop using my cell phone to
release video.
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