2D sprites get massive for the HD generation

by Kyle Orland on Apr 20th 2007 11:15AM

While the arrival of HDTV has generally been a boon to the game industry, it's definitely caused headaches for at least one shrinking but still important sector of the industry -- 2D sprite artists. As the above illustration of the Ryu sprite for the upcoming Street Fighter II HD Remix shows, drawing good-looking 2D characters in HD requires a lot more attention to detail than the old standard-resolution sprites.

This problem is not exclusive to Capcom. Castlevania designer Koji Igarishi remarked at GDC on the labor involved in creating high resolution 2D art and SNK President Ben Herman lamented in an IGN interview that bringing the company's fighters to the 360 and PS3 would require artists to "re-draw every single older game."

The extra work leads to extra benefits, though, as the sleek new Ryu above clearly demonstrates. Still, the proof will be seeing these beautiful high-def drawings come to life. All the graphical fidelity in the world doesn't matter if the animation is on par with Star Wars Adventures.

Source

Tags: 2d, animation, HD, HighDefinition, PS3, sprite, ssfiithd, StreetFighter, UDON, Xbox-360

Reader Comments (53)

It's hard to believe that so much detail will actually be in the sprites. Seriously, this looks like the artwork that the devs do before they even start a project. That Ryu on the right just cannot be real.

Lets imagine that's actually the sprite. Will they scale it down for 720P if it was made for 1080P? Because 2D works differently 3D.

On a side note those GGX sprites are really good.

and here i thought that capcom would just keep using the same sprites... anyone familiar with the morgan from dark stalkers sprite?

Whoever said that the PS3 has 512mb of memory is wrong. PS3 has 256mb, half of the 360, and it still costs $120 more than the most expensive 360 model which, by the way, has double the hard drive. But that's irrelevant.

Here's the thing. None of the consoles can render "true" vector graphics, they're all rasterized. A PC can't either. Flash Player rasterizes the graphics. Now I'm as much of a Wii fanboy as anybody else, but if you render a vector graphic, rasterized, at 480p, it might end up looking worse than a 1080p or 720p picture simply because there is less pixels there. Now don't get me wrong. I think Super Paper Mario, in widescreen 480p, looks absolutely brilliant on my 1080p TV. But the fact is that even with vector graphics, there will be less pixel information there.

That being said, I don't see why they wouldn't make him with vectors, like many people have said, just to be safe.

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