As I was editing the video I realized that the background hides the floor in a way that's more pleasing to the eye. Had they used a sky sphere the ground would end abruptly like in many PS1 games. Retro gamedev asset packs for Unreal devs: www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/profile/Marcis
I think they wanted the floor you move on to feel like it's way larger than it appears, as you move it kind of grows and shifts while the background stays, it gives illusion that the floor and playing space is massive as long as you aren't paying attention to the part where background and floor meet
Performance. Arcade's backgrounds were 3D. And while hardware of Tekken Arcade games was similar to PS1 architecture it was more powerful. So they used fewer triangles to maintain 60FPS gameplay while still looking convincing enough to Arcade visuals.
So I think my best guess is it's a way to reduce affine warping and vert quantization (not sure those are the proper terms) on a prerendered background, they want every pixel of those backgrounds to be stable and good looking at every moment. They're much more complex textures than a typical skybox, so I wouldn't be surprised if those artifacts were noticable with a low poly distant model to display them on
if i had to guess it's an iteration of the technique used in virtua fighter, which is similar but results in stages that look like they're in the middle of nowhere.
I think the one of goals of that was to keep characters at constant distance from the background "walls", I mean in the centre of the arena, but in the same time, to create an illusion of movement around the area. Flat background, per se, of course was an optimization thing, as a standard solution. More triangles of the cylinder/sphere were used in order to make the background look seamless.
Thanks for exploring this! These seemingly closed but infinite spaces always puzzled me as a kid. Some people mention in comments that the arcade version used 3D backgrounds. I looked at some clips and it's exactly like you described, but with additional layers for parallax effect. My guess is "the explanation that sucks" is the right one. They wanted their backgrounds to look as if they were close, nice and detailed, but characters should never reach them. As soon as devs decided they want the wall game, they changed it.
It was done for performance and to conserve memory. The PSX only had 1 mb of ram, and that goes quickly when you have to load 2 higher quality character meshes and tons of animations for each character. Not a lot of space left to load background level geometry. The background being in front of the camera is simply due to different coordinate spaces. Using a rotating background plane allowed for a detailed background instead of a blank color. The game spends all the horsepower doing above average (at the time) quality character animation, and even changing their vertex colors in real time to simulate dynamic lighting when characters get struck. There was no hardware support for skeletal animation. It was all done on the slow CPU. There's simply no horse power left to draw a 3D background, even if there were memory left to load it. PSX fighting games used the entire of the machine on the character models. The background moving at a different speed was just parallax scrolling. This was very popular in 2D games in the nineties to simulate depth. Every layer would move at a different speed.
I have exprience with sky box on unity engine and I can tell you its probably about custom sky box rotations , its fine when sky box is static but in one of my games i was creating in unity they told me to apply custom rotation to the sky box based on how camera is rotating to give it a nice look and even tho the code works fine in my surprise it was affecting the performance noticabely , very cool video tho , I love it , pls do more
Big Tekken fan/nerd here. The Tekken series up to Tekken 4 were really technically groundbreaking. The tech used for character animations is really solid and the mocap animations are sourced from real martial artists, even to this day.
Keep in mind the arcade version that released before the PS1 version released had fully 3D backgrounds. It's a performance thing. If you need further proof look at character hands in Tekken 3 arcade vs. PS1; the home version of the hands are simplified aka Mittens (besides the attract mode demo) while the arcade ones have individual fingers.
Interesting, i guess having it really close to the camera allowed better performance, since the model/triangles didn't have to be as big as they would if they were actually that far back, their scale would have to be much bigger.
that's not really how it works, what matters is the number of pixels a triangle has to draw to and the number of triangles. It still takes up most of the screen so whether its technically close or far away doesn't matter. It probably is for performance in some way, but not this specific way
@@morganlak4337 With current day engines sure, an object scale shouldn't matter, but we're talking about the PS1. Other than that, there's also the render distance.
@@X363 in what way does it matter on the PS1? Scale is just a multiplier on the object's transform, unless there's some PS1 specific hardware limitation I'm not aware of (very possible) it shouldn't matter at all for performance
I think thats a trick to hide the clipping. The ground floor is being extended on demand, infinitely, so they need to hide the procedural construction of the ground to avoid clipping. Like this you think the graphism are awesome 😄😄
As I was editing the video I realized that the background hides the floor in a way that's more pleasing to the eye. Had they used a sky sphere the ground would end abruptly like in many PS1 games.
Retro gamedev asset packs for Unreal devs: www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/profile/Marcis
I think they wanted the floor you move on to feel like it's way larger than it appears, as you move it kind of grows and shifts while the background stays, it gives illusion that the floor and playing space is massive as long as you aren't paying attention to the part where background and floor meet
This was my guess too! Its the only explanation that I can think of :)
Performance. Arcade's backgrounds were 3D. And while hardware of Tekken Arcade games was similar to PS1 architecture it was more powerful. So they used fewer triangles to maintain 60FPS gameplay while still looking convincing enough to Arcade visuals.
So I think my best guess is it's a way to reduce affine warping and vert quantization (not sure those are the proper terms) on a prerendered background, they want every pixel of those backgrounds to be stable and good looking at every moment. They're much more complex textures than a typical skybox, so I wouldn't be surprised if those artifacts were noticable with a low poly distant model to display them on
if i had to guess it's an iteration of the technique used in virtua fighter, which is similar but results in stages that look like they're in the middle of nowhere.
I think the one of goals of that was to keep characters at constant distance from the background "walls", I mean in the centre of the arena, but in the same time, to create an illusion of movement around the area.
Flat background, per se, of course was an optimization thing, as a standard solution. More triangles of the cylinder/sphere were used in order to make the background look seamless.
Thanks for exploring this! These seemingly closed but infinite spaces always puzzled me as a kid.
Some people mention in comments that the arcade version used 3D backgrounds. I looked at some clips and it's exactly like you described, but with additional layers for parallax effect.
My guess is "the explanation that sucks" is the right one. They wanted their backgrounds to look as if they were close, nice and detailed, but characters should never reach them. As soon as devs decided they want the wall game, they changed it.
I was kinda curious about it but never expected to run into a video analysis of it all lol subbed
Damn that was really interesting, great video man would love to see more stuff like this
It was done for performance and to conserve memory. The PSX only had 1 mb of ram, and that goes quickly when you have to load 2 higher quality character meshes and tons of animations for each character. Not a lot of space left to load background level geometry. The background being in front of the camera is simply due to different coordinate spaces. Using a rotating background plane allowed for a detailed background instead of a blank color.
The game spends all the horsepower doing above average (at the time) quality character animation, and even changing their vertex colors in real time to simulate dynamic lighting when characters get struck. There was no hardware support for skeletal animation. It was all done on the slow CPU. There's simply no horse power left to draw a 3D background, even if there were memory left to load it.
PSX fighting games used the entire of the machine on the character models.
The background moving at a different speed was just parallax scrolling. This was very popular in 2D games in the nineties to simulate depth. Every layer would move at a different speed.
The background it's actually in the front...Mindblowing!!!
Interesting! I did not notice it much until you mentioned it. It indeed moves in a funny way. Cool stuff, keep them coming!
The interaction between the background and the floor always caught my attention, nice vid!
I have exprience with sky box on unity engine and I can tell you its probably about custom sky box rotations ,
its fine when sky box is static but in one of my games i was creating in unity they told me to apply custom rotation to the sky box based on how camera is rotating to give it a nice look and even tho the code works fine in my surprise it was affecting the performance noticabely ,
very cool video tho , I love it , pls do more
Big Tekken fan/nerd here. The Tekken series up to Tekken 4 were really technically groundbreaking. The tech used for character animations is really solid and the mocap animations are sourced from real martial artists, even to this day.
Must’ve Tekken a lot of time
intranetgirl brought me here
Mystery solved!
Tekken 3 is so beautiful,even today, especially the animation.
Keep in mind the arcade version that released before the PS1 version released had fully 3D backgrounds. It's a performance thing. If you need further proof look at character hands in Tekken 3 arcade vs. PS1; the home version of the hands are simplified aka Mittens (besides the attract mode demo) while the arcade ones have individual fingers.
I love aestetichs of backgrouns in retro pixel and 3d games so bad. A good topic for review👍
Very nice video, tho I'm wondering.
How did you extract the models from Tekken to Blender?
Interesting, i guess having it really close to the camera allowed better performance, since the model/triangles didn't have to be as big as they would if they were actually that far back, their scale would have to be much bigger.
that's not really how it works, what matters is the number of pixels a triangle has to draw to and the number of triangles. It still takes up most of the screen so whether its technically close or far away doesn't matter. It probably is for performance in some way, but not this specific way
@@morganlak4337 With current day engines sure, an object scale shouldn't matter, but we're talking about the PS1. Other than that, there's also the render distance.
@@X363 in what way does it matter on the PS1? Scale is just a multiplier on the object's transform, unless there's some PS1 specific hardware limitation I'm not aware of (very possible) it shouldn't matter at all for performance
@@morganlak4337 For one, the render distance. Which is a weird limitation in itself, so imagine the rest of them that are not so well known.
How were you able to take the view from the emulator into blender like that? I'd like to do this.
How did you manage to do an export from emulator to blender? :O
how do you open a scene and/or export it to blender? awesome video like always
Thanks!
I use Avocado for that. Don't expect clean geometry though. The models are often broken in many ways.
Maybe because it's a port from the arcade version ? I remember in the arcade version the backgrounds are not pre-rendered
I think the floor slides so that you can avoid hitting a wall, unlike modern tekken games.
I think thats a trick to hide the clipping. The ground floor is being extended on demand, infinitely, so they need to hide the procedural construction of the ground to avoid clipping. Like this you think the graphism are awesome 😄😄
Interestingly enough, Tekken 1 used 3D backgrounds, even on ps1 hardware, but in a doom way!
plz, how i extract the scene and get in the blander?
Use Avocado emulator. Just don't expect clean models.
@@Marcis. Thanks !!!!!
2:20 yooooo those honkers werent from ps1 ill tell you that
Why not ask the devs?
Make videos about making ps1 characters
ok
hmmmm