polarity: Different answers for Puzzle Fighter and Street Fighter on that one. We have greatly tinkered with the Puzzle Fighter screen layout. The net effect is that it ends up being widescreen, but with nothing stretched-looking, and nothing even really different looking. It’s just magically widescreen and will seem like it was designed that way.
For Street Fighter, there can be no such magic. Stretching the characters to widescreen would be a high crime to me, and changing the game to be widescreen is beyond the scope of the project and would lead to too much complaining about it being a different game anyway. So bottom line, the game will not be stretched at all and it will have some kind of decorative stuff on the sides. Perhaps we will give you an option to stretch the game to widescreen if you want to (but know that I will shed a tear if you do).
Back to Puzzle Fighter. Dealing with the aspect ratios of all the elements throughout the game has been nearly a full-time job in itself, at times. By the way, I have an amazing super power to detect when aspect ratios are wrong. I have quite a long track record of claiming that something is stretched slightly when others don’t think so, and having it turn out that I’m right. It happened just last week when something was 288 pixels wide and it looked wrong to me (but right to others). It turns out it was wrong, and it should have been 298.
Anyway, the aspect ratio issues surrounding Puzzle Fighter are dizzying, but they will all be solved (most are already). The game’s original pixels are wider than a 4:3 ratio (so random screenshots you see of it or other CPS1/2 games are all stretched too wide). But these pixels were somehow projected onto a 4:3 screen so they end up looking correct. This means when we extract assets, we’re dealing with stretched wide assets. But we would like to create normal looking assets rather than work in the “stretched assets space” if you get what I mean. To make matters worse, we took the original game’s pixels (wider than 4:3 but intended to be mashed into 4:3) and stretched them *even more* so that it became 16:9. Then, we replaced these really stretched elements with our new not-stretched art.
You probably didn’t follow that, and it gets even worse still. Remember how I said the original game’s assets are stored in a “stretched” form? Well, after studying the game for quite a while, I’m pretty convinced that there were some mistakes about aspect ratios there too. It’s kind of too much to go into (too late), but the point is that we can’t even uniformly tweak everything because a few things were wrong before we even started.
There’s an associate producer at Backbone who goes by the name MK, and I want you to know that he has gone to amazing lengths to help straighten all this crazy stuff out so that you, the player, won’t realize any of it was ever an issue at all. It will all just look natural.
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