Talk:Sprite (computer graphics)

Terrible article

For example, the sentence "... how many can be displayed per scan line (often a lower number) ..." doesn't even make sense.

Article quality is poor, and scope is too wide.

This article tries to describe many possible meanings of "sprite", frequently confusing one with another. Even when talking strictly about hardware sprites, there are actually many implementations, gradually growing in complexity. Overlay with priorities, linebuffer blitter, framebufer blitter. No display list, CPU/coprocessor-based display list, or opaque, hardware-driven display list.

Sprite hardware table is ugly. Looks like people just copied various tech specs from different sources, as result having different descriptions and measures for essentially similar hardware properties and capabilities. For example, why Amiga sprite height is "arbitrary" and 2600 sprites are 262 lines? Also, Amiga has several very different hardware facilities for manipulating 2D images and neither was originally called a sprite.

3D sprites is potentially a big entry by itself, as you can use 2D images in various ways, with different orientations and rendering approaches.

80.249.84.110 (talk) 07:46, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

This article is ridiculous. The table comparing various systems' hardware doesn't belong here. Anyone that says anything like "Mario is my favorite sprite" needs to be blocked from contributing. Real sprite technology (as distinguished from sprite sheets drawn by fanboys) is not such a broad topic that a coherent article can't be written.--Drvanthorp (talk) 04:50, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Sprites on Wikipedia

Wikimedia feature request: Support for sprites in order to show cropped views of large images. For example, zooming in on Mona Lisa's smile instead of showing the whole canvas. See bug 7757.Heyzeuss (talk) 17:40, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

This might be a function supported by some software sprite engines, but it is not a characteristic of sprites.--Drvanthorp (talk) 00:06, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

I'm Going to Gut the Entire Article

No kidding. This thing needs to be butchered like livestock. The beef will be an article on real hardware sprites, the workings and history of the hardware devices, and maybe a little info on how it lead to the development of software sprites. The beef -byproducts will be separate pages about spritesheets, web-based sprite-designed subcultures, spritesheets, and a list page for that badly designed table of various machines' graphic capabilities. Hope that this doesn't piss off the Mario fans; I'm guessing that it will be an uphill battle undoing the reverts from editors that prefer this muddled page as it is.--Drvanthorp (talk) 01:46, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Should horizontal/vertical mirroring count as rotation?

Horizontal/vertical mirroring is included for Atari 2600 and NES under 'Rotation', but other systems that are currently listed as having no rotation support probably support mirroring as well. Should mirroring be included? 85.228.198.150 (talk) 15:22, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Mirroring is not rotation.performing a horizontal and a vertical mirror is equal to 180 degree rotation. No other form of rotation is accomplished by mirroring. 74.211.58.201 (talk) 07:56, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Split

I propose the material about "sprites" in CSS should be moved to a separate article called Sprite (CSS) or similar. All these "sprites" have in common with traditional sprites, which this article is mostly about, categorised as, and pretty much referred to in all incoming links, is that they're small rectangular pictures. The CSS material even talks about cutting down HTTP loading time, when sprite graphics doesn't exactly have anything to do with network communications at all. If this trend continues, this article will become a jumble that throws the word "sprite" around to mean any kind of small picture. JIP | Talk 19:29, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Comment: I think splitting is a bad idea. Contra many of the other comments, I think it's very useful to have a single point of entry that talks about hardware, software, CSS, etc. The idea surely transcends its implementation, and that's why the name rolls along as the techniques change. If you're interested in animation, it's all interesting. Frankly I think it's v usable as is, so thanks to its authors. BenM 18:42, 7 December 2014 (UTC) benm — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wordmatter (talk • contribs)

Support. The page is just too long to read. Stranger195 (talk) 07:46, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

What is "analog scaling"?

I saw it here first: List_of_Sega_arcade_system_boards#VCO_Object and it seemed nonsensical to me. Googling "Sega VCO object analog" is not helpful, I get few results and they (all?) seem to be from here. comp.arch (talk) 10:21, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

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Smooth X/Y movement.

One thing I've never been able to understand about sprites is how smoothly they can move across a screen. Even if the display resolution is quite low (like the blocky Atari 2600 graphics), they can translate from one coordinate to another in a much finer resolution than I would think possible. Why is this? --Navstar (talk) 23:21, 15 December 2016 (UTC)

It's all a matter of resolution. Atari 2600 backgrounds can be very low res, but that doesn't affect the sprite resolution at all, and it can jump to any coordinate. they also can be animated, which causes the transition to look more realistic. 74.211.58.201 (talk) 18:58, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

That's an absurd answer that doesn't address the question.

Not sure what the machines did. If Sprites are merged into the screen's frame buffer, then they can't move more smoothly than anything else (they're still bound by frame buffer resolution). However, the hardware Sprite processor is focused only on sprites, so isn't slowed down by other stuff running on it like the CPU is, which might give the illusion of being smoother because it doesn't have to skip pixels to maintain speed while other operations hog the CPU.

I could imagine smoother movement to work if sprites are just "tiny separate frame buffers" that override the info from the main frame buffer, and are composited at the same time the video chip selects the pixel value to send to the CRT. In that case, given a CRT is analog along the horizontal axis, and had probably 2x-4x what most PCs had memory for at the time in vertical scan lines (NTSC has 480 lines, PAL even 576, computers only had memory for e.g. 240 pixels height), the cathode ray might visit each frame buffer pixel several times. It would therefore be possible to store the sprite position with a higher resolution than the actual image, and position sprites on half pixels or even finer granularity. Not sure if any computer actually did that, though. -- Uliwitness (talk) 13:52, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

OK, a friend just pointed out to me that the 480 lines are split into half-frames of course, so that means at 60Hz, each individual frame contains only 240 lines. Also, apparently no computer ever actually sent different images in half-frames like TVs did, they just sent the same picture twice (effectively 30fps with double-height pixels), as they weren't fast enough for 60fps. So my theory is nonsense. No idea what Navstar was referring to with smoother scrolling. -- Uliwitness (talk) 14:14, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

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Hillis and TI

The text says "It was also used by Danny Hillis at Texas Instruments in the late 1970s."

I believe that "at Texas Instruments" should be "for Texas Instruments."

According to his bio, Danny Hillis apparently never worked at Texas Instruments. The cited source ("Never Mind the Laptops: Kids, Computers, and the Transformation of Learning") says Hillis designed the chip for sprites, and it was for a TI project, but it never says he did it at Texas Instruments.

Quoting R. W. Lawler:

Texas Instruments supported the development of Logo for the TI-99 at the MIT Logo Project. The turtle geometry component of the system was quite inadequate. The sprite graphics system, which originally had been an uninteresting feature of the hardware, proved in the end to be a liberating addition to the repertoire of tools which could be used for educating children with computers.

And according the section TI Sprite Logo 1978-9:

Seymour was approached by Texas Instruments founder Cecil Green. Green had a grandchild in the Lamplighter School in Dallas. He wanted Logo on the new personal computers TI was building. Ed Hardebeck became the chief implementer of Sprite Logo – color and sprites (turtles).

This seems very much like TI worked with MIT to product TI Sprite Logo, and Hillis was involved through the MIT connection, working ``at`` MIT rather than working ``at`` TI.

Follow-up

According to this video of Hillis (https://www.webofstories.com/play/danny.hillis/111), he was working for Milton Bradley on electronic toys and was sent to TI to "design a chip for a video game." So he was at TI, but not working for them. Dgpop (talk) 21:07, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

References

Impostor (computer graphics) needs its own article not a redirect into nonsense

Impostors are not just sprites and are definitely not a part of 2D engines, which is what this article is exclusively about. Impostors need their own article as it is a 3d technique for 3d engines using sprites, which are in this case called imposters. This article doesn't even mention the Impostors in the text! I therefore suggest editing the redirect Impostor (computer graphics) and making it its own article. The computer game Trespasser was btw. one of the first 3d games, that used this technique. 93.229.163.76 (talk) 05:05, 26 October 2023 (UTC)