The end of the article speculates that the sheet system was dropped since the tiles appear scrambled. I'm wondering if the artists still used the sheet system, but a memory optimizer tool re-ordered the tiles to help free up a little more space on the ROM.
> I'm wondering if the artists still used the sheet system, but a memory optimizer tool re-ordered the tiles to help free up a little more space on the ROM.
Seems unlikely. Managing the "physical" layout of sprites on a sheet is a lot of work; there's no reason to do that if it's going to be thrown out by an optimizer in the end.
Besides, notice that, on the optimized SF2 sheet, all of the tiles for one sprite get written out in order; they aren't interleaved left-to-right like the tiles would have been on a sheet.
The way Super Street Fighter II has a mix of methodologies seems to count against that. Why only run this optimiser on the new art?
I could see artists might still use a grid when sketching and planning to keep a handle on sprite size / memory usage. But not in the hand packed sort of way, more just each sprite drawn unscrambled on a grid. You wouldn't go through all the rigmarole of hand optimising memory layouts if some stage in the build system is going to ignore it and do its own thing instead.
Because if you change the tiles, you need to redo all the tile number tables throughout the program. Much easier to only change it for new graphics added to the game than to rework a bunch of old stuff that works.
