BillGaitas
Member
Oh wow this is actually true.
That's friggen wild.
It checks out.
Crazy stuff, I had no idea he worked on Sonic Boom.
Oh wow this is actually true.
That's friggen wild.
Is this a marketing stunt?Oh wow this is actually true.
That's friggen wild.
Benefit was vertice count for flat surfaces and better perspective accuracy sans-filtering.
PSone and Saturn didn't have perspective correction and used Affine mapping, but you probably only heard of warping on the PSone. There's several reasons for that, but the biggest is:
Affine is not good with triangles, with rectangles though, it behaves acceptably albeit not perspective correct.
A bit of news: after a fair amount of sweat and tears the Cartdev is finally running well, all of it. The System Disc works well, and I ripped the IP.bin from it to use it in the Mirage disk images I produce to test, otherwise the Saturn refuses to work, the IP.bin of the System Disc and the one on the Discs needs to correspond for the Mirage to work.
It turns out that we are missing some pieces of code that Ofer was using in his Saturn port (a very early version of the SBL), so it will take a while to recompile his engine on the Saturn to a usable state.
The video I have taken uses a version of his engine that was partially compiled, and I managed to compile and link with, but while it runs fine on SSF, on the real Saturn it works for a brief period of time and then it hangs; it also has some inconsistencies with SSF, the main one being that Sonic is much larger on the real hardware, so much so it takes almost half of the screen.
This might be related to the fact that I am running this on a PAL Cross Products Saturn (hence the reason I am looking to buy a NTSC one, please anybody?), but when I can fully compile the code I will be able to run a lot of tests.
Finally, with the Cartdev completely up and running I can see where the semi-prebuilt demo stops on the real hardware; what I can see is that at least it's not crashing, it is waiting in an infinite loop for the VDP1 to finish rendering, no idea why though, the code is large and it will take weeks to inspect all of it.
So the situation is as follows: Ofer's early engine version with editor (let's call it April build) compiles and runs fine on NV1, but with some nasty rendering issues that I need to figure out, which are likely more related to the NV1 itself than the engine code. I cannot completely compile Ofer's engine for Saturn yet, but I will get there eventually, and the version that is partially compiled hangs on a real Saturn after a short while. I have not tried the POV engine on the Cartdev yet.
Much more to come, stay tuned...
Jolly
Ok, some bad news and some good news.
The bad news first: it looks like the version of the engine we have does not contain the "paths" code, the snapshot of the code predates that feature. There is a fragment of a source tree (header files only) from June 1996 that has a "path.h" and all the other header files are also more recent than anything else we have; unfortunately that fragment has no source code at all, only header files, presumably a backup.
This means it will be essentially impossible to reconstruct the path functionality from the original code, unless we code it from scratch.
The good news: I FINALLY managed to build the Saturn version of the engine entirely from the source code, what a royal pain...
The code is in a bad state, clearly in the middle of development. The player controls are not active, as the code was being rewritten to reduce the memory footprint and increase the performance.
We do have the "original" player movement code though, so it will be a matter of finishing the conversion that was partially started, and that should give us a buildable version with controls, it will take some time though.
Jollyroger
Is this a marketing stunt?
(I know it's not)
Seems like the best timing for everything to come together, I mean the "sonic boom" being considered for X-treme all these years ago part.
Not really.I thought sonic lost world was considered the modern re-trake of sonic x-treme or have I missed something?
bad art
http://www.senntient.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=2173&p=4andrew75 said:Okay guys, Time to dust off one of the oldest .def files that I could get my hands on. a Version 03 Def file to be exact! Dated 12/28/95. Time 14:26:42. Just so you can imagine the scope of all of this, the latest .def file we know of is Version 042 and dated 12/29/1996.
It took about 2 days of trial and error modeling this over and over again using the 003 def file as a guide. Its very primitive compared to the later files. There are no slope blocks in this .def file whatsoever.
But I think that I got this down now for the most part! I'm sure that there may be something wrong with the UV's on the side of the blocks , they should be rotated 90 degrees, but ehh I'm to tired right now to fix that!
There may be other discrepancies with accuracy , especially since there are no screens to compare with.( I'm flying blind here !)
So Chris what can you tell us about this level? Can you remember it ?
Why are there so many Sonics ?! (maybe that Sonic texture is in the incorrect directory?!)
I love the fiber optic like lights ! Very very nice touch !
Without further delay , May I present you with this very important new level ! ( named Level01) ( there are a lot of LEVEL01s by the way)
Notice that there are 2 sprite sets for the rings , Horizontal and vertical.
The circled blue thing moves around following an edge and also hurts Sonic according to the .def information ( ow!) its animation includes a spark attack.
Meaning that he's now able to use the Saturn pad with the development computer as intended.Jollyroger said:Ok, I managed to get the gamepad to work, what a waste of time...
Now on to the rendering glitches on NV1, I am trying to extablish whether it is an issue with the source code's usage of the hardware, or whether the code was in the middle of some experiment that makes the rendering not work properly...
Andrew75 said:Jollyroger is Breaking it down!
Kind of a recap of what's going on. The code we have here is like a snapshot in time caught in the middle of an engine overhaul, and because of that many aspects for the Editor/engine are broken.
JR states that One example is the code that calculates the shading of polygons based on their distance to the camera. When they are far enough from the camera they are supposed to fade to black but the original programmer forgot to initialize a variable, so ALL the other polygons were rendered with a pretty much random value.
That value turns out to be completely transparent most of the time... it doesn't make sense at all for them to be all alpha blended, it is a waste of processing time, JR will eventually change the code to blend only the polygons that actually need blending.
The editor has essentially two modes, in one you navigate the level with the mouse and you can edit the level, one block at a time or by strips of blocks.
In the second mode sonic is playable. Sonic can jump, run up and down slopes, He can even run loops inside the long tunnel in the map.
There is also a separate build setting which lets you build only the engine, with no editor. (gameplay only)
You guys may recognize this area from one of the magazine screens. although the camera and sonic are off to the right of that magazine screenshot.
What the fuck!? Why would you do this, like you were competitors instead of co-workers?Yuji Naka got wind that they were using his prized engine, and threatened to leave sega unless they stopped using his work. Rather than lose Yuji Naka, SoA yanked the NiGHTS engine from the team, leaving them about a year into the project with absolutely nothing to show for it.
Naka wasn't there for the demo. He was always removed from Sonic Xtreme development.Well Naka and some Japanese executives were pissed when they were demoed the game. The problem is what they were shown was already 6 months outdated at the time amd the presentation was done without the team's knowledge.
Naka wasn't there for the demo. He was always removed from Sonic Xtreme development.
Andrew75 said:Okay guys ! I'll keep this short but sweet.
Here Sonic can run around and have some fun in this now famous area. (I like to call it the Gold Tile level myself, as the name is referenced in the .def code)
Its running in version 37 Engine/Editor which does not seem to have Fisheye functions.
Enjoy !
Any news!? :3
Jollyroger has apparently gotten the game up and running in a very basic state on real Saturn hardware using his Cartdev system
He is also using the source code to re-write the renderer to output using OpenGL, meaning a PC version of this tech will be playable on modern systems eventually, without needing an NV1 card
It's still leaking, as in, the guy has the code and has built it and is working on distributing it. And the guy has indicated he's interested in sending the files over. This is how leaks like this go, it's back and forth. He had been willing on working with Andrew75, I'm guessing he doesn't know my involvement with Sonic Retro yet.
I think working behind the doors, closing off this sort of process to those "in the know" is sort of elitist, I like being open. I think this stuff is fun, and it's been a while since I've been directly involved in the hunt for a proto like this. Especially given that this is Sonic Xtreme, a game I've worked on getting the proto for, with varying degrees of success, for years now.
I wrote a post on assembler and Sonic Retro urging people hanging on to not bug this guy to release the source or whatever, because his request makes sense for logistical reasons. Sonic fans have a habit of working themselves into a frenzy over prototypes, and we've lost prototypes in the past because people go nuts and get demanding. This stuff will eventually work itself out.
Updates on windows 8.1 port of the NV1 engine by Jollyroger !
Here we have textures, but lacks effects like fog, no perspective correction, no transparency, improper UVs and no proper lighting system.
and UV progress update:
EDIT:
Skype Quote:
the game engine supports two types of texture formats.
both are PCX.
one is an 8 bit indexed, palettized mode.
the other is a 16 bit RGB mode.
in both cases, when I load the PCX into the engine, in order to draw those images with OpenGL I have to convert them into 24 bit RGB.
I have already written the code that reads the 8 bit palettized PCX images and converts them into 24 bit RGB OpenGL textures in memory.
but I have not written the code that converts the 16 bit images into 24 bit.
I don't want to convert all the files into 24 bit.
I want to leave them as they are.
EDIT: The level is also missing some textures because JR has not converted to the 24bit textures yet. (So They are not loadable at this point.)
A little more in depth explanation. The textures are converted on the fly via code. At this point in time He has done the conversion of the 8 bit textures. But not the 16 to24 bit ones. It'll be a simple mater for Master coder JR to handle.
This post is being updated on the fly as info comes in.... (update to show how fast this is going.)
EDIT
16 to 24 bit function functional while posting the above!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maa1ezK0f3A
It's getting closer...
Jollyroger has apparently gotten the game up and running in a very basic state on real Saturn hardware using his Cartdev system
As a kid with a Saturn I was dying to play Sonic Xtreme. I still have the Next Generation magazine with the screens. I used to just re read that section over and over again. Hope to play this some day.
Used that Sonic drowning tone as a phone alarm for about a week, waking up to that was the creepiest most awful thing, I kept thinking I'm having a stroke or dying while waking up.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maa1ezK0f3A
It's getting closer...
What is the current plan regarding level design for the game?
Level-design-wise "as is" it's clearly unfinished, and needs some structure to go along with it. They were clearly getting somewhere with the engine and afterwards the game would shape up and follow suit. As is, it's a good curiosity artifact but... We all know this won't be the Sonic X-treme that could be, unless someone does levels using the assets in place? perhaps encompassing what exists into something grander? dunno.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maa1ezK0f3A
It's getting closer...
Why use a different engine?Andrew75 (I think) is developing a 'finished' version of Sonic Xtreme using another engine. It looks identical to the original version but with finished levels and gameplay mechanics.
Used that Sonic drowning tone as a phone alarm for about a week, waking up to that was the creepiest most awful thing, I kept thinking I'm having a stroke or dying while waking up.