Saints Row 10th year Anniversary, Unreleased builds

Linux builds as of late is what I'm interested in. But anything works for me as long as it's something really out there in the obscurity world.
Speaking of which I have The Third loaded up on Linux as I type this.

Unrelated but are there any sourthern california based locations that need QA testing that you know of? If so could you PM me some as I wish to actually get a job

 

You all are amazing for reaching out like this, I think we're all aware here that this is a niche hobby but still important none-the-less. Entire games have been lost and can never be retouched or redone because of negligence in keeping accurate backups. Hence why we'll never see a remaster or re-release of Panzer Dragoon Saga...

My question is - What has kept you all so rooted and supportive of pockets of the Internet like AssemblerGames which are all about unreleased and unfinished games and builds?

 

Yesterday's highlights:

Showed off a video of "Bling Bling" which was the codename for Saints Row 1. Early in development this was running on a PS2, but switched to XBOX360 as it became available. Sadly I do not have a working build and all I have is this video. This is really old stuff, and we would have to dig through some tape backups and then build this to make it work.



We also showed off working builds of Saints Row, Milestone 6, and Milestone 7. Both were builds after the E3 build shown, but still in heavy development. Lots of missing missions, cutscene animations, and some greybox areas in the city still existed:



You can watch the stream archive here: https://www.twitch.tv/dsvolition/v/86436780?t=04m04s

 

Just watched the first stream. Great stuff! Learned a lot about the game and its development. @Alexander Mejia, at one point in the stream you asked the stream crew to talk about how Saints Row barely shipped on time. I don't believe they saw that so they never went into it. Is it at all possible that could be answered in a future stream? I'm curious.

EDIT: Also, I believe I read on Unseen 64 that there were a few cut missions from Saint's Row 2. The reason they were cut is the team felt that they went too far and crossed the line from being funny to making them uncomfortable. Two were mentioned, but were there any other missions cut for a similar reason? Do those mission exist in any build?

 

Yesterday's SR2 stream's are here:

https://www.twitch.tv/dsvolition/v/86645574
https://www.twitch.tv/dsvolition/v/86656459

I'm currently, working on today's stream so I wont have nice Highlight photos from yesterday. You won't want to miss SR3 today as I'll have some really really old stuff to show about the development of SR3.

 

Speaking of SR2, do you know anything about that that SR2 Submission build the was floating around on eBay? I can't imagine anything different then retail, but I'm slightly curious.

 

If you have trouble with tape recovery I have two guys at work (software company) who can help. We have a bunch of tape hardware from mid 90s and up until now (although we don't use tapes anymore).

As for questions I would love to know more about the history of the first Red Faction game. How did it all start? Can you show footage of early builds? Do you have any cool tech demos to show?

 

A submission build would be almost identical to what shipped, except that it would be incompatible with your save files most likely, and not be able to connect to anything but partnernet.

 

Thanks, I'll hit you up if we need help with hardware. We still have a functioning DAT tape drive for our system, We just need to examine the format of the tape so we can dump it back to a spinning disk.

Unfortunately I cannot speak for Red Faction.

1. Deep Silver or Volition do not own the IP anymore, and all code was given to Nordic Games during the THQ Bankruptcy auction.
2. We ask THQ Nordic (Their new rebranded company name) permission before doing anything RF related since they own the IP, and we don't want to mess up any thing they may be planning.

I want to make it clear that THQ Nordic do not share any plans with us in regards to the RF series.

 

Ah yes I forgot about their rather insane aquisition history (JoWood, Dreamcatcher, a bunch of THQ IPs, heck even the THQ name itself). Those swedes be crazy.

 

Just remember, there can only be 1gb of RAM in 360 dev kits. First retail style kits had the same as retail at 512mb, was bad.

 

I was told by someone in the studio that some kits have more than 1GB of ram in them, and the debug portion always has a duplication of that memory.

We could not get SR3 POC1 to boot up on anything other than the grey Debug kit with 2 USB ports on it. The newer Debug kits wouldn't run it, and neither would 1GB test kits.

 

Na, the 1gb kits were a big deal. Like I said, thats one of the issues that the 360 had. Initial plans called for the system to have 256mb of RAM until Epic stepped in, so 512 would have been enough. Thats why we got the XNA kits and 1gb Slims.

As for it not booting, there could be a few different reasons for it. Could be something simple like the flash version, or even simpler with a folder not named correctly (which happened to me recently, spent an hour trying to figure out why something wouldnt boot). Use Xbox Watson, sometimes it gives a hint.

 

The game would boot on all three kits we tested. We couldn't load a level without getting a "cannot read memory at [ADDRESS]" that is compiled into the game (we run our own memory manager) on ones that were not the specific debug kit.

I heard secondhand from a QA tester that they somehow used the memory in the debug portion to make it work expanding past what was available on standard debug/test kits, but None of the programmers can remember what hacks were done as it was almost 6 years ago.

It is not an XDK issue. I had the same XDK Flash loaded on all three kits.

 

There just isn't memory to use, so that isn't it. Possible that the worked out some hack to free up some of the system memory I guess, does the Xbox Guide still open?

 

Did you use the Xenon Apple G5 towers early on in 360 development?

 

I asked @Alexander Mejia that and if they also used the XeDK. He said that was before his time, But I think they for sure used the XeDK and the Xenon Alpha G5 as some of the dates they were giving were early 2004.

 

To have something that actually runs on an Alpha G5 would be cool to see.

 

Actually, seeing an Alpha G5 Kit working would be really cool to see.
I mean, they are rare & most of them just don't have the actual software installed on them.