Scud Race "Supercar"

Does anyone have images from the time Scud Race was called Supercar? All i've found was a intro which was on Scud Race Plus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzzxRQFnp6E

 

I really do hate to be such a tease, but if you can wait another month then I was actually planning to finish an article I'd recently been writing about "Supercar" along with another unreleased game by AM2 from around the same period... you'll have to be patient, though, as I'm still waiting to be reunited with my main computer (that contains a large portion of the research notes from my Sega related project, which I first started working on over twelve years ago) following a recent hardware failure - that will teach me to only make file backups once every few months on average!

 

Okie dokie, also, does this include the Saturn/DC port?

Also, WHURHURHUR IS MY FUCKING VIPER ON CONSOLES?

 

I could try writing a paragraph or two about the abandoned console version of SCUD Race, but to be honest there isn't much information outside of the Katana development kit tech demos, which have already been covered at length elsewhere...

 

You mean the tech demo that supposedly was made by Core design? That's all I know.

 

Bit off-topic, but does this include the Burning Rangers info we talked about in 2011?
http://www.assemblergames.com/forum...g-Rangers-Beta&p=535237&viewfull=1#post535237
Would love to see some more. Been doing some exploration on the US release and already found some things, would love some video from you

 

I really must apologise for how long certain elements of my overall project are taking, but there is no single priority, and I've found that some parts end up taking longer than originally anticipated due to the arrival of newly submitted material that I need to filter through. As you can hopefully appreciate, this is often a very time consuming process (especially for someone who has frequent real world matters to also deal with, including some ongoing health problems).

Thanks to a very kind contributor, I received a wealth of videos including large amounts of prototype footage, with the good news being that I now possess a few minutes showing off not only the alpha build of Burning Rangers, but also the removed co-operative mode. Furthermore, I was sent an unpublished promotional VHS from a division of Sega Europe featuring lengthy clips of the mythical Fighting Force review copy rumoured to have been sent to various magazines in the UK especially.

Unfortunately, not everything is so easy to find, and of all the various challenges I've encountered since beginning this ambitious quest, there's nothing worse than having to scan through a submitted tape to document its contents, researching where possible to confirm what exactly is of value. Also, in some cases I've had to restore clips where no alternative exists, using my judgement and referencing available material in other formats, which requires a lot of patience to realise to the best of my ability.

I don't want to get your hopes up, but I've actually delayed the deadline because of communication being arranged that may ultimately result in further tantalising media finally surfacing. I can't give details at the moment due to ongoing negotiations, though I will say that I have two particularly interesting sources - one has a late era Saturn prototype that is not known to be in circulation online, while the other claims to have a production reel from their time working at an outsourcing team linked with Sega Of Japan that includes several unreleased AM titles from the late 90s.

I wasn't originally planning to do this, but once I get my main project hardware back I'll see about uploading at least a few of the finds that I've made and already polished to my own levels of satisfaction. In the event there are further clips that I feel would be worth sharing before I've brought these up to the same high standard, I'll share those as well, only with a disclaimer attached... would you rather wait for the end result to be the absolute best it can be or accept compromises? As something of a perfectionist, I'm naturally content to make you all wait a little longer, especially when new contributors surface to justify my delays!

 

Feel free to do whatever you think its best, the delay I believe.

Kinda off - topic = Do you know how I open the .NJA file from the F40? It came on the Katana SDK R10/11, I managed to extract the textures (.pvr).

"WHERE IS MY VIPER?"- Scud Awesome, an parody of Gears of Awesome.

Also, I believe you know already, but Ryo has the Beginner Day track tech demo, he did even make a thread.

 

I'm happy to wait Just playing with BR and it made me find the old post so thought best to ask. To see the co-op mode running would be amazing.
Believe I've found a really poor way of accessing the '2-player mode arena', not that it's very exciting. There seems to be level data for a level called Taisen, which according to Google translates to competition in Japanese. So I renamed the level 1 data called round 1 to the taisen data. The object data, lighting and texture data seems to be all from level 1 but the main geometry seems (which is hidden to the right) to be the arena. If you replace the tutorial level with the same data it creates something that looks closer to what's expected (and randomly spawns two fires) but you can't move about due to the tutorial stuff.

 

I forgot to mention this before, but I do indeed have quite a lot of information regarding the deleted "Taisen" mode in Burning Rangers...

To date, the only evidence we have of a versus mode comes from a handful of screenshots in the UK's official Sega Saturn Magazine, showing this feature running in a late preview build, along with a brief description.

However, unlike the basic competitive features of previous Sonic Team games (including Sonic 3 and even NiGHTS), BR was also to include a co-operative mode, allowing two players to fight their way through the main four stages.

Despite previous claims this was removed - just like the more comprehensive 2PVS features planned for NiGHTS - due to a tight production schedule, it's clear that BR was already significantly delayed as a result of development being restarted.

Magazine and video evidence now confirms that there was indeed an early build containing such differences as an alternate HUD (which has a compass similar to that in the Shenmue Saturn Version prototype footage) and key-like placeholder numbered items to collect, later replaced with crystals generated by extinguishing fires.

By far the biggest "lost" feature is the co-op element, though after conducting further research I've concluded this function was NOT removed at the last minute, though some code does indeed remain in the retail version along with a small number of related voice files.

Since both NiGHTS and BR (plus Sonic World/Adventure) are built around the same basic engine, it was believed that hacking with an Action Replay code may have similar results to enabling the former's mythical debug options.

Sadly, it was concluded that too many of the required assets were missing to restore this, though it may be possible to inject the missing parts using data from a prototype. Of course, we'd need for such a disc to surface in the first place for this to be something that can even be checked, as it may not work in practice.

One theory is that the real reason any multiplayer aspects were taken out wasn't because of deadline issues, but rather Sonic Team being unable to maintain the game's already struggling frame rate with two characters running around - while not always by design, it's claimed the signature flickering polygons are sometimes a deliberate way to keep up the speed.

Alternatively, I've heard from a former Sega employee that internal videos circulating in the company's European offices showed major AI problems when two players joined forces against the game's mechanical enemies. Additionally, it was possible to play alone with a CPU partner, which again supposedly led to the kind of bugs that couldn't easily be fixed.

As with NiGHTS, it seems any multiplayer or co-op modes in BR were being developed as something of an afterthought to Sonic Team. The major delays and technical challenges faced just getting the single player game to an acceptable level of satsfaction had resulted in the overseas versions being held back until early 1998, with the localisation of e-mails sent from those rescued plus navigation voice clips making the process an even lengthier one - none of this could be translated until the original Japanese sources were finished.

As a result of Bernie Stolar declaring the Saturn's premature demise back in '97 during his infamous E3 speech, Sega Of America pressured Sonic Team (and a few other developers) to either hurry up with any ongoing titles or risk missing out on the US market completely.

Similarly, a meeting was held between SOE executives and representatives from the few remaining third party developers still supporting the Saturn to produce a list of what ultimately became its last wave of software, with Deep Fear tentatively scheduled to be the final new game in PAL territories, pencilled in to appear on shelves alone no later than September '98.

At this point, I should emphasise that negotiations between Sega, Capcom and Virgin continued right through until February to secure a PAL version of X-Men VS Street Fighter, which requires the 4MB RAM cartridge. Virgin was the first party to drop out, unhappy that its proposed £79.99 RRP had been rejected as too expensive for a package containing both the game disc and necessary upgrade.

Having already published Resident Evil, Capcom then wanted Sega to publish their latest game at a reduced price of £49.99, absorbing the cost of producing the cartridges. With focus now turning to the Dreamcast's imminent launch, talks eventually broke down.

What does all of this have to do with BR, you ask? Well, there were very nearly two more casualties of Sega's decisions made around this transition period in the company's hardware business. Sonic Team were told that translating BR from its native Japanese would be scheduled for no longer than three months, meaning the end product would launch as part of a final push that also included such high profile titles as Shining Force III and Panzer Dragoon Saga, which also required expensive localisation efforts.

In addition to these great last minute additions to the Saturn's PAL library, the only other games chosen to be released were Riven (which only received a minimal print run due to its sheer size, similar to PDS) and Courier Crisis. Although a completed Saturn version of Chill was completed along with World League Soccer '98, the former was turned down for a release - Silicon Dreams were only "appeased" by SOE management after being promoted to 1.5 developer status and given the Worldwide Soccer name to use for a new relaunch of that franchise on the Dreamcast built around their already existing engine technology.

Finally for now, there was one last game that SOE considered a liability. After establishing strong links with Australian group Tantalus, the powers that be didn't want to wait any longer for a Saturn conversion of The House Of The Dead, knowing its sequel was already in development at AM1 for the NAOMI board with a Dreamcast port inevitable.

To cut an already long story short, Tantalus were bluntly told by SOE that it was "now or never" if ever their Saturn treatment of HOTD was to see the light of day. Despite still including many rough placeholder textures in the last two areas especially and memory optimisation planned for later in development, the full game could already be played through in a 60% complete internal build, which included all of the intended extra features.

I personally interviewed one of the key staff members at Tantalus involved with this game a few years back and learned that Sega did indeed request the last prototype was quickly prepared for an early release, hoping that buyers wouldn't be too put off by the mid-stage disc accessing. After all, weren't most eyes on the Dreamcast? "They probably don't care - just put it out, anyway!" was the general attitude, and Tantalus equally seemed happy to accept the money rather than keep polishing the game, even though it meant a slight hit to the team's reputation.

As with Silicon Dreams, it's believed that Sega offered Tantalus damage limitation by promising 1.5 party status on the Dreamcast. However, with the more appealing PlayStation 2 looming and rumours surfacing of newly recuited developers struggling to meet Sega's expectation of their wares joining the console at launch, Tantalus declined.

Perhaps the most familiar example of this is how Bizarre Creations had to delay Metropolis Street Racer, with the end result having an inflated budget of £1m that Sega refused to help fund. By the time MSR was hastily put together, the Dreamcast was barely weeks from being officially killed off, plus it cost even more to issue two revisions necessary because of various significant bugs.

Thankfully, Bizarre signed into a deal with Microsoft and rebranded MSR as an exclusive series for its Xbox range of platforms, restoring a once tarnished legacy. Sonic Team was able to recover after making the sound decision to complete Sonic World as a Dreamcast project, but Tantalus later experienced a mass migration, its name affected by the HOTD episode.

For those who don't know the history behind this team, Tantalus was formed in 1994 by a core team of former staff from Beam Software, which later evolved into Melbourne House after being sold to Infogrames in 2000. Following the HOTD disaster, quite a few of its founding members rejoined Melbourne House, leaving the rest of Tantalus to churn out second-rate conversions.

At one point, Tantalus had access to the best technical resources that Sega could provide, with the plan being for the studio to eventually be rebranded as part of the OziSoft family. Under this new name, its first project would have been a Saturn conversion of Motor Raid, which in its original Model 2 arcade guise ran on the Manx TT engine - Tantalus had previously converted this, using elements of the same code in their port of WipEout 2097.

In the end, Tantalus chose to remain an independent outsourcing studio for further Sega conversions, initially taking on the task of bringing HOTD to the Saturn with no idea of just how much of a bridge burning exercise this would become.

Anyway, I've gone way off-topic and given you all a few previews of the fascinating nuggets I've been extracting over the last few years. Providing you can tolerate reading through another informative yet lengthy post, I'd say it's a win-win situation, as I now have less to write later!

P.S. Any contributions or corrections would be welcome.

 

That sounds really interesting Anthaemia! Keep it up!

 

Did you know that Driver 2 Chicago Night Free Ride /Surveillance Tip-off (1st mission) have an altered version of HOTD first stage music?

Driver 2 was published by Infogrames in November 2000, but it was develped by the British Reflections Interactive, which later was bought by Ubisoft in 2006/2008, Tantalus earliest involvement with Infogrames that I know was with the PS2 port of Looney Tunes Space Race in early 2001. Reflections also made Destruction Derby 1 and 2, as you know, DD 1 had a Saturn port, while the last one had an unfinished one.

I always think that the reason for that music in Driver 2 was probably because of someone from Tantalus, althrough there was a rumor about a Dreamcast port, but seeing that the DD 2 was released in the same year as HOTD in the Arcades, its possible that during the development of DD 2 for Saturn they head the music and bought in for Driver 2.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdHJEgO9lVY

Even some people on YT noticed how similar they were.

Also this story leading to other people is very interesting through, here is an off-topic, Infogrames had DMA Design (Rockstar North) for a few months after buying from Gremlin Interactive, and sold for Take Two just a day before the relase of GTA 2 for PC.

"After the release the core team behind Space Station began to experiment with a 3D city concept using the Dreamcast and the Body Harvest team worked on a follow up to their game while at the other end of the studio" This is from Wikipedia

"The Space Station Silicon Valley team began work on Grand Theft Auto III while the Body Harvest team started work on what would become Manhunt" Also from Wikipedia

There was rumours about GTA 3 being planned for Dreamcast, but got cancelled because of lack of space in the GD-Rom, the Body harvest project might be indeed Manhunt.

Recently, one of the guys from Project Manhunt (41hc1) contacted one of former developers and he stated that Manhunt was being planned 8-9 years before the relase (2003), which leads to a date even before the release of the first Grand Theft Auto, it was being planned as an FPS as the concept art from Craig Moore shows, it did have motion capture facial animation, 41hc1 believes that the facial animation was moved into MH2 hunters.

Manhunt was announced in mid-fall 2002 as Project Manhunt, along with The Warriors, Manhunt only got the first screens and videos around the E3 2003, while The Warriors was only revealed in E3 2005.

Meanwhile, during the Dreamcast time, the dreamcast port Max Payne was announced in 1999, but would be only be developed after the release of the PC version, the PC version was only released months after the Dreamcast death in July 2001, I think Borman said once that people who visited Remedy didn't see anything related to the Dremacast port, nor even a Devkit, althrough there was one time that someone said that a Devkit once inhabited.

In the end the PS2 and Xbox port was dealt by Rockstar Games, the first by Canada (now Toronto) and the later by Neo Software, which was renamed as the late Rockstar Vienna in 2003 that got closed in May 2006, their last game was Manhunt 2, but they didn't even receive the credits for this, and it was officially announced in Feb 2007 with Rockstar London as the Main Developer.

And finally, there was a saturn and 64 port of GTA 1 being planned, do you know anything about it?

 

Grand Theft Auto was announced and then developed for the Saturn, reaching quite an advanced stage before DMA Design signed an exclusivity contract that led to it appearing on just the PlayStation - supposedly because Sony liked the controversy surrounding the PC version, which generated a lot of public interest based on an early pre-release demo.

According to one programmer, the Saturn version used a similar approach to Mass Destruction, with all ground elements handled by the VDP2 chip, allowing more polygons to be allocated to rendering graphics that needed to be 3D. Also, having so much processed in this way meant that transparent effects could be retained, as everything else in the game was sprite-based and therefore easy to blend.

Now, on to GTA III... Disc space wasn't an issue with this one, as the GD-ROM format isn't that much smaller than what Rockstar Leeds was later able to fit onto a single UMD for the original PSP version of Liberty City Stories. Besides, it's not as if GTA III came even remotely close to filling a whole DVD.

Furthermore, it's well known that the PowerVR2 solution favoured by Sega over 3dfx's alternative had native support for up to 2x texture compression, plus the Dreamcast also had the ability to play ADX files, not that Rockstar would have chosen any of CRI's middleware options over its own "proprietary" tools.

Rather than storage limitations, I've been reliably informed that GTA III was plagued by issues relating to the Dreamcast's VRAM and inability to stream data fast enough, with mid-island disc accessing seen as too much of a compromise, seriously breaking the game's overall flow.

(Then again, I'd have thought the biggest obstacle would be the Dreamcast's significantly lower theoretical polygon count when compared with the mighty PS2, assuming those figures being thrown around by Sony weren't just theoretical or simply unrealistic in a playable environment with AI and collision detection to calculate!)

As for Max Payne, I'm still yet to get a definitive answer on that one. For every staff member at Remedy who never saw a single Katana development kit, there's another claiming the Dreamcast port reached a preliminary and hardly playable alpha state, only cancelled because management no longer saw this platform as financially worth continuing to support.

Any more questions you'd like to ask?

 

Interesting, I've tought the Saturn version would be still in an very early state, and this also shows that this was the first time that DMA had signed a exclusivty deal, the second one was with GTA 3, althrough it was just a bonus for State of Emergency.

About GTA 3, it was really weird indeed, the PC Version and Xbox version had something like 900mb, the PS2 size was the entire disc 4.37 GB, but I don't know the real size, since most of it is dummy, sounds like a Rockstar commom habit during the PS2 era, Manhunt had a 2gb real size, State of Emeregency was 700 mb on Xbox and PC, but on the PS2 was 4.37gb disc size, the only exception I recall was Manhunt 2, which used less than 2.5 GB.

The original relase of GTA 3 for PC had a performance problem because it would render too much far away, more than the necessary, and that's why they released a patch for it.

The PS2 had double the dreamcast RAM, but half of the VRAM as I know, but indeed there is the RAM problem over games with big or too detailed areas, Max Payne for PS2 and Xbox had 3 loading times for each chapter, while the PC had only one, Soldier of fortune for PS2 and DC had the same thing, I've head that Doom 3 for Xbox levels were simplified because of the memory, Far Cry Instincts was linear for the same thing.

About Max Payne for DC, this is what I've heard indeed, but I think the person/Borman did also mention the playable state.


Question?

Yea, do you know anything about the GTA 64? Besides that ign made an article about how it was going to be in 1999, ironically they mention the RE2 64 port, which was made by Angel Studios, which turned later into Rockstar San Diego.

http://www.ign.com/articles/1999/03/30/grand-theft-auto-7


Bonus

Here is an video that supposedly shows the PS2 version of Max Payne in an early state, althrough it dates just 2 weeks before the PC release, I think it is the PC version with the early assets which got cut in last minute (the MP5 still on the game files) with the never seen before 1997-1999 era gameplay.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjMkzDT3Clk

 

Sorry, but I really don't know anything about GTA for the N64. Also, I must apologise for a couple of mistakes in my previous message... that will teach me for replying to a thread without having my research notes at hand!

The actual problem with GTA3 for the Dreamcast was related to the GD-ROM drive not being able to stream the necessary large amounts of data quickly enough into its limited RAM (and not a lack of VRAM as I mentioned before, since the console has more of this compared with Sony's counterpart).

Even if Rockstar had utilised the system's native texture compression option, there would have been LOD issues carried over from the PC version. As you correctly said, the original fault was too much being rendered in the background, though a reduced draw distance could have easily fixed that.

I haven't messed around with any of the PS2 era GTA titles for a while, but I do seem to recall the discs being heavily padded with dummy files in comparison to editions for other hardware. I'm fairly sure Liberty City Stories - on the PSP, at least - didn't surpass 1GB, and that's very similar to GTA3 in terms of content.

 

I don't know where he found this quote but the guy who run Sega-saturn.net has something interesting about GTA:

 

Its okay, I tought it could be an oversight or yours.

Also I forgot about the LCS size, on PS2 it was something like 3.7gb on disc.

Today i've played scud race on arcade for something like 3 hours, but the best I've could was 5th place on Beginner with Viper, but I could see the main cars after a truckload of Alpine A610s, probably it was an Alpine club meeting in the game. It was a pretty deal, on Playland sometimes if you recharge your card with a determined value, you will earn the same value as a bonus, I recharged R$ 40 (something like USD18) and ended with R$80 (USD36)

 

That is some amazing information.
I hope some day you could release the footage of the coop mode in BR would be awesome to see (even in still form!). Thanks for typing all that out, it was enjoyed immensely.

 

I sometimes worry that my posts are a bit too long, though it's worth it to me even if just one person learns something from them.

As someone who first learned of Burning Rangers though preview coverage in UK magazines, I thought Sonic Team restarted development quite early into the overall process. Of course, by the time news reaches the print stage over here it's already a few months behind, so it was fantastic to discover that Japanese publicity started before this point.

Years later, during research for my Saturn related project, I came across what amounts to approximately two minutes of raw footage showing the scrapped co-operative mode. Also, while it may only exist in low quality, the very first promotional video uploaded to Sega's website back then includes placeholder voice files (by a secretary, no less) and even a demo version of the game's theme with partly improvised "scratch" vocals by Takenobu Mitsuyoshi!

I'm sorry to be a tease, but I can assure you that I'll share a compilation of the most fascinating clips as soon as I can, along with videos of other Saturn era prototypes. If all goes to plan, there may even be something from another abandoned AM2 title on the cards as well, though I'm still waiting to see whether or not a contact I've been negotiating with delivers the goods they promised and lets me use this at all... How about we start crossing our fingers just in case?

 

As someone who holds some rare materials (not game related, more film and music oriented) I completely understand. As soon as something is released it loses its trade value and stops you being able to get more materials. So don't feel any pressure from me, I'm happy to wait.

I learnt of BR from the UK magazine too, I got hyped up - my parents let me get the game while in France as a holiday treat (and I think thats where we were when it was released). I read and reread the manual over and over again in anticipation. It was one of those important games that defined my childhood.

Good luck with your material hunt