Sonic X-treme - Point of View - Info + help required

Hey guys ! JollyRoger has some updates for us!
Here we see that he has started to port the source code of the NV1 engine. He changed the original code so that it compiles using the latest Visual Studio and he is writing a new OpenGL rendering backend that replaces all the NV1 code
Basically this is the original Sonicboom version 37 but recompiled in Windows 8.1 and with OpenGL rendering the polygons.

RUN04.def ( which is a variation of the red brick area)


RUN24.def (which is the Gold tile Level)

 

A man with many talents. A big thank you to Jollyrodger for all the hard work he's doing.

 

I can't wait to play ASAX as it looks amazing as a modern version of extreme but if it was possible to play the game game on the saturn with the features shown in some of the videos like the breakable blocks, item boxes etc then wow.. even one single completed level would satisfy me just to see what could have been.

One thing which impresses me is is that I thought the fish eye lens apparently made the game unplayable as the frame rate was so low yet in the videos we see that it actually runs smooth on the saturn..

or is it because there are no other enemies, textures and other things using up memory? Not a coder so not sure how it all works

 

Thank JR so much for us Andrew75. The work he's putting in for us to see this is immense. As fans we could not be luckier that it fell into his hands.

 

do you have an estimated time to when will the job will be done, don't worry i'll be patient

 

I don't think an estimated time is possible at this point because the times when JR can work on the project are random due to Work, life and other aspects. It's not like he can work on this every day, and sometimes he's busy for a full week at a time. I think when something get closer to being completed than we can guesstamate a time for release. ( its also the same situation for AXSX, sometimes I skip 2 weeks or more in some instances)

 

He's making amazingly rapid progress considering the circumstances, though.

 

I see, on second though having an estimated time might gonna ruin the surprise and build up hype for something that is not confirmed

 

Just chill, guys. Some of us have waited for over 10 years for this to happen, we can wait a bit longer. Knowing that it's coming soon is good enough - hype is exactly what we don't want right now.

 

ok, *shoots my hype train with bazooka*

 

I've spent over a week attempting to modify the older .def files to work with the Saturn build, I was partially successful , in that it seems levels with lot of textures ( like Gold tile level and its over 8 textures) can not run properly on Saturn hardware threw modifications.
What I did was change the key features inside the version 037.def to match exactly the 040 def version which is the Saturn build we have. First I made a code translation chart so that we can translate slopes between .def versions.
Than I commented out all slope, scale and other attributes in the .037 def file that were no longer used in version 40 (Threw experimentation). lastly I added in the ver 040 functions to the version 37 .def file.

When running the file in game, the cubes were not showing up so threw a lot of troubleshooting I narrowed the problem down to texture calls , (err... where the .def file loads textures) after disabling multiple textures 1 by 1 than running the engine each time a texture was disabled I found that random but specific cube types would come back on screen.
By the time I got the level down to like a few textures the full level was visible. (it did not matter what 2 textures were loading, any 2 worked) ( so yeah right now it looks like only 2 textures of 128 x 128 size are useable in game at this moment for Saturn build)

Now I'm not exactly 100% sure what the cause could be......Mayyybeeee Ran out of System memory , or perhaps something to do with the pallets assigned to the textures. or something engine side that I can not see since I don't have that code, I did not attempt to mess with the .def file further as it was eating into AXSX dev time. the almost 2 weeks did coast a lot of time !

 

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:

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!

 

JR is doing great work. Keep it up!

 

this is some great stuf man, hope to see more

 

hey, assemblergames is back

 

Just in case someone didn't check SonicRetro while AssemblerGames was down, here's what you missed:

 

I've noticed that some posts are missing from here, but at least there's new info on other places.

 

http://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?showtopic=33545&view=findpost&p=813414 Start here to catch up on things !

 

After 12+ hours blood sweat and tears, JollyRoger has successfully ported the level editor over to a Modern Windows OS, However its still in need of a lot of work. Features are missing, has bugs and crashing issues. It should all be downhill from here, as the hard parts are done.Its extremely preliminary, But this shows that it can be done !