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

On a related note:

http://www.seganerds.com/2013/09/08...veloped-a-sonic-the-hedgehog-game-for-saturn/

 

Sure, sorting polygons takes some memory, but it also takes processing power, which was substituted by z-buffering or in the case of the Dreamcast tile-based rendering.

 

Yes, most of the levels can be backported to v37, which has a larger features set, although that would mean re-porting everything to the Saturn from scratch.

v40 contains, shall we say, a half-port. A large portion of the code has been restructured to use smaller variables, to reduce the memory footprint and increase the performance.
Also, many routines for collisions and camera movement have been rewritten and simplified dramatically, again to run faster.

I suspect this was probably the result of an initial attempt to port v37 (or v38 or v39) to the Saturn, and the realization that it was running at 4-5 FPS.

Jolly

 

That was it - the Dreamcast didn't use z-buffering as we know it today, but rather a similar processing technique called tile-based deferred rendering, which I believe was a feature NEC carried over from the original PowerVR chipset.

Also, I seem to recall a former STI member once suggesting that even the later Saturn versions of Xtreme were still only running at 5fps compared with the PC code, so it's very possible this comment was being made in reference to one of the 3x builds.

 

jolly, your doing a great job man, hope to see more soon

 

allso andrew, just a question, will we see anything of tiara in AXSX?

 

No sprites .... not sure maybe will make some custom stuff way off in the future.

 

Thank you very much.

After bringing the code of v37 (engine and editor) to a level where it runs pretty comfortably on modern Windows, I am taking a break, but I will be back at it soon...

When I resume, I will look more deeply at how broken is v40 (which I have running too), restoring basic functionality like player controls (which is essentially absent from the code), and then doing a considerable debugging pass to the Saturn code, which is very fragile.

Jolly

 

x

 

According to what I can see in the code I have, v37 has no support for Saturn at all.

v40 seems to be a version where the Saturn rendering backend has been added to some extent, and the engine has been partially simplified to have better performance, by optimizing the code and the use of data, and by sacrificing features.

Perhaps somewhere in between these two there has been a version which represented the first experiment to a direct code port to Saturn, which likely ran very slowly.

 

No intention to rush you of course, but does that mean an OpenGL binary release is close on the horizon?

 

Good question, we have not really established a plan for releases yet, as this engine needs the data to be massaged to use it in this state...

Jolly

 

What I meant is just a little something in the meantime, like a single level release or something along those lines, possibly the Gold Tile Level, 1 of the two most famous layouts of that build.

You and Andrew had both said that the physics aspects for an individual level could be tweaked from the DEF itself, so at least from what I know, that wouldn't be too hard to do for just a single level test release.

Correct me if I'm wrong I guess though, just making some suggestions. Wishful thinking you could say, ahah.

 

Just read through the entire thread. This has all been amazing work, jollyroger. You've been told how many times already, but you're making a sacrifice taking all this time to deliver something so sought after. While its possible others might have been able to do what you've accomplished, I don't think anybody would have been so transparent and timely. While I know you didn't take on this endeavor with money in mind, I think a fundraiser to reimburse especially your and every contributing parties' expenditures would be good. That's just my suggestion, though.

 

Thank you for the encouraging words, I really appreciate your comments. All the work I am doing, and all the equipment and tools I purchased to do this work are simply a reflection of my passion for games programming and hardware in general, so while I appreciate your thoughts about a fundraiser, I will not accept any donations.

Some members are helping me with some practical matters, like videos, testing, data, etc.
That is really all the help I need

Cheers,

Jolly

 

Can I join team Xtreme? :3

 

There is no such thing as "team Xtreme", we are just trying to put something together (over time) that helps preserving the legacy of this ill fated game...

 

I was...kind of playfully referencing something someone said on the Senntient topic, it wasn't really meant to be taken that seriously, lol.

I was referring to the small group of people you've somewhat organized who are helping to get this thing to completion, as you mentioned yourself. Headed by you and Andrew of course.

I just wanted to know if there was something I could contribute/help out with, such as testing, as you also mentioned. Not to be a butt about it, but anything new btw?

 

everyone sais "can i test", when they need someone use to working with the software, like jolly said its a long process to port from 95 to 7/8 and openGL, on a second note jolly, wouldent you be able to run the engien in emulated win95?

 

The issue is not so much Win 95, but rather the dependency on the NVidia NV1 hardware.
I use a couple of Win 95 virtual machines to setup and test the development environment, and to understand if there are major differences in the code produced by the compilers that would make the engine fail, and I have a full Win 95 machine with the NVidia NV1 to test the original engine behavior.