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

I'm down for helping in the way of donations. I'll regularly check this thread to look for the opportunity. Very exciting.

 

Wow, if there's a playable build of Sonic X-Treme hiding in there...

 

Even if its not playable and has development files we can study and research , that would be just as good!
Especially useful for the project that I've been working on since 2006.

One of the levels I've rebuilt.
[video=youtube_share;qU-k90htzqk]http://youtu.be/qU-k90htzqk[/video]

 

I found that card on ebay last night, didn't post it because I thought it was a bit pricey. I figured you might be lucky and find one in with a bundle of old cards that would probably have been a lot less. Would be nice to see if there is any Sonic X-treme content on there, despite there being so many versions there doesn't seem to be much code floating around.

JollyRoger helped design the CELL? That's awesome! I'd love to get into something like that myself one day. Sounds like this project is in good hands

 

Definitely Correct. He worked on the Cell low-level system software library and early (pre-PS3) technical demonstrations of the hardware, then some large scale scientific simulation code on Cell.

 

Hi all

hxc from back in the day here. hopefully I'm allowed to be back here, it's a long time since the dramatics of the first sonic xtreme auction.

Ofer Alon had built his engine on the PC, PoV were comissioned by Robert Morgan to port the engine across as there was no indication that Ofer would be able to do this.

When I asked about the job in hand, whether it was a port, or a recode due to the apparent lack of fisheye lens in this version, Mike Wallis had this to say

'It was pretty significant, since Ofer coded it for Windows (nearly--he
didn't use the Windows specific code, but wrote his own memory manager
and other typical Windows functions). So it was quite a job to port it
over.

The fisheye lens would come in, as it still needed to be coded. POV
didn't have enough time to code that by the time we needed to show it
to Irimajiri.'


What is very interesting is the fact it used the NV1. As some of you may or may not be aware, Sega was building an NV1 based system that never saw the light of day and there was a Sonic Xtreme sort of thing being coded for it by Ofer and also Don Goddard. I've not heard that Ofer's original engine was NV1 based at all, but it is totally possible as sega were pushing it at the time...

"Here's the story of why nVidia never made it though. We were attempting Sonic very briefly on this NV1 (Ofer was) and I was doing some experimental game prototypes on it. This thing was a BITCH to hookup the graphics pipeline. It was like someone cutting a cable line with thousands of wires and trying to figure out which wire goes with which other one. It was supposed to be flexible but was truly baffling...much like programming the Saturn, haha. Well, over the next few months (Sonic went back to the Saturn after a month or so) nVidia was trying to sew up all of these loose ends and make this beast do things that are only NOW this YEAR getting in to games. They are four months behind schedule." -Don


Provided my contacts are still live I can very easily get you in touch with Don who had a full working NV1 setup as 2008/2009 when he was looking into this stuff; he has loads of archives and I would be very unsurprised if he had the SDK knocking about. If he did not, he would certainly know how to get it running, and from the very, very long conversations I've had with him before, I think he'd be willing to have a shot at it. He bought an NV1 card and compiled his personal, non sonic demo, and it ran first time, for reference.

It's late at night and I have exams next week, plus work 9-5, and this is digging up very old info, so if this is a bit haphazard i apologise, but if I can be of aid here, I would love to be, just give me a bit of time!

 

In the archives (which by the way are not THAT extensive) there are source files that compile to PC (Windows 95) executables, which seems to suggest they might be dumps of Ofer's engine, although I have not had enough time to look into them yet.

Some of the data files included seem to correspond quite closely to what Senn has already released, which suggests that something in the archives leverages that format of assets.

The archives do indeed contain more material than the one related to Sonic, in fact the Sonic specific material is not actually that much. So far I have not come across other STI projects, as I believe POV was not an offshoot of STI, but rather it was founded by one STI member.
Something interesting is that there are traces of specific Sega Saturn development material in the archive, some of which I had never seen before.

Thank you for the offer, I do have the Sega tools to manipulate DSK files, my intent is to use the DSK directly if possible (and hence my need for the Saturn System Disc), so that I can launch Saturn executables on the Cartdev with the data coming directly from the Mirage.

I am intrigued by your assumptions, what gave you the impression I don't have many hardware/software/programming/debugging skills?

Just curious.

For the sake of precision, I worked on parts of the Cell low-level system software library and early (pre-PS3) technical demonstrations of the hardware, then some large scale scientific simulation code on Cell.

I certainly don't want to overstate my abilities, I had no hand in the hardware design.

Once again, I didn't help designing the processor's hardware, I worked on the system software and libraries.

 

Make sure to make some nice solid backups for yourself in the meantime And try to avoid double posting, you can quote multiple posts using the quote button with the + next to it

 

Hello there,

this is excellent news, anything that Don could provide in terms of help would be enormously appreciated.

I asked an old friend at NVidia to see if he could provide the NV1 SDK, just to have another chance.

By the way, this is just the very first approach to resurrect this code, it is mostly to see if some of the prebuilt executables can be made to run as-is.

Conversely, with the luxury of having the source code of these experiments, I can pretty easily rewrite the rendering code to use OpenGL or DirectX or a software rasterizer; it just takes time, nothing hard or clever...

Jollyroger

 

The archive is already backed up on three redundant storage systems, I have done this before even looking at the contents, and anything I do is on a further copy.

I will try to avoid doing multiple posts.

 

Truly sorry for the incorrect info. I'll fix them.

 

I wonder what kind of things they were trying to get the NV1 to do that are "only NOW this YEAR getting in to games"? It was my impression that it wasn't incredibly powerful; it couldn't even do texture filtering.

 

x

 

Someone that knows a lot about Sonic Xtreme code, would Be a programmer that goes by the name of SaNik , but he's kind of vanished off the face of the earth.
I used to chat with him on Sonic Retro, maybe if you'd like me to try and dig him up, perhaps he could be of assistance.

 

I haven't used a Cartdev+Mirage in nearly 20 years, so I will have to get reacquainted with it, but I still remember the Mirage allows loading a DSK into its hard disk and selecting it as the Virtual CD source, which then can be accessed by any binary code that invokes the SDK CD library interface.

You are right though, it is faster to convert the DSK to a disc and try running it directly. I do not have a tool to convert DSK to ISO though, I never used anything but the Mirage itself and the SEGACDW tool, which burned CDs directly from DSK files.

If you have a tool that does it, or the source code for it please send it over, PM me.

Please understand, this is not a matter of trust at this point, there is just too much material and I am trying to go through it with some order and trying to make sense of it.

 

This is certainly all pretty exciting stuff - anything Sonic Xtreme related instantly has my attention.

Looking forward to new info as and when it comes.

 

Very curious find, looking forward to seeing what you discover! I always liked Sonic Xtreme, I thought the concept was interesting and the game looked fun, shame it never saw the light of day.

 

I'm not doubting any of the sources used, but until I saw it mentioned in this thread I had no idea that Point Of View was founded as a splinter group of sorts from STI, though it does make sense considering the team was formed in 1996 - right around the time Sonic Xtreme would have been in development. Also (from what I can tell, at least), they were involved in quite a few other Saturn games, including conversions of Black Dawn and Mortal Kombat Trilogy. I've previously been informed that a port of Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub Zero was on the cards as well, so I'd be curious to know whether POV was responsible for this, too.

Anyway, back to Sonic Xtreme, my understanding was that executives paid a visit to STI and were disappointed by the main level engine, which had been shown extensively at the 1996 E3 in video form. However, they left so impressed with Chris Coffin's boss engine tecnology that it was suggested the whole game be produced using this instead. For years I'd presumed this was what powered the previously leaked test build, although I'm now having second thoughts based on the evidence being presented in this discussion. POV was undeniably brought on board to assist the main team after Chris Senn and Ofer Alon went off to create their own vision, but rather than producing a standalone game could it be that Project Condor was simply porting over what Alon had developed for the PC as its lead platform?

There is substantial proof that various different people had come up with their own design documents for what Sonic Xtreme should be, ranging from the 32X-bound Sonic Mars to the most common story, featuring characters such as Tiara. As the creative half of the breakaway PC duo, Senn's concept was again completely separate from all that had come before, and programmer Alon was clearly the individual behind that distinctive fish eye camera lens effect. So, now it seems as if POV's task was to take the more advanced PC version being developed by this pair and somehow get this working on the Saturn?

Based on what I've been able to find out regarding the multiple builds, anything containing a polygonal Sonic is based on Coffin's engine and prominently featuring a rendering quirk in the Saturn hardware that allowed for the generation of curves, first exploited by STI when Peter Morawiec used the same principle in his Sonic Pool bonus stage prototype. Contrary to this, Alon's code still relied on the same set of sprites first seen back at E3 before STI was split into two projects, which I'm now convinced were not producing competing ideas, but instead branches intended to serve the other later into development.

With their planned Winter '96 release target rapidly approaching, STI must have been aware that everyone linked to Project Condor was behind schedule, even with POV converting data to the Saturn based on the more complete PC equivalent. Until recently I'd never heard any suggestion that what Alon and Senn were working with was based around the NV1, though it's definitely a possibility considering how Sega's links to Nvidia in the past. On the other hand, by this point wasn't the company already establishing a relationship with 3dfx, resulting in the ill-fated Black Belt? From what I can tell, the Diamond Edge had already been on the market for a year by the time Sonic Xtreme was ultimately cancelled in favour of Traveller's Tales' 32-bit upgrade to the existing Sonic 3D: Flickies' Island, or Blast as it was known in the US.

While certain details in this overall timeline of Sonic Xtreme's troubled development still don't quite add up for me, I'm still very much thrilled to learn that the archive of such an important player in its creation has been located - especially after the announcement through Chris Senn that Ofer Alon is currently unwilling to share his own engine or key assets for personal reasons. I never suspected for a second that there was just the one source of this data, but to discover that POV's mission was primarily converting Alon's work significantly increases the chance that most promising of the many variations almost simultaneously in progress under this name could yet surface.

My fingers are now firmly crossed that all those offering their services to preserve the work of POV and possibly STI by extension lead to a positive result... hopefully this won't be the last significant lost title from that era to be found again through such actions, as I know from my own discussions with former employees in private that SOA had access to quite a few major Saturn games that never saw the light of day, most in a state enthusiasts such as myself would find satisfactory to play for even a short period to get a taste of what might have been.

Sonic Xtreme is certainly one of the best known examples, but while any version apart from perhaps Ofer Alon's PC work is hardly going to challenge something like BioHazard/Resident Evil "1.5" in terms of how much interactive content it features, this still remains an important find for the whole prototype community, and I genuinely can't wait to see if more comes from this latest effort. The potential for a remake or restoration is possibly without comparison, particularly as there are already countless fan games based around STI's many original concepts, not to mention plenty still ongoing concerns that might benefit from whatever is eventually made available!

 

I do have a NV1 card. But:

1 - I need to find it.
2 - I'm in Brazil. I might have a way to send it to Canada in december.

I'm not willing to donate it. But I can lend it.

 

Does it have the Saturn controller daughter board ? According to Jollyroger it's an important asset that the code is looking for.