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

Just a quick update: I am working on the Saturn right now, with the v40 engine. As I said before, the engine in its present state runs slowly (10/18 FPS) and crashes a lot, but at least I managed to get the PC and Saturn versions to behave similarly, so that I can try to debug most of the crashes due to bad memory access on the PC.

The engine is capable of loading essentially only one level, which has an intermediate format between v37 and the following v42, which is the format many of the PackageX levels are.

Initially for the sake of preservation we will make some videos and perhaps a release of the engine "as-is", just like we did for v37, both on PC and Saturn, but be warned, it will be slow, the only level it works with is crap and it crashes all the time.
Then we will focus on fixing the large amount of bugs, hopefully speeding it up somewhat, and enhancing the code to load the newer levels.

This is the current plan, stay tuned...

Jolly

 

Awesome .

 

Thanks for the update, jolly! We will all stay tuned.

 

Are you suggesting then by "enhancing the code" that we will indeed be able to load/play some or most of the levels from PackageX? And thank you for the update.

 

Great news

 

*** Eventually *** the engine should be able to load/play at least some of the newer levels from PackageX, that is the idea; it remains to be seen if this is actually doable...

 

Very cool to hear, thanks for the reply. You mean the ones like Jade Gully and Crystal Frost? Even path functions? One thing at a time of course though.

 

Awesome work, Jolly, you and your team are doing an amazing job and I eagerly await any sort of release

 

Amazing work

 

Fixing bugs... the old gcc SH2 compiler makes it harder...

 

Kind of counterintuitive to what the original point of the game was, but could a build of Xtreme actually run on a PS1?

 

Yes, definitely.

It would only require writing the rendering backend for PS1.

The drawback of the engine code being somewhat portable is that it is not optimized for any platform, and therefore quite slow.

Jolly

 

Cool c: actually didn't expect to hear it's definitely possible. Didn't the PS1 have it's own version of OpenGL available though? Or am I thinking something else

 

That was the PS3.

 

Ah.

 

hmmm, im prety sure the game could probaly un on a dsi or 3ds (since the ds and the ps1 are qiute similar) or just to fuck with people port xtreme to n64 lol

 

lol Xtreme 64 would be interesting

 

How possible then would you say it is to do it the other way around, that is, port a native Saturn game like NiGHTS to the PS1? Though I'm sure that's a completely different story, as it was written for different, much more complex hardware altogether, plus there's the problem of the native quad rendering on top of that. Would love to play Daytona USA on my PS1 though, haha.

Also, about Xtreme running on a PS1, would fisheye even be doable in a PlayStation build? Or would that bog it down too much? I also wonder about how the newer levels would run in a build of that sort.

 

Ok, last reply on this topic.

Everything is possible having the source code, but the performance may be different, given the vast differences between the two hardware architectures. Also, I suspect a decent amount of code in Nights would have been written in assembler, porting that from MIPS to SH would take a long time, unless done is some procedural form, which would also take a considerable amount of time to prepare for.

The PS1 has a dedicated DSP-like coprocessor to perform operations like transform and lighting, so I think it would be actually faster than on Saturn.

 

Hmm, interesting that it might actually be FASTER on PS1 hypothetically. Thanks for all the replies, I'll try to drop the topic then though .