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

Thanks, I will definitely work on this again later on in the year.

Cheers!

Jolly

 

hey guys, thought this pange got deleted cus i could not acess it but anyway im back

 

I am perplexed at how most Sonic Retro folks aren't giving the due importance to this happening. SX is kind of a holy grail of the Sonic Scene, even of the whole gaming history. JR and Andrew77 are being unbelievably "forgotten" as *regular* forum members there after all the hard work they have been doing. Also, AssemblerGames thread seems a lot more enthusiastic about the releases.

Simply can't understand that.

And again, I'd like again to praise and thank jolly and andrew for all the efforts. It's amazing to see my Sega Saturn running this old rarity. Can't wait to see what comes next.

 

its weird, cus technicaly SX is the holy grale of cancled games its the zelda 64 of the saturn, im shocked people arnt giving these guys as much prais for helping SX see the light for the first and possibly last time.

 

I don't want to speak ill of any community, but maybe because it didn't originate on their forums? I doubt they're that petty, but I guess it's possible. I doubt it, though. Maybe what's been released hasn't been enough? If so, I strongly disagree. I too thought it would be a massive deal for them, but then again I thought the Sonic Adventure Autodemo with original Windy Valley would set the world on fire and it didn't seem to do so.

 

They made 2 threads about these builds (1, 2) and the forum was down during a few days not long ago.

 

You know what would be cool to implement? A VR headset enabled build of this. I don't know how the current build renders scenes and if it'd be difficult, but for something like say the Oculus you just render each scene twice with different projection matrices and then some post-fx stuff for lens correction.

 

hey jolly anything new? oh and do you think there is a possibility of adding 3d pad support for the pov version? thanks

 

nothing new currently, jolly is swarmed with work. and andrew is busy with family life and ofcorse AXSX

 

ahhh thanks

 

Today, digging casually into the Xtreme archives I found a really old executable from late 1995 that turns out to be an old prototype of the Xtreme engine for PC.
This is from a time before Ofer did any work to port it to the NV1 card, and it renders everything in software.
It also uses an old format for the level files.
There is no source code for it, but tracing the system API calls I managed to see what files it was trying to open at startup and I made it work. I thought you might enjoy...

Cheers,

Jollyroger

 

Too cool! Always like seeing more of this game

 

Good work Jolleyroger.
What can it do to your knowledge? Can you run around or anything?

Speaking of which i need to actually play a build of this soon...

 

Amazing find! Thanks for providing yet another great gem.

 

This build is only an extremely simple tech demo.
There is no control system at all, one can only move the camera around the level.

I think this is from an early rewrite of the engine to work better on PC, with full texture mapping and scaled sprites, before Ofer tackled porting it to NV1.

Just interesting as a piece of the whole story for posterity I guess...

Jollyroger

 

Yeah, this is really interesting .

Jolly, can you do a mini timeline of development? For example, did they try creating an engine on PC before they started working on the Saturn? When did they start porting it to the NV1?

Btw gotta love checkerboard patterns in 320x200, who doesn't love aliasing eh?

 

Andrew75 messaged me and told me the demo was running insanely fast on modern PCs, so I ran it on an older system.

 

I am definitely not the most knowledgeable person here on the timeline of X-treme, but yes from what we can gather, Ofer worked for a long time on Mac, then progressively ported his engine to PC (sometime in 1995), then to the NVidia NV1 (late 1995), and then attempted the port to Saturn (sometime in 1996), which failed mostly due to the massive hardware differences between the PC and the Saturn, which made a direct port very hard.

 

sweet hope to be able to download it, and jolly any chance we could get a pov build on the saturn with 3d pad support?

 

Technically it can be done, albeit not trivially.

The joypad management code is easy to modify, the control system is not quite as easy, as it is written entirely in SH assembly.

No time to do it though...