VladR

No, this is it. This has been in the process for almost two years. I bought the house last month. There's only a short, 700-mile strip of land, within 60 miles of Canada border that fullfilled my primary condition: - it must be able to drop to -40'C and population cannot be higher than 200. In Montana, I lived in a spot that had -40'C (and I experienced it for about a week), but it was a huge village - 1,500 people. Too much traffic there, so the search continued as it's utterly ridiculous at 3am at night to not be able to cross the street with my Husky because you must wait for some stupid car. I really can't stand south - I grew up in a very cold microclimate, down to -30'C, so I have really high standards when it comes to winter. While Chicago was getting close, it's a common misconception that it's cold there in winter. Alaska is too expensive to live in such climate, Montana only tiny bit cheaper, so North Dakota it is. Finally, after ten years of listening people to bitch because it's -20C or blizzard, nothing. No complaints from people today. After all, it's winter...

Well, surely by Wednesday they should plow even my neck of the woods. I should need 48 hours for the trip.

https://www.google.org/publicalerts/alert?aid=5102081ceedaae2d&hl=en&gl=US&source=wweather Link appears corrupted so here it is pasted: BLIZZARD WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 1 PM CDT SATURDAY... * WHAT...Blizzard conditions. For this entire event, around two feet of snow is expected. Winds gusting as high as 60 mph will result in whiteout conditions with large, impassable drifts. * WHERE...Cooperstown to the Devils Lake region to Langdon. * WHEN...Until 1 PM CDT Saturday. * IMPACTS...Several days of impossible travel. Disruptions to travel will last through at least the weekend. Localized power outages. Tree and structural damage from the heavy snow load. Disruptions to agricultural and livestock activities. * ADDITIONAL DETAILS...Snowplows are having a hard time plowing the wet, heavy snow. Ditches are full of water in many locations, adding an additional danger for persons trying to travel. Recommended actions Travel should be restricted to emergencies only. If you must travel, have a winter survival kit with you. If you get stranded, stay with your vehicle. The latest road conditions for North Dakota can be found at dot.nd.gov/travel and for Minnesota at 511mn.org, or by calling 5 1 1 in either state.

Finally, as predicted in this here very thread, the weather is clearing up! I feel truly privileged I was given the rare opportunity of being given an advice of a renowned snowfall expert from Australia gracefully sharing his lifelong experience with snowfall in the Northern Plains! I can thus, on my way to PRGE, feel free to proceed driving to this intersection, one block from my house: I was hoping to get a better shot of the intersection a bit further, but got literally stuck as snow was above my waist, which is understandable, being a tiny short guy at 6'3" (191 cm). Astute reader will hopefully forgive the startling unintentional resemblance to the Adelaide skyline.

Oh, he is having a swell day, he already cursed me out in the other thread to be "dumbfuck shitwad" or similar (don't exactly recall the quad-curse combo, it sounded so -hmmm- Australian) So swell, in fact, that he actually thinks I forgot the clusterf*ck threads where your game was ripped to shreds and: - they were spinning dozen different sub-threads within main thread to divert attention and create confusion - they were constantly victim-blaming and taking stuff out of context disproportionately - they were judging you for personal preference choices (aka "How dare you like blue ! That's not a color!") - and, best of all, all of that was masked as "we only want best for the customer", like anybody was going to fall for that Those threads were, literally, a textbook example on behavior of sociopaths, psychopaths and malignant narcissists. Truly best of the best Anything wrong you did, was outclassed, easily by a factor of 100:1, by whatever crap they started spinning and feeding each other. But, luckily, we were all there, and can form our own opinion, regardless on how much spin he tries, and tries, and constantly tries to put on it I'm sure some clown will step in and start furiously spinning the same crap, only to confirm my point. Please, by all means, do

The storm isn't that bad, because it's luckily a Tropical Snowstorm - e.g. it's around 32F (0C), so it's instantly melting. So much for the dramatic 3FT+ predictions, it's barely 10 inches now (but it is still snowing) It is true, that the state of ND has flagged my 30-mile connection road to the interstate highway as "No travel advised - avoid " but that will surely change within a day or two. But, in the unlikely scenario that I couldn't leave, I would email you the build, for sure. Thanks for offering. It's great to see that there are, after all, some genuinely nice people

I would have expected, that of all people, you would understand why I am excited that I can finally offload 3D modeling to anybody remotely (even if it isn't for my first game). Yes, to me, it is the very definition of "very cool setup". And while I can model inorganic meshes just fine, I -surprisingly- prefer coding to 3D modeling. Not a burger guy, I cook all my food at home. But I recently discovered Smashburger (has been around only, like, forever ) and loved it. But, netiquette demands you posted the PopCorn.GIF. You wasted such a perfect opportunity

I am seriously suggesting it is technically possible to achieve a ~somewhat (by jaguar standards, not PC standards) playable framerate of 12-15 fps given these conditions: - no 3D cars, just Blitter-scaled bitmaps - only simpler 3rd track (not first two) of the game - no music Why ? - I know exactly how much screen-space I can texture at 60 fps (e.g. 1 frame time) - it's very easy to extrapolate that to the amount being used by Daytona - add the transform/clip overhead of many more polygons - subtract ~2 frames due to the parallel work of DSP And you will end up consuming 4-5 frames, e.g. 60/4-5 = 15-12 fps. Over the last year I gained a very good understanding of jag's parallelism (beyond the typical GPU+Blitter): - My racing engine already does almost everything on 68000 (AI, scene management, physics, input, GPU sync, collision detection, updating HUD, RPG stats/damage/experience, OP List, ...), except rasterizing the polygon soup, - yet profiling the 68000 shows that it barely takes more than 10% of frame time (e.g. assuming the polygon complexity of the current scene is within GPU's reach of 60 fps, it all runs at 60 fps) - this means that for 90% of the frame time, 68000 is idle, so I can increase its workload by a factor of 10, yet still keep 60 fps (for scenes that can be rendered at 60 fps, of course!) - oh, and OP is busy as the background skybox is 640x240 at 16-bit, so it is hitting the bus quite a lot - over 400 KB per frame, so around 24 MB/s - 68000, over the course of 5 frames, can do insane amount of work in parallel to GPU and DSP - I would not waste precious GPU space with tasks that are unworthy of GPU, like 3D transform, having recently benchmarked 68000's transform output. That code is unworthy of GPU cache. I only regret not doing it earlier. But, on paper, it sounds like it's exactly the thing gpu should do, right ? Yes, it is very complex and tricky to design the pipeline stages in a way that minimizes DSP's access to RAM (and access bug that comes with it), but when you do that, you gain GPU's power output for free on DSP. Of course, if somebody wants to extrapolate SuperCross framerate into Daytona to gauge if it can be done, then go ahead

1. Talk about technical stuff (3dsmax) -> WTF 2. Talk about non-technical stuff -> WTF 3. Post a video of your build (like in past) -> WTF It's so easy to please you guys

Unfortunately, the term "Bad Winter" is really totally dependent on the preparedness of the area, as you mention. In U.S., you can have 2 inches of snow, but if it happens in Georgia, where everybody drives summer tires all year long, it's, understandingly, a disaster. When I spent a December in Oulu (very close to Polar Circle), Finland, it was refreshing to see that the only issue worth complaining about was that the shop with alcohol opened just twice a week. In my country, the capital city used to grind to a halt in winter for almost a week. Because it had an inch of snow (no exaggeration, 3 days of national news). But I was supposed to freeze outside for up to an hour during blizzard conditions at -27 C (windchill easily around -40C) at 5.00 am for a bus that usually never made it up the hill. It was called "Duh, it's winter " The one great thing I never saw in my part of Europe is, that in U.S., everybody drives a truck. And in winter, they mount a small plow. Hence, the local municipality doesn't need extraordinarily overpriced plowing trucks. They pay a local guy few bucks and he can go and start plowing local roads the minute it starts snowing. So, it's never an issue that there are 2 large trucks covering area of 60 sq miles and it takes 8 hours for them to make one round. There's dozens of small pickup trucks that can plow just fine, as long as they don't wait till it's 20 inches. Surprisingly, it's more economical to pay few guys $100 (and the whole area is always fully driveable) than to obtain and maintain a $300,000 vehicle (and the area still grinds to a halt for 2 days till it covers all roads)

Mostly London and couple hours driving north (some *.shire). In winter, it always struck me how warm it was after landing, given that the flight took about 2-3 hours (or so). I never stayed more than 2-3 weeks at a time, so perhaps it got cold after I left home. Uk's temperate oceanic climate averages +1C as an avg low in January and only has -25 C as a historical record. That is unseasonably warm, to me at least. Did you live in a place in UK, where: - it's -40 for a week - it's -30 for 2 weeks - it's -20 for 3 weeks Because I did in MT, and that winter (not last winter) I worked full winter at night, thus higher daytime temperatures were something I only saw on the internet and didn't really experience. When it warmed up to -25 'C, people were cheering everywhere, in grocery stores people were happy how warm it is (and no, it wasn't sarcasm, it was genuine). Even in Chicago most people were bitching once it hit -20 C, let alone be happy about it! It was surreal, given that in Jersey people bitched about +10 C. It's funny how it's all relative...

The Saturn version pops like crazy, that's for sure, right in your face. Of course, Jag is incomparable to Saturn, no question about that. Just the texturing HW where you merely submit a command to texture a quad (instead of killing GPU power by doing scanline by scanline on jag) in itself is a huge improvement. Even handling 8 polygonal textured cars in itself, without anything else, would totally kill jag. Which is why I mentioned cars as pre-rendered sprites. Also, first two tracks are just too complex even for 10-12 fps. Only the third track is (most of the time) simple enough that could have a nice playable framerate on jag. But, I maintain that at the time, no team would be given enough dev time to accomplish that - that's without a doubt, now that we know how Atari "managed that". "Oh look, they have screenshots ! It's a release candidate!" I did some texturing tests with that kind of environment and jag can do soooo much better than Supercross shows, it's actually painful. It's really unfortunate it was released at that state as it forever tarnished jag's reputation. I'm sure if Supercross coders were given few more weeks it would have been much smoother. But it is what it is.

From the top of my memory, MK3 was still 2D, just like MK2, right ? Was there something technically different about MK3 compared to MK2 ? Perhaps it switched to higher resolution already ? If so, that wouldn't run well on jag (there's interlace mode, but it has its own set of issues). I haven't played MK3, so don't really remember. Besides, How many characters and environments could fit on a 6 MB cart ? Probably not even half of them. Would have to be a CD release...

I just watched an "arcade Daytona USA" YT vid, but didn't notice any significant issues with the pop in or draw distance. Since I haven't played at the arcade, it's hard to say how precise that vid is, though. Probably via MAME, I guess... At the time, the TVs were much smaller (though some arcades did have giant screens) so the pop-in we see today on huge LCDs would have been unnoticeable on CRT TV from some distance.

You wouldn't know about it, it was a budget PC publisher in U.S. Regardless, we've have this conversation here before. Because it was done in DirectX, local "experts" (but with MORE published 2D games) starting ditching it as a "LEGO" where anybody can write a 3D engine plus toolsets (editor/importers) plus game in a week. Which is obviously a nonsense, but it's like visiting kindergarten and expecting to hold a conversation about nuclear physics. You need to manage your expectations accordingly.

Technically incorrect. I have two published retail PC budget games from cca 15 yrs ago (the pre-shader era). I just don't have the ego to keep advertising that in every single post, like some other people around here. But, please, don't let the facts interfere with your agenda

Wait, did you actually think I would talk to you IRL ? Man, all sarcasm aside, you are so talented ! I watched some explosive SNL this morning, yet literally burst out in laugh over your response. Thank you Why don't you record all that comedy gold and submit it to Netflix ? You could really get famous, as there's obviously lots of untapped potential there ! It's not fair keeping it hidden from world in some largely obscure forum !

Awwww, you're so cute

Yep, a quick look at wiki reveals that Daytona runs at Sega Model 2 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sega_arcade_system_boards#Sega_Model_2 There's 7 (seven) RISC chips in the system (main Intel + 6 DSPs), plus Motorola for Audio. It surely beats even Playstation 1 in terms of raw horsepower and comes closer to PS2. And it has Z-sorting plus HW clipping. And texture rasterizer. With 120 MFlops, they don't even have to bastardize the codebase with integer or fixedpoint, but may straight use floating point! One has to wonder, what exactly does their engine do then, as at that point, there's not really much to do left - transform polygons and submit a batch of triangles (and let the HW deal with all the edge cases) In short, they didn't even have to bother optimizing it too much to run at 60 fps.

Come on ! Give the dude a break, given his predicament. He's from Australia

Dude, you got some serious balls driving a rear-wheel drive in Ohio climate, I'll give you that - some parts of OH get close to freezing temps even in summer You must have been real close to home though if you roughed it out. I always carry a full winter survival kit+shovel+calfskin leatherjacket with me and multiple layers of clothing, but there's plenty room in Jeep for that. Monte Carlo looks like you might perhaps fit a small shopping bag there, for sure not half of what I carry. Just my leatherjacket would fill the passenger's seat, judging from wiki pics on the car I grew up in a local microclimate with down to -30 'C and we had often some serious blizzards, but what blizzards Montana showed me looked exactly like NatGeo documentary on McMurdo (Antarctica) For fun, while driving through few, I used to step out of the car and let my Husky enjoy it, but didn't dare to go further than half foot from the car given the whiteout - and even she had enough after 10 minutes of it and she loves -40F temps

Wait, did you just attempt to compare UK's winter (which I've experienced quite a few times too) with that of Montana/Wyoming/Idaho/Dakotas ? I am actually trying really, really hard not to laugh now, but it's not humanly possible. OMG, you're like one of those Florida/Cali people back in Jersey who regularly showed up (and stayed whole day!) at work with a jacket, because it was cold. And by cold I mean 62'F (17'C)

True, but there are also slightly more obscure but even better candidates for jaguar: Final Lap R F1 Super Lap Final Lap R doesn't even have roadside props, it's just textured road and grass. 30 fps effortlessly and 50 fps on PAL with some additional effort. Regardless, at 12 fps, we have 60 / 12 = 5 frames worth of 68000/GPU/DSP time available. That means 5x the amount of screen it can texture at 60 fps (e.g. 1 frame). I'd argue that for the third track at Daytona, given that GPU can texture the road during 1 frame (at 60 fps), it should be possible to run the track at 10 fps fully textured even without using DSP. Car as a bitmap, though, a reasonable compromise given the discrepancy in the HW (Daytona vs Arcade). Throw in DSP and you can expect to shave off ~1-2 frames, e.g. 60 / (5-3) = ~20 fps, but of course, with framedrops based on current scene complexity. Still playable, though. But, very highly unlikely that much engineering effort could have ever been done at the time.

First of all, he never said Daytona USA. That was you. Here's his post - would you please point out where he specifically asked for Daytona USA ? Second, I just checked the third track of Daytona USA on the YT longplay. 95% of time the only car on screen is just player's car. And it could be a sprite, there's certainly enough RAM for 15 frames of the car as the track textures surely wouldn't take more than 0.5MB. Most importantly, the track is so simple and empty that there's no reason jag couldn't do it textured in 15-20 fps, assuming of course, the rasterizer is parallelized across all 3 processors (GPU,DSP,68000). But, I presume you meant 68000-only rasterizer - then yeah, 68000 would barely texture that scene at 1 fps.

Wow. Every time I think there's no possible way you could possibly post something more ignorant, you manage to surprise me "Snowfall" ? There has been historic snow storm all over Montana in September, dumping a meter of snow. What would you know about driving through that - living in Australia ? Most people in U.S. live on both coasts so I experienced that what they call a "snowmageddon" does not qualify to be mentioned in casual talk around here. Local highways aren't plowed till there's at least 20 cm of snow. I have, literally, gotten stuck with my Jeep many times (luckily close to home), due to low ground clearance. It takes several days till those local highways are plowed. I've seen trucks that had double my ground clearance, yet were stuck. As much as I wanted to visit my last place in MT, I will have to use interstate highways as those are plowed to higher standard and should be driveable even during the storm. As of right now, there's incoming storm system that will dump up to 3 ft of snow in my area of North Dakota and there are 35% predictions for another one next Tuesday, which is exactly when I plan on leaving. That can absolutely affect my arrival as it's out of my reach. I currently adjusted my driving to target arrival for Thursday night, so this way, I have a 36 hours buffer for bad weather and still make it till Saturday morning.