philipj
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Posts posted by philipj
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Ok I'm back... Today is Friday Sept 28 of 2018... Back in the day there use to be a TV marathon called "Kung Fu Friday" so this topic is perfect for I'm going to bring up next... No doubt I use to love to watch this show on Friday evenings, sometimes it would show on Saturdays. One of the shows I use to watch that I have great memories is called "Wu Tang Deadly Strike" back when me and my pops use to watch it together. Other movies like "The Last Dragon, Big Trouble In Little China" are movies that would stylistically set the tone for games like "Pit Fighter and Mortal Kombat" thus it certainly hit a nerve with me concerning the idea of making a Street Fighter style game of some sort. "Konami's Yie Ar Kung Fu arcade game" was a favorite of mine long before the whole fighting game craze hit the scene in the 90s as well as a slew of other beat-em-up genera of games; It was out around the time Deadly Strike was playing on TV... it was only a matter of time before I tried my hand in coming up with some kind of fighting game concept... I also have some hand drawn art works I might post later, however I would often make music first before I got into designing something thus if I ever get this programming thing, I'll at least have something to work with... And I will get get it eventually. It's always fun to look back at what I did... i usually finish what I start when I do things like for legacy sake; live and learn right?
Before I make this post too long (I can go on and on), here's a song I made, among other songs I haven't made public, concerning a fighting game concept that's been sitting on the back burner; it's probably the one the best of them all... I made this probably about a year before I did some music for Starcats "Jagworm". The song is called "Face Off "Kung Fu Madness" and was inspired by the movie "Deadly Strike" and one of my favorite hip hop artist "Ice T's Tibetan Jam". I hope you all enjoy.
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To talk about "Jaytrax", for me, is to sort-of go back in time to give a bit of a back story, foundation to how I got started into using Jaytrax or at least give some idea as to the driving nature of using the sequencer/synth. Take it back to 95 around my high-school graduation year; one day I visit the old arcade at the mall and run into a slew of games that would really showed you what was to come with the PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and N64. There was this game called "Soul Blade" that we all know today as "Soul Caliber", but by the time they released for the PS1, they renamed it "Soul Edge"... The way I remember, it was Soul Blade on the arcade cabinet. Anyways without being too long-winded, it was very fun and different in game-play thus bought something new to the table, but what impressed me the most about the game was the music. Now the SNES music from various games back in the 90s really offered a very refreshing alternative for non PC owners that was used to hearing the bleeps of the NES and the 2600; the 16-bit era was a bit of fresh air musically... The fact it can play more than four channels was audibly obvious and appealing. I always dabbled with a music keyboard in those days, but the music content coming from the 16-bit games, I knew if I wanted to get into gaming at some point in time, I'll have to make music outside my musical box thus some of the music I was hearing from "Soul Edge" was highly thoughtful and certainly outside of my knowledge base. Fast forward to 98 when I got Jaytrax I decided to revisit the old arcade as a source of inspiration for trying my hand into making music that's appropriate for a game scene as an experiment to see if I can make music similar to what Namco did so I chose "Mina theme song" having worked with a TS-404 emulator thus I used a music loop I created with the program, saved as a wave file and imported it to Jaytrax and created my song called "KUNG FU STYLE" just to see if I could make that kind of stuff.
So without further or do here's "Kung Fu Style"... A song inspired by Mina theme on Soul Blade and for kicks, I'll post a YouTube of Mina's original theme song for a comparison to see if you hear the differences. A little later I'll post another song I made inspired by the martial arts and maybe I'll talk a little bit more about the "TS-404 emulator" I was using; I had a very good workflow and tool set I developed back in those days. Also I was very much inside my musical box, which I'll probably get into... Until then, I hope you enjoy.
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I'm just telling you that it would be wise to be a bit more modest about yourself, read: abilities/competence as a coder, IF you actually want to achieve anything.
I gotcha.
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One more thing... Can we please get this tread back on topic???
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You had better read what the "Dunning Kruger effect" is.
Dude what are you even talking about...??? You're trying to paint a picture of me that isn't true at all and you know nothing about... I don't know what kind of idea about me that you have, but I'm trying to make peace here, maybe the sarcasm goes straight over my head, a lot of that around. Making peace seems to go by the waist-side over here, but then again maybe there's still hope... Maybe.
I've read 2001, but I ain't going to Jupiter anytime soon.
Ha ha very funny... Well now that you bring it up... Actually I like 2001 the movie visuals. Syd Mead (Mr. TRON himself), the futurist did all of the visual art works for that movie. I consider his work very brilliant and hope to bring that level of artistry to the Jag one day.
BTW I'm still very interested in RAPTOR... I want to make a 68000 based 3D engine using RAPTOR to display it for experimental reasons. There's a few things I need to grasp before using it, but I been eyeballing Raptor for a minute believe or not since I got another Skunkboard about a year ago. No need in programming the GPU in Assembly when you have the API to do the graphic work.
As soon as you start programming, you will know if you know or don't know. And likely you will know by then that your knowledge isn't sufficient because of the unknown in the machine.
You know?
I here you... Thanks for the advise. That's probably one of the reason why I never dived in all of the way due to all of the horror stories from experienced programmers like yourself and others here. It's also one of the reason why I keep reading.
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You seem to have got the 'don't render' part down fully. I'll chime in and be the nth person here telling you to go and do something and stop pretending you already know how
Reading the tech manual and countless forum topics over a period of time, makes me feel like I know something.
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If those are from 1996 I wonder what you were doing the last 22 years? These artworks/meshes probably won't work for the Jaguar, you need to design some interesting low poly meshes, at least for a 3D game. Limitation sometimes pushes creativity. :-)
Well that goes without saying a high poly count mesh obviously won't work on the Jag... That's stating the obvious. Games and comics are one thing, real life is another, I've was busy either working, career chasing, and/or taking care of family... No time to make video games the way I wanted. I'm an artist, not a programmer; if you're not making a real living in the programming field or already educated or established in programming, there's not too much of a reason skew off into making games except as a side hobby, but it doesn't mean the desire to do those things wasn't there... Just didn't have the time, the patience, or both get into something I didn't fully understand that's all. There's no real living to be made making Jaguar games so other priorities came first, but I always maintained interest as much as possible over the years. That's all I have to say about that.
And here I was thinking you started by reverse engineering a BIOS, modifying a jaguar with said new BIOS, in the process adding a way to upload code via the joypad ports, created a protocol 'standard' that would be used for years to come and only THEN did you think about "Hello World"
/we're not worthy.
A broken Jag due to bad soldering never set well with me using BJL... Even I have a limit. A good copy of "Protector SE" is always good to have. I regret selling it; I'll probably get another copy at some point in time in the future just for keep sake. I use to have problems with BJL, never really got it to work correctly with the PC I had back in the day and didn't always have time to fool around with it. All I could do was to sit it on the back-burner and keep it moving, collect as much info as I could and figure it out later while I cook up ideas. If I had not done that, I probably would've left the scene a long time ago so I gave myself something to shoot for, stayed out of the flame/troll wars as much as I could and kept my ideas under lock and key so if it (my ideas) sounds crazy when I post, it probably is but what the heck. Maybe one day limitless polygon will be possible on the Jag (don't render harder, render smarter)... If a decent 3D engine can be made for the Sega 32X (Yeti 3D) why not the Jaguar.
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Now back to the original topic...
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I appreciate that you took the time to reply but I think you are missing my point so I try to pick up two points from your last reply:
1) More experienced people already told you to just try and start doing stuff on the Jag if that is the platform you want to do something for, yet now you are speaking about learning something else for "prototyping and concepts". This sounds like still evading the main thing and not moving towards your goal. ( I know that feeling. For years I have been reading literature about scriptwriting but never really sat down and wrote a script, guess what...no script emerged out of that. :-))
2) You speak about learning from past mistakes but actually you are still doing the same thing, you always did. Where is the learning?
Don`t get me wrong, you can do whatever you want to do and I do not want to antagonize you but I had the urge to comment out of my own experience. You are never going to do anything if you do not start doing it.
Well... I posted the pics to help inspire the project; I didn't mean for the topic to skew. I posted some pics on another and the topic got right back on course after a couple of post; I guess the pics were a bit too glaring, but I get the feeling if I was to start a topic just showing off my art works, I'd probably get the same kind of responses I'm getting here. Whatever impression I made, I humbly just putting ideas out there in hopes of getting feedback and info on the Jags inner workings and what have you, which is something I've been doing for a while now to test the validity of my theories; I'm just getting back into the Jag having bought a new Jag and a couple of Skunks plus getting it going in Windows 10 being an issue so I'm pushing pass the clutter I experienced in the past and actually get a concept off of the ground in prototype form before tackling the Jaguar; a proof of concept first. But I think anything I post will be met with some level of scrutiny, which is a good thing: I try and read everything and the good info I get, I archive it for future reference.
I realize we're deviating away from the core thread subject here but Peter brings up a great point. I finally decided to pull the trigger and jump into experimenting with this on the Jag some late evening almost 2 years ago now. It's kind of crazy to think it's been that long but as you point out: time, family, work, life in general, etc. tend to be priority over a hobby like this. Not to mention any other hobbies which are also time consuming.
To Peter's point, you just have to decide today is the day that I start learning and dive right in. While "Hello World" has been the starting point in learning how to program on just about every machine and as cliche as it may be, I found myself doing just that as well with the Jaguar. Printing text on the screen, swapping graphics out and breaking things. Changing audio out and breaking things. Then actually writing something from scratch no matter how big or small, just to know how you have to do it and why.
What I also found to aide in progression is having some sort of challenge, may it be against yourself or against someone else or both even. Get the Jag to display some pictures and play some sounds. Figure out the ordering of assets and manipulate them so you can change things around and understand what works or what doesn't. Watch some YouTube videos on programming logic (I've watched about 20+ hours or so now and a lot doesn't click until you actually start doing it or really need something) so to that point, if you're not learning while you're learning, you'll find yourself going back a 2nd or 3rd time trying to figure something out again, which is where I've found myself at some times.
So here I am almost 2 years later and only just now am I finishing up something that isn't just a screen saver of sorts or a MOD playing Jukebox but an actual game (a Simon clone) and despite how simple of a game it is, it has still proven to be an incredibly time consuming and challenging project when you're doing everything from scratch (graphics, audio, voice samples and program) for the first time around. I tried to jump ahead and create something more complex like the fish eating game I was working on but realized stepping stones are the best course here and starting out with much smaller or overall more simple games made more sense, which is why I chose Simon. I probably could have managed the fish game had I stuck with it but realized I needed to go back and work on something smaller so I understand more.
I guess it really depends on what you're hoping to achieve. I know VLAD has been working on various things for years... and I mean since like 2012 kind of years, so 6+ years? Time tends to escape us but it's not there forever. The longer you wait... well, you see where I'm going with this. So just set yourself a goal to set something up this weekend and start to tinker around until you do something, anything at all. It's not going to be especially exciting but it is kind of fun sometimes.
I challenge you...
Thanks Clint...! I'd really like to make something really special for the Jag like what VRVlad is doing with emphasis on "Next Level", but I'm sure I'm not the only one to wanting something really good for the Jaguar. I'd like to do something really grand, but I'll settle for decent considering the Jaguar limitations. It's only a matter of getting things in order for a smoother way of development; I'll get there as long as it takes to get there. I'll be keeping my Jag and Skunk permanently... Just a few real life issue to over come, but I'm here for the long haul. Always good to get your input.
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Look, I'm the last one who can give advice about coding since I do not know how to write a single line of code but I know you from the boards for years and it looks like in your mind you are building up to writing that game of yours which is never going to happen that way. It's like trying to push a mountain away. Why don't you try with lifting a small stone first and write something like a hello world program and then you take it from there.
You're talking about 'reasonably timley manner'yet for years you are talking about it and people comment on it, it is a bit painful to watch. Why don't you just start? It's the same with everything, for example you did not draw your best drawing from day one surely, it's also a matter of learning and exercising...
Well don't think of it as something painful... I don't really consider it to be a painful thing or looking for sympathy. The Jaguar really is after all a very sophisticated kids toy at the end of the day just like my comic book collection; something that has nostalgic value more than anything else and shouldn't be taken too serious.I'm really just getting back in the swing of things, I haven't flashed a "Skunkboard" in a couple of years now. Really I've done more reading then I've done programming just to gain more understanding on some things. I did do a little html so programming isn't too much of a foreign thing... I've been looking at "QB64" which seems very clean cut with direct and swift results without jumping through a whole bunch of hoops; would make for a great prototyping tool for game concepts. Not really Atari Jaguar related, but it's start... It supports all of the major sound and image formats and seems simple enough. I'm probably putting too much of my thoughts out there, but I think QB64 may be a good program to prototype before tackling the Jaguar straight off. I've been watching tutorials on YouTube and what-have-you; I mean QuickBASIC, it doesn't get any simpler or more BASIC than that.
You're talking about 'reasonably timley manner'yet for years you are talking about it and people comment on it, it is a bit painful to watch. Why don't you just start? It's the same with everything, for example you did not draw your best drawing from day one surely, it's also a matter of learning and exercising...It's called learning from past mistakes... And you're somewhat right I have been, not just giving advise to others, but getting my head into the game, but don't look at as painful, it's not by no means. I'm invigorated and optimistic the future so sympathy over here personally; not everything is as it might seem so I hope this brings some clearity... I'm also a good bit older than I was during my past post over the years, I'm not quite the same person I was in my youth or I am the same person just a bit more wiser now. But when I sold my Atari Jaguar collection I regretted it so I'm here for the long haul whatever the case may be.
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So...this will always be a solo project?.
If so (and i mean this in a constructive manner) that might be something of a shame.
I love the look of Philipj's motorcycle and when i look back at commercial Jaguar titles from likes of ATD,you can see how much better the likes of Cybermorph and even Battlemorph would of been if they'd enlisted a different art direction.
It's early doors as they say,but having seen Philipj's work, it seems ideally suited to the type of game ValdR is pitching.
And would it not lessen the workload to have others onboard?.
I'm purely causal observer status and maybe people simply prefer to work solo and at their own pace...
Still, if nothing else, it's nice to see the community coming forward and offering help.
What's the saying about leading a horse to water?.
Thanks a bunch man...! I've had those old drawings for years just experimenting with concept artworks. I think the biggest thing is finding a beginning, a middle, and an end to an indie game project especially when it comes to the buggy Jaguar and finishing the game in a reasonable timely manner. The good thing is that it's not like the early days where information was hard to get on programming the Jag. If you got a family and a job and other priorities, you got to do what you gotta do; the key would be to find a fair balance if you still want to make something for the Jag with a reasonable level of enthusiasm, I hope to make legacy pieces, but then again I'm an artist so that statement kind or reflects that... The thing some artist have to realize is there's a time factor that must be considered thus art must be a means to an end; a process among other processes that reaches an end point with every project making things easier the next go round. Well in theory it all sound good.
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I can certainly understand... I'd like to see new 3D content for the Jag. I've been wanting to do a good racing game for sometime now. Here's some more artworks I did in Windows 3.1 paint program using 16 colors; I did this around 96. Maybe I'll redesign all of my old car drawings one day for a Jaguar release; it's always been a dream of mine revisit that old project; it's still on the table. I hope the images inspires one to get past the concept phase for more Jag development. I was influenced by a lot of good games back then; Ridge Racer, Outrunner, NFS 2, a couple of SNES games... All of the nuances came from those games back then in my youthful and expressed in my artworks.
Note: These images are massive and will take up a lot of forum space... The last picture, Akira's motorcycle" I modeled in AutoCAD and ported over to Bryce 3D for rendering. Couldn't put any texture on it, the 3D object was one gigantic mesh thanks to AutoCAD 2000 crappy 3D interface; I modeled this before I learned 3D Studio Max. Although the motorcycle is one big mirror, the gloss gives enough visualization of what a shiny vehicle would look like.
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Same here guy... My condolences.
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I was casual artist drawing every so often... My epiphany about having some drawing skills was when my English teacher told me I had good penmanship when I first started writing in cursive before my teen years. I reason in my head if I can learn to write in cursive, I can learn to draw: I'm basically drawing lines and curves to make a fancy looking lettering thus I can apply the similar principles to drawing so I collected comics and started mimicking the art works just as I did with cursive letters. Latter on in life while taking an art class I learned that if you doodle everyday for three to five month, by the end of the year you will have basically come to a reasonable level of artistry especially if you start with a very good strong foundational knowledge. If you ever doodled in a note book on some level then the first step has already been taken, it's only a matter of consistent practice with a good knowledge base like "How To Draw the Marvel Way". The book is simple and was a great starting point for me back in the day; it's a bit dated today, but it gets the job done just fine.
I know things are going a little off topic, but I'll post one or two more image and end it there to get the topic back on track. The following image are the old art test from those commercials you see on TV; I call them the "Charlie Brown Test" because the guy who drew Charlie Brown comic strips took this test.
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I actually pencil drawn the hovercraft and used it as a base line... The others I did freehand with a mouse of course.
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Thanks...
Here's a book I use to read almost religiously back in the mid 90s... I originally wanted to do comic book art at first; this book called "How to Draw The Marvel Way" really is a great starting point. It gives you all of the bare essentials for drawing anything. They also made a VHS I use to rent from the local library a lot. I'll post them both for reference sake.
https://archive.org/details/howtodrawcomicsm00stan?q=the+marvel+way
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I use to tinker with and old "IBM 386" with Windows 3.1 around 95 or 96. Before than I use to do art work using Mario Paint and found that the Mario Paint tool-set was better than the Windows standard paint, but I learned a whole lot using both. Here's some work I did using Win3.1 paint using 16 colors and lots and lots of diskettes. I was dreaming up game designs even then, but never went all the way with it (too busy working); certainly won't let that happen again.
Enjoy.
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I've seen SSD kits on ebay for the Cojag arcade boards where you can load games on an SSD hard drive... I thought that was pretty interesting.
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Although I know the GPU is highly capable of doing 3D on it's own merit, I'm more of an "audio and visual" person starting off as comic book artist in my highschool year until I took up "Computer Aided Drafting" due to the lack of jobs for comic artist in my state... Even with computer animators and digital artist, the school I went to also had cgi and animation course and I hear about talanted artist who struggle to get real jobs in the art field; it seems that cgi artist are becoming a dime a dozen these days with everyone wanting in on the cgi and gaming bandwagon... It just isn't a sustainable field in some areas.
Getting back on topic, learning to program in Assembler has always been something I've taken interest in more than any other language thus the 68000 seems to be the most stable CPU to learn before drifting off into the other JagRISC... Learning BASIC is on my to-do-list, but it's Assembler that I really want to master to take advantage of the speeds.
The API does not render polygons. If you want to do 3D you could use the API to manage the framebuffers and draw the polygons into that. The blitter is available via the API.
I've been making plans to make an experimental 3D engine for Raptor using the 68000 as the main processor and as a learning tool for myself personally... But that's a long ways down the road; I have to get to know the API first so a couple or a few classic sprite games are perhaps in order. Is Raptor programming language exclusive to just BASIC or can Assembler be used to control the API in some way?
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Hmmm, To double down the thread flipping...
I wonder just how much of a headache porting T2K to a Co-Jag would be. Obviously choose a 68020 based version. Might be a fun oddity to create, especially if you could get the cabinet artwork looking the part and wheel it in-front of Jeff at a show
That probably would give him a giggle I'll add it to my ever growing list of bizarre ideas that I'll probably get around to completing sometime after I am dead
I've often wish the Co-Jag could be consolized like the Neo Geo just to take advantage of the enhanced hardware and extra ram it has... Not enough retro activity going on concerning the cojag with exception of the "Primal Rage 2" and even with that, they used the R3000 cpu to get the game working right instead of the 68020 version. It would be a dream project for me to make something really good the home console and then ported to the Co-Jag.
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Here's a game that's super rare made by "Capcom" called "Slip Stream" released in 95, which is a pretty late start for such a game during all of the 3D craze that was going on in the arcades at that time, but I guess people were still hitting those soon to be dated games. This game was made using the "Sega System 32 Hardware"; a NEC-60 RISC based system, but the graphic style is very much like "Super Burnout" for the Atari Jaguar without all of the elaborate sprites to simulate bridges and what-have-you like in the game "Power Drift". I think the pseudo 3D effects are considerably done pretty good; it almost has a decent 3D thing going on the way the road and the cars are presented.
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It's not coin op related and i can only assume the original didn't sell in sufficiently well enough to justify a sequel. ...
But i so wish Core had done more with this:
Instead we got Herdy Gerdy, Shellshock, Swagman etc..
Shame....
That brings good memories... I rented that game and the Sega CD system when it first came out. That's more like mode 7 style graphic affects using the CD unit hardware that supported scaling and rotating. What that game company did with "Soulstar' was incredible; Galaxy Force 2 was absolutely possible it's too bad Sega never released their legacy super-scale based games for the CD unit. It would be great for more of the Sega Arcade games were ported to the Jaguar, it might attract more gamers to the system. All of the superscaler arcade stuff is totally possible even if the screen resolution was a little lower to make room for graphics just like it is with this game.
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For 1988, that's crazy impressive!
Not even the Sega Saturn could handle an arcade perfect Galaxy Force 2 port. I think it runs at 30 FPS to the arcades 60 FPS. Same thing for Power Drift, runs at half the arcades FPS on Saturn. Those Sega scaler arcade boards were pretty awesome!
Both "Galaxy Force 2 and Power Drift" uses the same hardware the "Sega Y Board"... It has three 68000 cpu's; they probably have two of them being used for graphics why one handles the game logic Galaxy Force 1 & 2 are one and the same game like "Afterburner 1 & 2" just slightly different. I think Sega really had a really good grasp on superscalers that seem to be trending around the mid to late 80s. Jeleco's "Cisco Heat" also featured three Motorola 68K chips in them. Was just looking at the Atari ST port it on YouTube which I'll post below. Wikipedia claims that a version for the Jaguar was in the works, but never made the cut; I wonder how that game would've looked?
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I never said the DSP was the only processor to have "specific characteristics" as you put it, I pointed out that it's the best processor to work with on the Jaguar because of those characteristics and even pointed the fact that Atari themselves makes that a highlight of the system. CJ didn't say anything that I didn't already know about; I've talked about in past discussion the issues I had with the 68K being the slowest cpu of them all and not really wanting to use it so naturally the DSP is the best processor, but not the only processor. Dude I'm sorry I make you feel some kind of way due to misconception you have about me; I left the Jag scene at a time when I was getting a better understanding of the system. I admit that back in the day my understanding was lax to say the least, but that's not quite the case today, at least not in the way it was back then... But you're right, I need a proof of concept in code on the stuff I post, but that doesn't mean that my ideas aren't solid... If you got the experience, well then good for you, but don't try and throw my stuff under the bus just because you disagree with me or whatever my concepts represent; One can't fly a plane without reading the manual first.
???
There are moments I do wonder about the Jag forum here at AA... Sometimes it's a great place to be and other times it turns into a rabbit hole. SMH
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"Jaytrax"Great Synthesizer & Mod Tracker / Sort-of Jaguar Related (Sort-of)
in Atari Jaguar
Posted · Edited by philipj
Just to follow up on my last post... I know it isn't Jaytrax related, but for a proof of concept, below are some pencil art works of me dabbling around with a fighting game concept. I could give a back story on the drawings, but to keep it short and to the point, the following is a ninja, a shaolin monk, a couple of street brawlers and a cyborg gorilla. All of these drawings I did in various points in time to kind of keep the idea around, the gorilla I did in high-school as a comic book art, but later decided to include him in a final concept. All of them I'll probably redesign or just scrap and start a new. These were all rough sketches.
With all sincerity, I hope these old drawings inspire others to keep working on your game projects and don't let anything discourage you... A delay isn't always a denial, just keep working on your stuff... Learn from mistakes, get smarter and keep moving.