Fred Gill (ATD) Interview.

[Lost Dragon]

http://www.google.co.uk/url?q=http://www.ataritimes.com/index.php%3FArticleIDX%3D282&sa=U&ei=tCyTVf-tBcLqUs-whagF&ved=0CDoQFjAG&sig2=GYM-XIYXTvtoLq3AikESVg&usg=AFQjCNHp2uWbA1xsatzaApExycX5Mcpoig

From the above, another piece of the Crescent Galaxy design jigsaw:

What was the Tramiel philosophy of coding games?:

I can't speak for everyone, but Leonard was pretty old-skool regarding Crescent Galaxy. At one point I remember complaining to him that we needed more game design for the levels. His reply was that side scrollers were too dynamic to justify lengthy design, that the best way to do it was to toss a bunch of NPC scripts at the game engine, then test hell out of the results until the team and testers deemed the result 'fun'.

There's old school and there's Leonard's approach.... :-)

[Zerosquare]

What was the Tramiel philosophy of coding games?

"It sucks? Doesn't matter, ship it!"

[+CyranoJ]

What was the Tramiel philosophy of coding games?:

 

"If you don't pay them, they will leave."

[Willard]

All cool. I would love to see the Panther version of Cybermorph someday to see what the differences were.

 

There is an early version of Cybermorph, club drive, raiden, kasumi ninja, Trevor McFur being shown off in this video, I imagine that looks like a panther game, whose assets were moved over to the Jaguar (not knowing much of the panther, of course). I haven't really seen seen a lot of substantial proof backing the claims that games like Cybermorph actually began development on the panther though, but I haven't looked that hard either.

 

 

Since you asked nicely Willard, bit more from said interview i did with B.J West concerning Crescent Galaxy:

 

B.J :'I was given a design document for a character (or ship or weapon, whatever), and I built and animated it exactly to those specs. Everything you see on screen is exactly as it was intended to be by the designer. There was a deliberate emphasis on color, as they wanted to show off the larger color space the Jag was capable of, including fully aliased edges on sprites, which was new.

 

I asked him a few questions about the game awhile back too and he told me that they actually cut a bunch of frames he made for it. I went through our Trevor McFur beta and looked pretty closely (cycled through the frames of a video I captured) and unfortunately didn't see any differences. He never noted whether they were incorporated and removed or just never incorporated.

 

As for his characters being to spec, I can see that.The weird perspective made it seem like none of the ground enemies were really on the ground (or in the cave level, the same depth as you), which seemed really off. Especially when things like scorpions just start walking all over the entire screen. I guess having a bad designer can really throw the project off balance.

 

I wonder if Bj got to see the backgrounds when he made the objects, or if the background designer got to see his models. I still think the artists probably should've been able to produce more cohesive results, unless the designer was pretty specific.

Edited July 1, 2015 by Willard

[JagChris]

Yeah I wondered about that when I read the I guess latest statement that LD got. I remember him saying that he had the animations at 24 individual frames or something and describes it as beautiful and then lamented that it was butchered down to 2 or 3.

 

Now he seems to be saying something else.

[Lost Dragon]

@Willard:The people i've spoken to/had questions put to on my behalf either arrived on projects like Crescent Galaxy when they were strictly Jaguar titles, might have been a mention of previousily planned on Panther, in the office as it were, but Panther long since dead and buried...

Or it's simply been so many years since, they honestly cannot recal anything on any early Panther work that might have been started (ie coding).

The years passed since is always a factor when you do follow-up interviews as people tend to forget more and more as time goes on, opinions often change/mellow with time (i thought this decision sucked back in .....but now i can see why they did it/it does'nt seem so bad etc).

It's getting harder and harder to get info regarding Jaguar canned projects, let alone what was actually done on Panther as people involved now spread far and wide, often don't want to talk or unobtainable in 1st place.

[108 Stars]

 

What??? Trevur McFur was no fun, but that was the one that looked amazing at the time to me. 16.7 million colors in 1993 was a lot ... especially on screen at once. On the Genesis you had 64 on screen colors, the SNES, you had 256. Trust me, 16.7 million was a big step ahead in 1993.

I always found Trevor to look lackluster from what I saw. Sure, it was colorful, but for example I don't recall parallax Scrolling. Not that I ever played it much, but what I saw remember was a ship flying in front of a static Background. Kind of disappointing to have the improvement in Colors, but at the cost of a graphic Feature that had been an absolute Standard eversince the 16-bit Systems had launched.

[DracIsBack]

I always found Trevor to look lackluster from what I saw. Sure, it was colorful, but for example I don't recall parallax Scrolling. Not that I ever played it much, but what I saw remember was a ship flying in front of a static Background. Kind of disappointing to have the improvement in Colors, but at the cost of a graphic Feature that had been an absolute Standard eversince the 16-bit Systems had launched.

Oh - agree. The game was terrible, IMO. It looked like a color demo. But again, as someone who had a Jaguar back in the day, it absolutely showed the Jaguar could do something 16-bitters could not do, without question. It showed how many more colors it could display than either the Genesis or SNES. *ABSOLUTLEY NO 16-bit games* had 16.7 million colors on the screen at the same time. This was an era when people were excited about display tricks that made the Genesis put 128 colors on the screen.

 

I'll never defend it as a good game or effort ... but I'll never, ever, ever, ever, ever buy that it "looked 16-bit". Just the sheer color depth on it had never been seen before on a console. I can see why people would see that in hindsight now, but wouldn't buy it in 1993.

Edited July 1, 2015 by DracIsBack

[Bill Loguidice]

Oh - agree. The game was terrible, IMO. It looked like a color demo. But again, as someone who had a Jaguar back in the day, it absolutely showed the Jaguar could do something 16-bitters could not do, without question. It showed how many more colors it could display than either the Genesis or SNES. *ABSOLUTLEY NO 16-bit games* had 16.7 million colors on the screen at the same time. This was an era when people were excited about display tricks that made the Genesis put 128 colors on the screen.

 

I'll never defend it as a good game or effort ... but I'll never, ever, ever, ever, ever buy that it "looked 16-bit". Just the sheer color depth on it had never been seen before on a console. I can see why people would see that in hindsight now, but wouldn't buy it in 1993.

 

I think the big problem with the game and the reason why it puts some people off (even the visuals) is that the whole thing lacks polish. It's more like a tech demo than a game in many ways. With extra frames of animation, more thoughtful level design, better gameplay cohesion, better sound, etc., I think the visuals would have more impact. When you look at it something just seems a bit off, kind of like an uncanny valley thing. It's such a shame that the Jaguar never saw a full release of a game like this done right, a la what was hinted at by the Native demo. Now THAT'S what we should have been seeing from day one, and THAT'S what would have truly blown people away and sold systems. Again, though, it goes back to Atari simply not having either the resources or foresight (or both) to see that through.

[Lost Dragon]

@108 Stars:It was indeed the lack of Parallax Scrolling that seemed to be Atari basically handing UK Press like EDGe a massive great stick to beat them around the proverbial chops with at review and in letters pages.

For a 64 Bit game not to feature something that was by now pretty standard in a 16 Bit console game was really just handing them a loaded gun.Sure they went on to complain about level design, weak sound FX etc etc, but this aspect often seemed to be the trigger point.

As i've said before, had it appeared on Panther (and indeed Panther itself) i expect Press would have commented, but not in manner they did, perhaps saying something like..whilst it's dissapointing the game does'nt appear to feature any parallax scrolling...the amount of colours used is simply staggering...and then gone onto slag off sound FX, level design etc :-)

Something like the Native demo were far more what Press etc seemed to expect from the Jaguar, but by the time that arrived, Press had long since moved on from Jaguar.

[Schmudde]

It's such a shame that the Jaguar never saw a full release of a game like this done right, a la what was hinted at by the Native demo. Now THAT'S what we should have been seeing from day one, and THAT'S what would have truly blown people away and sold systems. Again, though, it goes back to Atari simply not having either the resources or foresight (or both) to see that through.

 

Agreed but I think it's best to remember that Atari Corp. was trying to make the 'least bad' decision by 1993. Sam's Atari had shrunk from his father's profitable multi-division, multi-platform business to an endeavor with no living product on the shelves (both the Lynx and the Falcon were essentially dead).

 

In the spring of 1993, the two options were to miss Christmas entirely and launch with better software or to move forward 100% committed to Christmas and figure out the rest later. Considering how important Christmas is to the consumer electronics industry, I don't see how you could ever go with the first choice. If Atari Corp made a mistake, it was over-estimating their ability to deliver enough units for the 1993 holiday launch, but I think that's a risk they simply had to take.

 

This whole decision is exasperated by the fact that Corp's ATC stock was riding a wave of positive speculation based on the Jaguar news. If they would have missed Christmas, there is no doubt that Wall St. would have lost their minds and made everything in 1994 that much worse.

 

Finally, it's good to remember that both the Commodore 64 and the Atari ST had successful launches with limited software support.

 

I'm, of course, being pedantic with the idea of good software from 'day one' for the sake of discussion.

 

/ü

Edited July 1, 2015 by Schmudde

[NeoGeoNinja]

What??? Trevur McFur was no fun, but that was the one that looked amazing at the time to me. 16.7 million colors in 1993 was a lot ... especially on screen at once. On the Genesis you had 64 on screen colors, the SNES, you had 256. Trust me, 16.7 million was a big step ahead in 1993.

 

Oh - agree. The game was terrible, IMO. It looked like a color demo. But again, as someone who had a Jaguar back in the day, it absolutely showed the Jaguar could do something 16-bitters could not do, without question. It showed how many more colors it could display than either the Genesis or SNES. *ABSOLUTLEY NO 16-bit games* had 16.7 million colors on the screen at the same time. This was an era when people were excited about display tricks that made the Genesis put 128 colors on the screen.

 

I'll never defend it as a good game or effort ... but I'll never, ever, ever, ever, ever buy that it "looked 16-bit". Just the sheer color depth on it had never been seen before on a console. I can see why people would see that in hindsight now, but wouldn't buy it in 1993.

 

 

I can see EXACTLY what you're getting at:

 

-

 

 

-

 

Immense.

Edited July 1, 2015 by NeoGeoNinja

[+CyranoJ]

*ABSOLUTLEY NO 16-bit games* had 16.7 million colors on the screen at the same time.

 

And neither did the Jaguar.

 

350x240 = 84000 pixels.

 

There aren't 16.7 million pixels in a screen. FROM A PALETTE OF 16.7m, not ON SCREEN AT ONCE.

 

You'd need a screen 4096x4096 to just display that many colours, and then what are you going to do? Show a bloody rainbow?

Edited July 1, 2015 by CyranoJ

[KappaGuy99]

Surely, Atari wouldn't have deceived anyone?! </sarcasm>

[PeterG]

 

YAY! Then it'd be a shitty game with a low frame rate, instead of a shitty game with a fast frame rate.

Seems like the guys at Eclipse had a similar idea, the even talk about Blue Lightning in one of their mails to Sean Patten. I found these on one of the Atari HQ CD... i thought it was interesting also considering the other Eclipse thread going on...

Haven't fired the demos up in a long time, so don't know about the framerate but sure as hell would have liked to see them do a shooter like Blue Lightning.

Peter

To: Sean Patten / Atari Corp.

From: Marc Rosocha

Eclipse Software

Subj: Fractal Landscape Demo

Date: December 22, 1994

These are 2 small demos showing a full texture mapped

3D fractal landscape. Each demo is only using a single

32*32 texture. The routine is not really optimized so

far and there are still several bugs. The used technique

is similar to the Falcon 030 gouraud shaded demo, we

showed you during our visit.

The finished routine combined with a nice background bitmap,

cockpit graphics and lots of zoomed enemy shapes would deliver

a very nice engine for a linear 3D shooter with gameplay

comparable or superior to Blue Lightning. We can of course

create all kinds of landscapes (flat areas, small hills,

high mountains, canyons, etc.) with it.

To run the demo:

read FRACTALx.BIN 802000

g 802000

Controls:

Use joypad for movement

Use 1/2 to move camera up/down

Regards,

Marc

FRACTAL1.BIN

FRACTAL2.BIN

[sd32]

PeterG, is there a video available of this demo?

[PeterG]

I don't have one sorry but you could try it with a skunkboard or an Emulator. There is not much to do but I thought it is interesting still to try out.

[+CyranoJ]

JCP -F FRACTAL1.BIN worked...

 

Wasn't worth the use of a flash cycle though.

[Otto1980]

seeing this demo (i think i saw a vid of it on youtube.. not sure), i think eclipse software could easily do a BlueLightning on rails compared to totaleclipse 3do (in terms of 3d)

 

lol-> eclipse could do totaleclipse

 

using prerendered or scanned objects instead of mix of drawn and pixelclouds it could look very good

 

for sure.. they had the siutable 3d programmer skills

 

18,63 Kb for a basic texture 3d engine plus 32x32 image plus controls plus fractal initialisation of 3dData is not bad

Edited July 2, 2015 by Otto1980

[KappaGuy99]

I found a small bit of rolling footage on YouTube of what I am guessing is a very early version of Cybermorph. The video claims it is a Jaguar version:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1HwGUD9PtU&feature=youtu.be&t=4m7s

 

(Based on how it looks, I had to wonder if it might not be a Panther version)

[Lost Dragon]

@Willard:From the video clip you linked to, i actually much prefer the very early version of Kasumi Ninja with it's cartoony visuals, short as the clip was.Ditto the cartoony approach taken with Crescent Galaxy.

 

Would have been great to of had early versions of both unlocked as easter eggs...might of made up somewhat for games shortcomings in other areas...