Jump to content
IGNORED

Road Rash pre-alpha on Jaguar at 30 fps


VladR

Recommended Posts

For the record, I've enjoyed this thread immensely. Watching VladR's experiments and the talk about things that have been done in other games has been quite interesting. VladR, keep doing what you're doing. Everyone else, stop complaining about what he's doing.

  • Like 11
Link to comment
Share on other sites

For the record, I've enjoyed this thread immensely. Watching VladR's experiments and the talk about things that have been done in other games has been quite interesting. VladR, keep doing what you're doing. Everyone else, stop complaining about what he's doing.

 

Yes, as I said above, now he's moved to GPU, the things he suggested were possible now are. Bus contention will be the biggest hurdle - if that can be mitigated (and I'd be happy to help here if he requested it) this could be a neat 3D engine for some games.

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah I like watching the demos too, and seeing ideas implemented about how to effectively utilize the hardware. It would be nice to have a deluxe 3D professional game, but that takes lots and lots of work (to say nothing of programming, creating tons and tons of artwork takes forever), especially if only one person is working on it in their limited freetime as a hobby. All we should expect of anyone is that they pursue what they are passionate about and interested in, and its fine by me if Vlad is primarily interested in testing the hardware capabilities via short demos and sharing the results as videos, I don't regard that as a tease since taking the demos to full game status would take years and hundreds of hours of work - quite a much bigger step and investment of time and energy.

Edited by sirlynxalot
  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Sure, right now, it's not very impressive - driving in a straight line in constant speed with 2 different textures on front-facade of buildings.

 

I will gradually keep on adding more features and more art assets.

 

It can only get better from here, though.

 

as someone who can't program, but has used multi media fusion 2, it took me hours to make a one level game, so I can understand what you've done so far is amazing, you've build the foundation, now its just a patient case of adding, however it will be interesting to see how far you can push the Jag :)

one question I did have, is programming the Jag or using the hardware as difficult as it was made out to be?

Edited by D.Daniels
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've partially implemented the idea behind the WipeOut cheat and here's the result:

 

- I've experimented a bit with the polygon distribution and spaced it more evenly (compared to the terrain)

- The result is a WipeOut - resembling small track segment (repeated endlessly). Only one, as I couldn't be bothered to "design" more complex track in a notepad (but it could be relatively easily done), as the engine is reading segment data from an array

- there's always between 2,048-2,304 triangles in the view (8-9 segments)

- the framerate is locked to stable 60 fps

- there's a very simple color rotation effect (not the palette, the actual rendered colors get rotated)

- video is obviously shot only at 30 fps, as that's what the capturing device handles

- this is a separate codepath, so it doesn't break into the RR stuff

 

 

Turns out, the jag can process quite astonishing number of triangles. If we locked it to 30 fps, the polycount could be more than doubled to 4,096-5,120 per frame. That's quite a crazy amount for such an old machine.

And if I could be bothered to at least slightly optimize the current engine, that number could go way higher, but the wireframe is even now almost resembling the flatshading on good portion of screen : ))))

 

I'm going to have to ask you to gouraud shade in those with random colors and shit... ;-)

 

But no, seriously.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

But I don't want to start a flamewar 'jag vs saturn vs PS1'. I've seen couple of those - I merely want to get inspired by the games on similar machines of the era.

Speaking of interesting racing game engines, there is System Rush, one of my favorite games for the NGage.

 

The NGage seemed to have comparable performance to the PS1. This System Rush is similar to WipeOut, but uses a combination of flat shaded polygons with a bit of texture mapping and lightning effects for the tracks. Pretty cool looking. Not to be confused with System Rush Evolution, released on the next gen NGage hardware.

 

Game starts at the 0:50

 

Edited by sd32
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

System Rush looks great. I'm a sucker for STUN Runner / Wipeout style games. From the look of it, there's no doubt in my mind that the Jag could do a game like that. It's a shame the IS / IS 2 or Battlemorph or IWar or even HS:UL engines weren't ever repurposed for a futuristic racer.

 

FWIW, many years ago Scott LeGrand said (on usenet or Jaguar Interactive) that he believed a slightly cut down Wipeout would technically be doable on the Jag...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

as someone who can't program, but has used multi media fusion 2, it took me hours to make a one level game, so I can understand what you've done so far is amazing, you've build the foundation, now its just a patient case of adding, however it will be interesting to see how far you can push the Jag :)

one question I did have, is programming the Jag or using the hardware as difficult as it was made out to be?

Let me give you some clarity on this question. I used Multimedia Fusion 1.5 and 2 waaaaaaaay back in the day. They were pretty simple and easy to pick up. Then I moved on over to Dark Basic and learned a little bit of code which was kind of hard. Then I took up Game Maker and learned how to do scripting in GML. This is what I have done the past 7 years. This year I took up making games for Jaguar using RB+ provided by Reboot. What I have learned the past week is that making games for the Jaguar is like NOTHING I have ever done before. It is very LIMITED in terms of graphics resources. (I already knew this before but DAMN reality check happened after RB+) I will say that the set up of RB+ seems to be targeted at making the whole process as easy as possible and it is fun getting your game going but it's pretty hard man. It's definitely not for the inexperienced I'll say that.

  • Like 4
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Quick update:

 

Good news: I deprived myself of 3 hrs of sleep today, got up superearly and finished the point-sorting and edge-sorting stage of flatshading (that's what was left after last weekend, when I had the triangle rasterizing stage finished). I tested it manually on all 6 combinations and it was working just fine. So, I'm one week ahead of schedule (my estimate was 2 weekends) :)

 

Bad news: As expected, when I uncommented the wipeout fly-through, I ran out of 4 KB of cache :)

 

So, I'm going to have to write a GPU-based code swapper that will swap in&out the functionality that is needed at given moment.

 

 

Apologies for not taking part in the discussion recently, I was just busy coding :)

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Let me give you some clarity on this question. I used Multimedia Fusion 1.5 and 2 waaaaaaaay back in the day. They were pretty simple and easy to pick up. Then I moved on over to Dark Basic and learned a little bit of code which was kind of hard. Then I took up Game Maker and learned how to do scripting in GML. This is what I have done the past 7 years. This year I took up making games for Jaguar using RB+ provided by Reboot. What I have learned the past week is that making games for the Jaguar is like NOTHING I have ever done before. It is very LIMITED in terms of graphics resources. (I already knew this before but DAMN reality check happened after RB+) I will say that the set up of RB+ seems to be targeted at making the whole process as easy as possible and it is fun getting your game going but it's pretty hard man. It's definitely not for the inexperienced I'll say that.

 

thanks for reply :)

that's pretty cool to learn all that stuff, I suppose it also gives us an insight to maybe why developers struggled with the Jag at time.

Edited by D.Daniels
Link to comment
Share on other sites

one question I did have, is programming the Jag or using the hardware as difficult as it was made out to be?

I can now honestly say that it's a complete and total bullshit. Also, don't forget that the differences between the productivity between coders are up to 100:1, so what one coder, on one extreme, codes in 2 days, some other needs few months to accomplish the same output.

 

 

I'm going to have to ask you to gouraud shade in those with random colors and shit... ;-)

 

But no, seriously.

Oh, I have just the right inspiration for you then, I guess ;)

https://youtu.be/YBpo5GHcmsE?t=168

Farbrausch - the.popular, watch at 2:48

Not sure, how close we can come to that with only 256 colors, but hell - it's worth a shot, eh ?

 

Speaking of interesting racing game engines, there is System Rush, one of my favorite games for the NGage.

 

The NGage seemed to have comparable performance to the PS1. This System Rush is similar to WipeOut, but uses a combination of flat shaded polygons with a bit of texture mapping and lightning effects for the tracks. Pretty cool looking. Not to be confused with System Rush Evolution, released on the next gen NGage hardware.

 

Game starts at the 0:50

 

I had NGage for quite some time, but missed this game. Great find !!!

It's almost like an FPS game, with tall rooms and corridors. Sort-of like getting close to Forsaken game on PC. Have you played that ? It was like Disneyland Descent.

 

Speaking of enhancing flatshading, few weeks ago I came up with a design of a crossover between texturing and flatshading - it will provide additional details for much lesser computational and especially bandwidth cost compared to texturing. It would be especially useful for fast racing games. It's scalable from single pixels to texture-wide enhancements.

 

I haven't seen it ever, so it's entirely new, but my excel sheet says it should be 65% faster than texturing (at certain % coverage) - in terms of bandwidth costs.

I gave it a temporary working title of 'VectorShading'. Stay tuned, it's on my to-do list, for the wipeout rasterizer. I guess the best example would be Tron-like environment.

 

Oh, and it's something I could let Blitter do in the parallel, while I'm rasterizing polygons, so synchronization will take some effort (Blitter has to do at the exact right time - e.g. not too soon and not too late during frame time) - but I have a lot of experience with timing of the Blitter through 68k, so I'm confident here.

 

System Rush looks great. I'm a sucker for STUN Runner / Wipeout style games. From the look of it, there's no doubt in my mind that the Jag could do a game like that. It's a shame the IS / IS 2 or Battlemorph or IWar or even HS:UL engines weren't ever repurposed for a futuristic racer.

 

FWIW, many years ago Scott LeGrand said (on usenet or Jaguar Interactive) that he believed a slightly cut down Wipeout would technically be doable on the Jag...

Of course it is possible. Polygon count is not the problem, we know that already. Bandwidth of texturing shouldn't eat more than 2-3 frames, so even if we reserve 1 more frame for incidentals, we're at 4, e.g. 60/4 = 15 fps. Less detailed parts of the track could be done within 3 blanks - e.g. 60/3 = 20 fps.

 

The only problem with WipeOut is that music is kinda an integral part of experience. Unlike , say, NFS, that I played without any music whatsoever, Wipeout experience actually needs great music (which in turn requires a lot of bandwidth). So, for Wipeout, we'd be overloading bus from GPU, DSP, Blitter and 68k. I can't, yet, predict the exact performance impact of that.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Oh, I have just the right inspiration for you then, I guess ;)

https://youtu.be/YBpo5GHcmsE?t=168

Farbrausch - the.popular, watch at 2:48

Not sure, how close we can come to that with only 256 colors, but hell - it's worth a shot, eh ?

 

I've loved that demo for a very long time now and enjoy running it occasionally! =D

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

thanks for reply :)

that's pretty cool to learn all that stuff, I suppose it also gives us an insight to maybe why developers struggled with the Jag at time.

You got remember hes not working at Atari they had a bad tendencies to mistreat their game developers which doesn't make any sense :ponder: all you end up with are buggy games or just bad games. This is why I think "developers struggled with the Jag at time" and lack of help form Atari with the Jaguar Developers Documentation. :-o

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You got remember hes not working at Atari they had a bad tendencies to mistreat their game developers which doesn't make any sense :ponder: all you end up with are buggy games or just bad games. This is why I think "developers struggled with the Jag at time" and lack of help form Atari with the Jaguar Developers Documentation. :-o

Also, anyone developing now can take as long as they like. I'm sure anyone programming for the Jaguar back in the day had very tight deadlines in comparison.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Also, anyone developing now can take as long as they like.

Untrue. Big team crunches, 16 hour days, sleeping under the desk etc are probably more common in the games industry now than back then (or at least it's openly discussed more). Especially with the bigger companies promising unattainable launch dates (hence day one patches).

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Untrue. Big team crunches, 16 hour days, sleeping under the desk etc are probably more common in the games industry now than back then (or at least it's openly discussed more). Especially with the bigger companies promising unattainable launch dates (hence day one patches).

I'm talking about anyone developing for the Jaguar now, not modern commercial game developers.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Untrue. Big team crunches, 16 hour days, sleeping under the desk etc are probably more common in the games industry now than back then (or at least it's openly discussed more). Especially with the bigger companies promising unattainable launch dates (hence day one patches).

I think he meant people like sporadic himself and VladR on their free time projects.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If we're talking about 100-hour weeks, then I haven't spent nowhere near 2 weeks of work on the GPU rasterizer so far.

 

A bit over 1 week at this point, realistically (spread over multiple calendar weeks, of course).

 

20 yrs ago I would have been easily way more productive than now. Plus, the corporate whip makes one work even faster, as it's survival (hence I would not do side distractions)...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...