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Road Rash pre-alpha on Jaguar at 30 fps


VladR

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Looks like I'm soon going to have another Atari to try my RISC Assembler 3D engine on :)

 

I was very lucky and eBayed a dirt-cheap Falcon 030 (14 MB RAM, 4 GB CF) with broken case that does not close, but it's booting up (supposedly, as per the seller's video). It was only $1,200, so -duh- it's along the lines of "if it's too good to be true, it probably is", but hell, I couldn't pass such an opportunity to get this rare beast!

 

From an [admittedly very brief] look on Falcon's DSP instruction set, it looks like porting from jag's GPU should not be a big deal. And while there's a very strong demoscene presence (+dml) on Falcon, over the next few years, I -eventually- should be able to make a dent there, too. Assuming, of course, I advance steadily on jag, as that's always going to be the baseline for my Falcon coding.

 

Wish me luck that it arrives in bootable condition this weekend :)

 

$1200 for that? Wow, guess I need to put my loaded Falcon03 with Cubase, etc., on eBay ASAP!

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$1200 for that? Wow, guess I need to put my loaded Falcon03 with Cubase, etc., on eBay ASAP!

There's been quite a few Falcons I missed on in past. And yes, in much more pristine condition and much better equipped. And for much less. But I'm going to die of old age before I get one for reasonable price. So, Fuck It. I've waited years enough.

 

Inflation, exchange rate and fact that people generally earn more when they're older means these things just go up in price each year without any limit. Just take jag for example.

 

I'm not willing to wait another 3-6 months for another Falcon auction to pop up, so I could perhaps buy it for $700-$900. Besides, who's to say that another guy isn't in same boat and is willing to go way higher anyway? These things don't pop up every week. If jag can command prices it does right now, then Falcon (given how few were manufactured) is completely justifiable at range $1,000-$1,500

 

 

Technically, I lost the auction, as I fell asleep (yeah, I know). My personal limit was actually $1,750. But, the guy who won, wanted that special keyboard, which I don't care for, and the original owner managed to find another one, so we made exchange and everybody's happy.

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Don't let that distract you from the Jaguar stuff Vlad ;)

Don't worry. It's gonna take years till I catch up with Falcon demoscene (engine-wise). If, ever.

 

But the 14 MBs of RAM make me want to try the large-scale terrains (4 km2 - 32 km2) I used to create with WorldMachine and I think it would be pretty awesome to have that on Atari.

 

Since textures were generated procedurally at run-time, you only need to store the heightmap (and even that could be generated using fractals).

 

I could literally, just take my current terrain code, port it to Falcon's specifics and have something up&running quick.

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I spent 2 hrs this morning at 5am and generalized the LOD scheme probably as much as reasonably possible and necessary:
- each terrain LOD chunk can now have arbitrary dimensions (not just 2,4,8,16,32,64,... as was the case till now)
- LOD pop distances have been parametrized from compiletime to runtime, so now it's possible (and tested), at run-time, to adjust those values (e.g. every other frame)
- this allows to swap between multiple different sets (currently 3) of, say, 'LOD quality' setting that the player can choose for himself (just need to link it to UI element, really)
- example: if you are playing on smaller monitor, you could choose more aggressive LOD and get more performance, as popping would not be very noticeable and vice versa
- the number of terrain chunks is finally unlimited - previously it had to be 4 (as the dataset I have is 64 rows long, which implied 4 chunks (and @16 rows each, 64/16=4))
- this is probably the most important feature for the C&B long-distance test - we need a lot of those chunks (I'm guessing 16-32 or even more)

Now I just need to create a proper, long, Crash&Burn-style terrain dataset (most probably paint it in paint shop pro), as I finally have a code that can actually reasonably process it.


I'm thinking that this kind of renderer could be best reused not just for racing game, but also:
- endless runners
- arcade plane afterburner/RiverRaid-style shooters
- probably other genres, that I'm not recalling at this moment

If we slow down the speed of going through the world to a human walking pace (kinda like in an RPG game), then we can increase the terrain detail quite drastically (like, 4x - 16x, probably up to 4,096 on-screen triangles)

There was one popular 3D top-down strategy series, on a PC, about a decade ago, that was very distinctively stylized , without textures, like that (towards brownish hues), with just white bitmaps of "characters", but I cannot for the love of god, recall its name now...

Does anybody have any examples of stylized, non-textured, flat-shaded/gourard-shaded games, with 3D terrain, for any platform ?

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Pitfall on iOS. Starts as an endless runner side-scroller, then changes to a behind the back endless runner. Stylish and very good use of flat shaded polygons. Probably throws a few more polygons around than the Jag could ;) but scaling down the complexity for something like this for a 320 x 240 game seems somewhat possible (given what Battlemorph and IS 2 throw around).

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It's actually great fun and has a bit of nuance to the gameplay that works well within the limited feature set (branching paths, railway cart sequences etc). More fun and less frustration than the Jag version of Pitfall ;)

 

Simplicity doesn't mean it isn't fun nor 'deep' in its own way. See Downfall for an example.

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I actually played Pitfall on iPad. Well, tried playing is better approximation, as the touch-based control scheme meant I was dying a lot, and that very quickly became frustrating.

 

It is, however, a great example of a modern take on non-textured graphics!

 

Another one could be Bit.Trip.Runner- though that one requires rock-solid framerate for proper gameplay.

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I didn't feel like drawing this morning, so I just copy-pasted the current terrain dataset and quadrupled it.

 

The whole terrain is 2,048 tris, decimated to more reasonable number at runtime.

 

This is quite close to the drawing distance of Crash n Burn, but since it's all in one straight line, it does not give out the same distance effect, as when it's curved (so that should come up a pot or two in my to-do list)

 

 

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Um, did Sauron just come to Vlads defense or did I bump my head.

I vote for "bump" but I don't know.

 

 

I didn't feel like drawing this morning, so I just copy-pasted the current terrain dataset and quadrupled it.

 

The whole terrain is 2,048 tris, decimated to more reasonable number at runtime.

 

This is quite close to the drawing distance of Crash n Burn, but since it's all in one straight line, it does not give out the same distance effect, as when it's curved (so that should come up a pot or two in my to-do list)

 

 

 

Wrt the last video it seems the rendering/engine slows down quite a bit when "the terrain/road" thingamabob is afar, how many fps are we looking at?

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This is all becoming a bit tedious by now TBH.

 

What is it the guy is actually trying to achieve.

Over last few decades, there's been plethora of threads where people constantly argue if this or that could be achieved on jag, or if the devs were just lazy/ran out of time/whatever.

This is the Great Experiment Thread , where we're gonna find out answers to some of these questions.

 

 

Admittedly, there's quite a few primary, secondary and tertiary goals, based mostly on the level of technological challenge they represent, as they're basically from a generation after jag. It's sort of like asking if Gears Of War can run on PS2, basically.

They all keep on popping up as I'm being shown examples of another games of same era (just on different system), which you are free to disagree with, but hey - it's my free time I'm burning here :)

 

 

But, a quick summary:

- Can jag handle Road Rash ? (I know it can)

- Can jag handle NFS (e.g. RR with polygonal cars and more 2D sprites)? (I honestly believe so, but more work is required till I get to that 3D engine level)

- Is Checkered Flag's framerate warranted ? (At this moment, I'm still 50/50)

- Can jag handle insane drawing distance as in Crash'n'Burn ? (It's looking more and more like it actually can)

 

The last two ones, I'm really close to figuring it out.

 

 

I for one welcome our WTF is going on here with this tedious shit for so long Overlord

BTW, you can always elect to push the Ignore button, it's not like I'll tell anybody, you know ;)

 

 

Wrt the last video it seems the rendering/engine slows down quite a bit when "the terrain/road" thingamabob is afar, how many fps are we looking at?

Honestly, no idea, as I haven't benchmarked last few builds. There's VSync going on however, which means steep bumps between 60,30,20,15 fps, which are always very visible.

 

Um, did Sauron just come to Vlads defense or did I bump my head.

Yes, we agreed I'll stop arguing and focus more on work, and it's been working out pretty well. In not-so-distant past, I have literally burnt countless weekends just on stupid flamewars, instead of work.

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Yes, we agreed I'll stop arguing and focus more on work, and it's been working out pretty well. In not-so-distant past, I have literally burnt countless weekends just on stupid flamewars, instead of work.

 

Indeed. Since VladR isn't promising anything here, there's absolutely no harm in him doing his experiments and posting the results. I've been following this thread just to see what he can achieve, and I've found it very interesting. So everyone can stop with the "WTF is going on here" posts, as it's adding nothing to the thread. If you don't like this thread, feel free to not post in it, simple as that.

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I think it's very interesting to see what the Atari Jaguar is really capable of. And if someone has the technical knowledge to showcase and explain this that's pretty cool. If I could I certainly would but I'm currently tinkering with making 2600 games so it's a bit beyond me at the moment. This system has a very special place in my collection and I play it frequently so to see someone attempting to push it to it's limits is exciting. And if there is ever a playable version of Road Rash on the Jaguar it would be absolutely amazing and I'd have to buy it!

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The 68000 alone in the Jag is more powerful than the main CPU in the 3DO, I would hope the Jag could handle some fun, playable version of Road Rash.

 

I'm sure if EA had a development team on it back in 1995 it would have come out great.

 

I appreciate the research you are doing VLAD but realize you don't have the time or resources to create a game that would have taken a team of 30 and a few hundred thousand dollars to create 20 years ago.

 

Very cool to see the updates. Good luck with your continued work.

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