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Games that should have been on Jaguar


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21 minutes ago, VladR said:

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...

Character designs changed..more realistic look, gameplay felt less organic and not really fixed until UMK3...death animations weaker in MK3..weaker atmosphere.

 

Entire thing felt rushed.

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23 minutes ago, Lost Dragon said:

Saturn Daytona USA C.E was built around an optimised Saturn Game Engine (Sega Rally) and created by a team familiar with the complex Saturn hardware and at best it's a technical improvement over the original Daytona USA on Saturn.

 

It still doesn't replicate the Daytona USA experience well enough.

The Saturn version pops like crazy, that's for sure, right in your face.

 

23 minutes ago, Lost Dragon said:

The Jaguar even fully optimised is not the Sega Saturn nor is the 32X or 3DO.

 

If the Saturn with Sega's vast resources and skilled coding teams couldn't hope to replicate the Daytona experience, why on earth would anyone wanted it on Jaguar?

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!" :lol:

 

 

23 minutes ago, Lost Dragon said:

Supercross 3D was fully texture mapped and again did the system so much harm.

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.

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The question still remains though..why would anyone of wanted a Sub-Saturn version of Daytona USA had the Sega Deal included it?.

 

With Supercross 3D we have 2 trains of thought here...

 

Missile Command 3D coder Martin Brownlaw claiming the decision to fully texture map the game was a decision Leonard Tramiel made...

 

Now Leonard has upset a lot of people in the industry that's clear, but he's also been unfairly made the scapegoat for internal failings within both Handmade Software and Imagitec Design. .

 

The second comes from the games coder himself who said in fact it was the bosses at Tiertex who wanted the game fully texture mapped.

 

 

Whoever made the decision,  the fact remains ATARI were happy to ship utter rubbish like Supercross,  Club Drive, Checkered Flag and promote this as 64 bit gaming on a system Sam Tramiel was telling press was more powerful than the Saturn and just behind the Playstation..

 

 

It becomes a mute point that Jaguar could of delivered better...it was only ever going to be viewed on what it did deliver and more often than not, that was substandard software and now we see commercial coders..company bosses..artists etc blaming each other.

 

 

The Sega deal never coming to fruition is something as both a Jaguar and Saturn owner over the years, i am so glad never happened. 

 

 

 

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2 hours ago, Lost Dragon said:

Atari want something like Virtual Racing on Jaguar..contract a small team (Rebellion) with no driving game experience to produce a plain polygon racer..next to 32X Virtua Racing it's embarrassing affair.

 

 

Sega, having their own teams overstreched give Saturn Virtua Racing to Time Warner to sub contract out..It's a massive dissapointment.

 

 

I personally would of hated to see Atari being given Daytona USA and it handed to lowest bidding developer

 

 

We really didn't need yet another dissapointing racing title that generation, especially not on Jaguar.

 

Teque had another racer in development which would of shown further optimizations to the W T.R engine..

 

Caspain didn't go into much detail regarding exact nature of the game they might of done with the proposed engine they had created.

 

The I.S Engine is fantastic, but your controlling a massive, stomping,mobile Gun Emplacement, it's not really suited for a pure, arcade style racer.

 

  

 

  

Fly with the cruise missile and you see it's quick. You can also play the satyr walker by cheat code and its 2x the walking speed=run. Overall the engine handles much more than a racing game probably would need.

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2 hours ago, VladR said:

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.

 Dito :-D

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7 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

Fly with the cruise missile and you see it's quick. You can also play the satyr walker by cheat code and its 2x the walking speed=run. Overall the engine handles much more than a racing game probably would need.

What's the frame rate when your using the missile etc?

 

 

One thing i have hated this generation on XB1 and PS4 is the birth of 30 FPS 'cinematic' racing games.

 

Doesn't coin op Virtua Racing run at 30 FPS with backgrounds at 60 FPS?

 

 

Personal choice but i would of prefered coders used Jaguar hardware to do more silky smooth 60 fps 2D racers like Super Burnout than try an mimic what was being done on 3DO upwards.

 

3DO Road Rash 24 FPS? and even that uses mix of polygons and sprites.

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2 minutes ago, Lost Dragon said:

What's the frame rate when your using the missile etc?

 

 

One thing i have hated this generation on XB1 and PS4 is the birth of 30 FPS 'cinematic' racing games.

 

Doesn't coin op Virtua Racing run at 30 FPS with backgrounds at 60 FPS?

 

 

Personal choice but i would of prefered coders used Jaguar hardware to do more silky smooth 60 fps 2D racers like Super Burnout than try an mimic what was being done on 3DO upwards.

 

3DO Road Rash 24 FPS? and even that uses mix of polygons and sprites.

Iron is 30 FPS max., flying the missile is smooth, much more so than any racing game on the Jag except Super Burn Out.  Road Rash 3DO is around 15 FPS and lower, there is a digital foundry analysis you can watch. 

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2 hours ago, VladR said:

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.

Well you could tell the name of the publisher at least then.

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20 minutes ago, Lost Dragon said:

What's the frame rate when your using the missile etc?

 

 

One thing i have hated this generation on XB1 and PS4 is the birth of 30 FPS 'cinematic' racing games.

 

Doesn't coin op Virtua Racing run at 30 FPS with backgrounds at 60 FPS?

 

 

Personal choice but i would of prefered coders used Jaguar hardware to do more silky smooth 60 fps 2D racers like Super Burnout than try an mimic what was being done on 3DO upwards.

 

3DO Road Rash 24 FPS? and even that uses mix of polygons and sprites.

????? Most racing games during PS1/Sat era were 30 FPS max and lower. We were happy to have PC Racing Sims running at 30 FPS, but 20-25 was regarded well playable. Same with flight sims. They were  too demanding for most hardware configs, even high end.

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5 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

Iron is 30 FPS max., flying the missile is smooth, much more so than any racing game on the Jag except Super Burn Out.  Road Rash 3DO is around 15 FPS and lower, there is a digital foundry analysis you can watch. 

Appreciated. 

 

I seem to remember figures of 12-15 FPS for Supercross 3D.

 

 

Talk in C+VG about Checkered Flag running so fast Rebellion had to slow it down, but they too fell down on the essential car handling aspect.

 

So many developers over the years have done this.

 

Vanishing Point on Dreamcast had a neat engine designed to minimise poP in etc but car handling felt off.

 

I had to buy a DC steering wheel to get anything out of Daytona USA on that.

 

Saturn Daytona USA CCE handling was off.

 

Couldn't get into Split Second on PS3 as car handling felt wrong.

 

 

Sega Touring Car Championship Saturn (another 20 fps title) attempted realistic physics and cars felt awful.

 

 

Saturn Manx TT was rather controversial. .Sega America telling press it would run at between 45 and 60 FPS. .didn't final version run at 30 FPS?

 

Yet another flagship Sega title not handled by Sega themselves for their own home system. 

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2 minutes ago, Lost Dragon said:

Appreciated. 

 

I seem to remember figures of 12-15 FPS for Supercross 3D.

 

 

Talk in C+VG about Checkered Flag running so fast Rebellion had to slow it down, but they too fell down on the essential car handling aspect.

 

So many developers over the years have done this.

 

Vanishing Point on Dreamcast had a neat engine designed to minimise poP in etc but car handling felt off.

 

I had to buy a DC steering wheel to get anything out of Daytona USA on that.

 

Saturn Daytona USA CCE handling was off.

 

Couldn't get into Split Second on PS3 as car handling felt wrong.

 

 

Sega Touring Car Championship Saturn (another 20 fps title) attempted realistic physics and cars felt awful.

 

 

Saturn Manx TT was rather controversial. .Sega America telling press it would run at between 45 and 60 FPS. .didn't final version run at 30 FPS?

 

Yet another flagship Sega title not handled by Sega themselves for their own home system. 

Supercross is sub 10, otherwise it would be on par with Cybermorph or Battlemorph. Remember that Jaguar Doom runs 20 FPS max but drops a lot, still smoother than your average Jaguar game. Same with CF, its "fast" but runs at low FPS, maybe around <10, it looks choppy. Rebellions statement makes no sense or is confusing by intent, you always want the highest frame rate possible because its absoletely NOT identical to the speed of the game. CF is "faster" than Iron Soldier but runs not even half the frames per sec. - that's why Iron has smooth motion.

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3 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

????? Most racing games during PS1/Sat era were 30 FPS max and lower. We were happy to have PC Racing Sims running at 30 FPS, but 20-25 was regarded well playable. Same with flight sims. They were  too demanding for most hardware configs, even high end.

That's basically what i am getting at..

 

People were expecting far too much from the likes of the Saturn and Playstation to come anywhere near replicating the true arcade experiences of Daytona USA and Ridge Racer..We were only just starting to see games like Out Run done justice on the Saturn.

 

Ridge Racer Hi-Spec (or Turbo) was 50 FPS on PAL 60 on NTSC but is very cut down i believe? 

 

I only owned the original 30 fps release and got bored of that very quickly.

 

We are only now seeing a 60 FPS (and 720/1080P version of Virtua Racing on the Nintendo Switch some what..30 years after the coin op?

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18 minutes ago, Lost Dragon said:

That's basically what i am getting at..

 

People were expecting far too much from the likes of the Saturn and Playstation to come anywhere near replicating the true arcade experiences of Daytona USA and Ridge Racer..We were only just starting to see games like Out Run done justice on the Saturn.

 

Ridge Racer Hi-Spec (or Turbo) was 50 FPS on PAL 60 on NTSC but is very cut down i believe? 

 

I only owned the original 30 fps release and got bored of that very quickly.

 

We are only now seeing a 60 FPS (and 720/1080P version of Virtua Racing on the Nintendo Switch some what..30 years after the coin op?

It was only 1 track I think, toned down to make the 60 FPS possible. I think Saturn Virtua R. is 60 FPS but really, nobody cared about that ;-) Thats why I don't agree to the 60 FPS "fetish" with 3D games, although it can be beneficial to some type of games. Most people confuse 30 FPS with 60 FPS because it looks 100% smooth. The main difference is drag and more latency with 30 FPS but you need to be adjusted to 60 to even notice it. Overall gameplay is much more important. Im not a big fan of Super Burn Out, it's too simple and shallow. We prefered playing Racing Sims on PC and PS1 with much lower framerates (>30) and had much more fun with the complexity of car physics and driver AI or having a full field of 15-20 racing cars.   

Edited by agradeneu
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2 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

Supercross is sub 10, otherwise it would be on par with Cybermorph or Battlemorph. Remember that Jaguar Doom runs 20 FPS max but drops a lot, still smoother than your average Jaguar game. Same with CF, its "fast" but runs at low FPS, maybe around <10, it looks choppy. Rebellions statement makes no sense or is confusing by intent, you always want the highest frame rate possible because its absoletely NOT identical to the speed of the game. CF is "faster" than Iron Soldier but runs not even half the frames per sec. - that's why Iron has smooth motion.

Never went as far as to purchase the Jaguar CD..burnt too badly by the Jaguar itself and Freelancer 2120 annoucement that it was canned, being moved to Playstation,  was the final nail in the coffin for me there and then.

 

To be fair to Rebellion. .It was not a direct quote from them, just something C+VG claimed they had said.

 

They had been falsely quoted in other UK magazines and Gamesmaster TV had apparently reviewed the unfinished version of Jaguar AVP..so there might have been some creative writing in the preview of Checkered Flag..

 

 

Skyhammer looks impressive,  but seems to use the set in darkness routine rather than fogging,  but then so did Playstation G-Police 1 and 2..short draw distance in both. 

 

Colin McRae Playstation had hidden and limited modes 60 FPS secations  on Playstation,  Ditto Gran Turing,  Motor Head (limited to 2 cars)

 

 

Saturn Street Racer managed a great frame rate and some fantastic environment effects, shamed the Playstation version. 

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12 minutes ago, Lost Dragon said:

Never went as far as to purchase the Jaguar CD..burnt too badly by the Jaguar itself and Freelancer 2120 annoucement that it was canned, being moved to Playstation,  was the final nail in the coffin for me there and then.

 

To be fair to Rebellion. .It was not a direct quote from them, just something C+VG claimed they had said.

 

They had been falsely quoted in other UK magazines and Gamesmaster TV had apparently reviewed the unfinished version of Jaguar AVP..so there might have been some creative writing in the preview of Checkered Flag..

 

 

Skyhammer looks impressive,  but seems to use the set in darkness routine rather than fogging,  but then so did Playstation G-Police 1 and 2..short draw distance in both. 

 

Colin McRae Playstation had hidden and limited modes 60 FPS secations  on Playstation,  Ditto Gran Turing,  Motor Head (limited to 2 cars)

 

 

Saturn Street Racer managed a great frame rate and some fantastic environment effects, shamed the Playstation version. 

Street Racer Saturn looks like using a lot of sprites and some rotating texture for the track, so the track does not seem to be 3D modeled. CTR on PS1 however is fully polygon/texture graphics. Frame rate really depends on the complexity of the game. Colin McRae was a very demanding game on PC with flutuating highly instable frame rates, never constant 60 by any means. Grand Prix Legends on PC was a performance nightmare, but had the by far best physics/force feedback FX and AI of any racing sim (in my book). With no cars on track FPS was like >30, at the start of the race with 10 cars like 18 FPS. It was managable ;-)

Edited by agradeneu
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55 minutes ago, Lost Dragon said:

Appreciated. 

 

I seem to remember figures of 12-15 FPS for Supercross 3D.

 

Nope, I've digged into SuperCross Source code (with my disassembler) and it's locked to a minimum of 4 vbl per frame on PAL systems and 5 vbl per frame in NTSC, that gives a maximum of 12,5 fps for PAL and 12fps for NTSC.

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Street Racer on Saturn was a great example of a team using the hardware to great effect but not at the expense of the game itself.

 

Mev Dinc had been offered the Atari Panther earlier by Atari, but declined it knowing Atari would struggle to support any new console fully.

 

Shame as i would rather of seen likes of Vivid Images as Jaguar developers than Miracle Designs. 

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3 minutes ago, swapd0 said:

Nope, I've digged into SuperCross Source code (with my disassembler) and it's locked to a minimum of 4 vbl per frame on PAL systems and 5 vbl per frame in NTSC, that gives a maximum of 12,5 fps for PAL and 12fps for NTSC.

Bloody hell.

 

Going with texture mapping really killed the frame rate with this one then.

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1 hour ago, Lost Dragon said:

Bloody hell.

 

Going with texture mapping really killed the frame rate with this one then.

So you think it would have been 30 locked without it? ;-) Doid you notice the game only reaches the target frame rate when no other bike/AI is on track but really tanks when racing other drivers? 

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3 hours ago, Kobra Kai said:

Nobody is seriously suggesting Daytona on Jaguar. The guy who made the comment that started it all said he was making a joke (I say a cheap zinger at the Jaguars expense). Then this thing went way off the rails.

It has been strongly suggested over the years by at least 2 well known individuals out there,that a reasonable approximation would of been possible on Jaguar. 

 

It and 3DO Need For Speed..

 

Talk of optimised Hoverstrike CD Engines etc powering such a conversion.... 

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5 hours ago, Kobra Kai said:

Nobody is seriously suggesting Daytona on Jaguar. The guy who made the comment that started it all said he was making a joke (I say a cheap zinger at the Jaguars expense). Then this thing went way off the rails.

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 :lol:

 

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