Does Jaguar have 3d geometry ? 3D Graphic GPU?

[JagChris]

1 hour ago, CyranoJ said:

Feel free to go start or join one of the many 'post any old random shit you like regardless of facts' forums around if you don't like the cold, hard truth.

Cold hard truth is more like I will weaponize any mistakes you make to further my own agenda. 

 

All you've done is proven I made a mistake on an assumption of the timeline of HVS's progression regarding development techniques. You haven't disproved that they worked toward and accomplished what they said they have. 

[+CyranoJ]

1 minute ago, JagChris said:

Cold hard truth is more like I will weaponize any mistakes you make to further my own agenda. 

 

Oh, it's the 'agenda brigade' - well, full body-suit tin-foil clothing for you then. 

[Lost Dragon]

On 6/20/2020 at 11:51 AM, JagChris said:

That's weak sauce and you know it. The company who made these claims is still around and well respected. Adisak today is considered one of the best technical advisors around. Disprove his 'guesswork'.

 

 

Sorry, but HVS are still well respected by whom exactly? 

 

They produced 2 titles on the Jaguar that come UK review, were utter laughing stock games. 

 

Ruiner Pinball for featuring only 2 (admittedly large, but flat) tables, blurry and overly busy background graphics and unrealistic ball physics. 

 

 

I appreciate the game has it's fans, but you cannot take away the fact that at the time, it was another review disaster for the Jaguars image, as reviewers keen to point out how reminiscent of 16-bit video pinball games it was and yet fell behind such games on the Amiga and Mega Drive. 

 

WMCJ with it's murky colours and gloomy atmosphere, jerky graphics and limited speech samples etc. 

 

Both games were highlighted as key reasons the Jaguar found itself with such a bad reputation and struggled to be taken seriously. 

 

NBA JAM was their flagship title and that based on the Sega 32X code. 

 

Adisak made some interesting claims about a Doom style FPS engine he had written on the Jaguar, but has anyone seen it running? has he released the code? and was it ever anything more than a tech demo? 

 

You can't use that or video footage of Dactyl Joust to claim HVS earnt respect, nobody even knows how well the actual Jousting mechanics would of worked in Dactyl Joust. 

 

Nobody praises HVS for work done on Jaguar F. F. L

 

And what did they do on a true 64-bit console when updating a classic Arcade title? 

 

 

N64 Paperboy. 

 

 

 

It doesn't matter how much more efficient their code on the Jaguar was than that of Atari's itself, it simply didn't equate to the killer titles we and the machine needed. 

 

When your games are pulling in UK scores of 22%..23%..35% and even a 2/5 from C+VG magazine for NBA JAM,your not earning the title of well respected as a development team. 

 

 

 

Edited June 21, 2020 by Lost Dragon

[alucardX]

HVS did some pretty impressive work on Wii.

The Conduit

The Conduit and its sequel looked really nice considering it was running on Wii. It was a fun shooter too.

[Lost Dragon]

35 minutes ago, alucardX said:

HVS did some pretty impressive work on Wii.

The Conduit

The Conduit and its sequel looked really nice considering it was running on Wii. It was a fun shooter too.

I can remember the game being praised for the tech behind the engine, HVS experimenting on the Wii hardware in areas other development teams had been reluctant to try, but general feeling appeared to be it was a rather mundane game. 

 

 

Similar critiscms were lain at the team behind the first  Assassin's Creed title on 360/PS3 and Factor 5 for PS3 Liar. 

 

Cutting edge game engines, especially for first wave titles, but the gameplay just wasn't there. 

 

 

Looking at Wikipedia on The Conduit:

 

 

The game makes use of the Quantum3 engine, a game engine designed by High Voltage Software specifically for the Wii. The engine allows effects such as bump mapping, reflection and refraction, and gloss and detail mapping to be implemented in the game. High Voltage Software's goal in creating the engine was to make The Conduit a competitive experience visually comparable to games on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

 

 

The Conduit has received mixed to positive reviews. The game has an aggregate average of 72.23% at GameRankings based on 64 reviews, and a metascore of 69% at Metacritic based on 79 reviews. In general, the game's praise is mostly centered on its technical success, online play, and intuitive controls, while its criticism is centered on the storyline and single-player experience.

 

They are capable developers for sure, but they are a long way behind the real well established and respected development teams who have earnt their pedigree by providing a steady stream of award winning and stand out titles, across multiple platforms. 

 

They, like many from the Jaguar era, appear to have fared better overall on other platforms. 

 

 

Employee accounts of working there are as mixed as you'd expect from a company of that size:

 

https://www.indeed.com/cmp/High-Voltage-Software/reviews

 

Nor without the workplace drama:

 

 

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-7th-circuit/1750259.html

 

Edited June 21, 2020 by Lost Dragon

[Lost Dragon]

43 minutes ago, alucardX said:

HVS did some pretty impressive work on Wii.

The Conduit

The Conduit and its sequel looked really nice considering it was running on Wii. It was a fun shooter too.

They aren't afraid of responding to constructive criticism to be fair, either..

 

Admit tech did come before gameplay at times, art was a little generic. 

 

 

They appear a lot more grounded than many other studios. 

 

Nintendo World Report: The Conduit has received some mixed reviews overall. What do you think of this outcome, and how will it affect future games?

 

Joshua Olson: We've been very happy, and the publisher has been very happy with the results of The Conduit, an original IP coming out, especially when the market's been down; it's been a very positive experience for us. In terms of reviews, it's interesting. We're all over the board. I think our high was 91 on Metacritic, down to a 40, I think? Reading the reviews, the positives are always pointed out as being positive, and the negatives are negatives. It's not this mixed bag of one person saying, "This really sucked" and another person saying, "This was really awesome." I think the way the scores work is people's biases or opinions of the Wii as a console, or FPSs on the Wii, or the control scheme; they come in with some baggage. If they're really into the Wii and they get the controls, I think we score really well. If they're playing FPSs and they're on the hardcore side and they're playing PS3 and 360, they want the eye-candy and they want a robust online experience that Xbox LIVE and PlayStation offer, then we come up short.

 

The viewers can either overlook that and see us for what we are, or hold us up to some comparison on other consoles that we can't match due to being on the Wii. It hurts a little bit, seeing some of the negative reviews, but seeing the positive stuff and the fan feedback and the e-mails we get keeps us pumped up, and I think the best is still in store for us here at High Voltage.

 

NWR: Ignoring the reviews, how do you and Sega feel about the reception of The Conduit?

 

JO: Sega was very pleased, and we were very pleased. Like I said, with an original IP introduced into a market that is down, sales have been very good, so we're very happy.

 

High Voltage has a long history of licensed development, spanning back to the infamous White Men Can't Jump on the Atari Jaguar

 

 

 

NWR: What are the major takeaway criticisms that you've seen from the reviews and the fan feedback?

 

JO: I like stories in games, and they're rarely told well. I think we had a good story in The Conduit, but I don't think we presented it particularly well. We worked really hard to make sure that the story didn't interfere with the gameplay. So if you weren't interested in the story, which I think there's a large section of gamers that couldn't care less, it doesn't stop you or interrupt you; it doesn't take control away from you. We wanted the player to have control at all times. In retrospect, I think we could have presented it a little better. The stuff is there, but I don't think people spent the time looking for it, or putting it together. So, that's something, moving forward, in future titles that we're taking a look at.

 

One of the big takeaways, too, is that Quantum3 was in development while we were working on the game, so I think in a few cases, art, or looking good, or showing off the new tech trumped gameplay. And that's something that we've learned as well. Gameplay needs to be number one. Something needs to look good, but gameplay has to be more important. That's something too in our level design, and how we played out in our engagements and built our levels, that we've definitely learned from and are going to address in future titles.

 

NWR: This isn't meant to be taken strictly as criticism, but The Conduit looks pretty generic in terms of art and character design. If the series continues, do you intend to spruce things up a bit?

 

JO: I think that's a very fair criticism. Looking at The Conduit, you're not really sure that you're in the world of The Conduit. Like you said, it's kind of generic. You could be anywhere. I think that was driven a lot by our push to make The Conduit in D.C. in realistic-looking environments, we wanted to make the graphics look as real as possible. But on the flipside of that, it tended to make it look a little generic, a bit mundane. If you're playing Halo, or look at a screenshot, you know you're in Halo. I don't think that's the case with The Conduit. It's a very valid criticism that we took to heart and we're hoping to address in future games.

 

 

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/interview/22757/interview-with-high-voltage-softwares-josh-olson

 

 

Edited June 21, 2020 by Lost Dragon
Link added

[alucardX]

Having actually played the Conduit, I found it to be a very solid game.

[Lost Dragon]

1 minute ago, alucardX said:

Having actually played the Conduit, I found it to be a very solid game.

Reviews are always going to be subjective and FPS in particular seem to conjour up polarising opinions. 

 

I was one of the very few who appreciated what Guerilla did with Killzone 2 on the PS3, controls initially had a real feeling of weight behind them, but the masses complained they felt different to COD, so it was patched out. ?

 

Getting back on topic.. 

 

For myself as a Jaguar owner at the time, desperate for killer titles to try and stem the inevitable demise of the Jaguar, titles like Ruiner Pinball just were things i looked at with utter disbelief. 

 

I was a huge fan of Mega Drive Dragon's Fury and if a team could pull something off like that on the limited 16-bit hardware, the Jaguar should of offered up something really special. 

 

It was a disappointment, but Pinball titles are niche, so doubt it did any real harm. 

 

Where as WMCJ did. 

 

It's still one of the key titles (joining likes of Club Drive)  that the press and industry pundits refer back to, as a showcase title for everything Atari got wrong with the Jaguar. 

 

It should of been canned, but Atari were so desperate for games, out it came and it helped cement the platform in the annuals of history, for all the wrong reasons. 

 

 

I never found Paperboy really worked that well outside of the arcades, personally, but the N64 update HVS carried out was another object of ridicule for many. 

 

I'm genuinely interested to know exactly which finished commercial titles HVS earnt respect from their peers in the industry for and on what grounds. 

 

 

They are a team I have never seen the mainstream media devote  serious resources to covering. 

 

An interview here, a game mentioned in a feature there, but never the big articles or a making of... feature. 

 

They make for an interesting topic of discussion. 

[agradeneu]

48 minutes ago, Lost Dragon said:

Reviews are always going to be subjective and FPS in particular seem to conjour up polarising opinions. 

 

I was one of the very few who appreciated what Guerilla did with Killzone 2 on the PS3, controls initially had a real feeling of weight behind them, but the masses complained they felt different to COD, so it was patched out. ?

 

Getting back on topic.. 

 

For myself as a Jaguar owner at the time, desperate for killer titles to try and stem the inevitable demise of the Jaguar, titles like Ruiner Pinball just were things i looked at with utter disbelief. 

 

I was a huge fan of Mega Drive Dragon's Fury and if a team could pull something off like that on the limited 16-bit hardware, the Jaguar should of offered up something really special. 

 

It was a disappointment, but Pinball titles are niche, so doubt it did any real harm. 

 

Where as WMCJ did. 

 

It's still one of the key titles (joining likes of Club Drive)  that the press and industry pundits refer back to, as a showcase title for everything Atari got wrong with the Jaguar. 

 

It should of been canned, but Atari were so desperate for games, out it came and it helped cement the platform in the annuals of history, for all the wrong reasons. 

 

 

I never found Paperboy really worked that well outside of the arcades, personally, but the N64 update HVS carried out was another object of ridicule for many. 

 

I'm genuinely interested to know exactly which finished commercial titles HVS earnt respect from their peers in the industry for and on what grounds. 

 

 

They are a team I have never seen the mainstream media devote  serious resources to covering. 

 

An interview here, a game mentioned in a feature there, but never the big articles or a making of... feature. 

 

They make for an interesting topic of discussion. 

Their portfolio includes e.g. Mortal Kombat X, Injustice and Mortal Kombat 9. They are somewhat profilic.

[+davidcalgary29]

3 hours ago, Lost Dragon said:

 

 

For myself as a Jaguar owner at the time, desperate for killer titles to try and stem the inevitable demise of the Jaguar, titles like Ruiner Pinball just were things i looked at with utter disbelief. 

 

...

 

It's still one of the key titles (joining likes of Club Drive)  that the press and industry pundits refer back to, as a showcase title for everything Atari got wrong with the Jaguar. 

 

 

Don't you dare come for my beloved Ruiner table!! It's one of my favourite things in the Jag library. Do feel free to trash the hideous "Tower" table though. I refuse to acknowledge its existence, so it can't do any real harm.

 

And I think we all must agree by now that Club Drive is a Very Special Game that has created a place for itself in our collective memories. The Press has always refused to acknowledge the joy of driving around in a house, so I don't see why I should listen to them or their opinions at all of what constitutes a fun afternoon.

[JagChris]

HVS did some background artwork for FFL that was about it.

[82-T/A]

22 hours ago, JagChris said:

All you've done is proven...

 

22 hours ago, CyranoJ said:

Oh, it's the 'agenda brigade' ...

 

 

Both you guys are acting like huge nerds...

 

[+CyranoJ]

5 minutes ago, 82-T/A said:

Both you guys are acting like huge nerds...

Well, you are half right.

[Lost Dragon]

On 6/21/2020 at 7:46 PM, davidcalgary29 said:

Don't you dare come for my beloved Ruiner table!! It's one of my favourite things in the Jag library. Do feel free to trash the hideous "Tower" table though. I refuse to acknowledge its existence, so it can't do any real harm.

 

And I think we all must agree by now that Club Drive is a Very Special Game that has created a place for itself in our collective memories. The Press has always refused to acknowledge the joy of driving around in a house, so I don't see why I should listen to them or their opinions at all of what constitutes a fun afternoon.

? If it helps, I found Dragon's Revenge weaker than Fury, so i am rather particular when it comes to my video pinball table choices. 

[alucardX]

On 6/21/2020 at 9:20 AM, Lost Dragon said:

Reviews are always going to be subjective and FPS in particular seem to conjour up polarising opinions. 

I totally agree with you.

[Chilly Willy]

On 6/18/2020 at 7:17 PM, JagChris said:

Didn't they solve that on Hover Strike? I don't remember seeing any affine warping in that game. 

 

Sorry about the delay... had a hectic schedule at work last week. Subdivided affine was a common technique used on better games to overcome (most of) the issues with affine mapping. Instead of rendering the entire raster line of a triangle using the same parameters, you cut the line into pieces... often 8 or 16 pixels at a time. This minimized the warping at the expense of a little more overhead.

 

One of the best explanations of old-school 3D rendering can be found in the old articles Chris Hecker wrote for Dr Dobbs WAAAAAAAAY back in the stone-age. You'll find those articles on his site, here: https://www.chrishecker.com/Miscellaneous_Technical_Articles

 

Another great thing covered by Chris - getting the fill conventions decided on at the start so that you avoid issues like the slight gaps between triangles you sometimes saw on PS1 games.

 

I'd have the GPU rasterize the triangles, doing subdivided affine calculations to feed line segments to the blitter. More work, slightly lower speed, but much less warping. Perhaps make a decision on doing the whole raster line as affine vs doing subdivided affine depending on the depth of the triangle. The further away a triangle is, the less affine mapping matters. That's why fish-eye like on various PS1 games was always worse when you walked right up to the wall. And that's pretty much how later PS1 games dealt with the issue - tessellating triangles close to the camera to avoid a large span of pixels that show the warping.

 

Edited June 25, 2020 by Chilly Willy
speeling

[agradeneu]

Don't know if that was posted yet:

 

John Mathieson interview, around 11 min. Jaguar starts.

 

 

[JagChris]

On 6/21/2020 at 4:16 AM, Lost Dragon said:

 

 

 

 

It doesn't matter how much more efficient their code on the Jaguar was than that of Atari's itself, it simply didn't equate to the killer titles we and the machine needed.

This is a digression from the main topic, however their tools, however you feel about the VERY subjective reviews of their games( I believe one magazine rated NBA jam worse than the SNES version). If Atari had paid attention to what HVS was trying to tell them they could have had these tools and gotten them into the hands of designers more to your liking.

 

Though the subject is about 3D on the Jag.

[Agent X]

On 6/21/2020 at 7:16 AM, Lost Dragon said:

When your games are pulling in UK scores of 22%..23%..35% and even a 2/5 from C+VG magazine for NBA JAM,your not earning the title of well respected as a development team. 

 

I hadn't seen that review (likely because I'm in the US), but that seems extremely harsh. I'd say that the Jaguar version is of NBA Jam Tournament Edition is the best home version of that game. (For reasons why, see this post that I wrote here many years ago comparing it to the PlayStation version.)

 

Heck, I'd even take it a step further, and say that outside of the arcades, it might even be the best overall game in the entire NBA Jam series until EA's revival a few years ago.

 

[JagChris]

Jenovi did an analysis of all of them you might find interesting.

 

 

[alucardX]

I thought it was interesting to hear John Mathieson say that the 3d used in Cybermorph is more or less what he had in minder during hardware design. I hadn't owned a copy of Cybermorph for years and recently purchased a copy to play it just this weekend for the first time in more than 20 years. I am impressed by the 3d, considering the time it was released and in comparison to the other 3d games around at the time. Obviously Battlemorph outdoes it in every way, it is still very impressive.

[agradeneu]

39 minutes ago, alucardX said:

I thought it was interesting to hear John Mathieson say that the 3d used in Cybermorph is more or less what he had in minder during hardware design. I hadn't owned a copy of Cybermorph for years and recently purchased a copy to play it just this weekend for the first time in more than 20 years. I am impressed by the 3d, considering the time it was released and in comparison to the other 3d games around at the time. Obviously Battlemorph outdoes it in every way, it is still very impressive.

 I understand he said they wrote a 3D engine in C and turned as much as they could into hardware, even developed a custom color space for gouraud shading. I agree, Cybermorph was before TIE Fighter and that one was acclaimed for rendering all polygons with gouraud shading (but it has to do that all in software). Too bad the frame rate got halved because of the AI, it would have been even more impressive.

Edited June 29, 2020 by agradeneu

[alucardX]

1 hour ago, agradeneu said:

 I understand he said they wrote a 3D engine in C and turned as much as they could into hardware, even developed a custom color space for gouraud shading. I agree, Cybermorph was before TIE Fighter and that one was acclaimed for rendering all polygons with gouraud shading (but it has to do that all in software). Too bad the frame rate got halved because of the AI, it would have been even more impressive.

I'd be okay with the frame rate staying right where it is if they wanted to improve the draw distance. Again though, Battlemorph was did everything Cybermorph did, only better.

[JagChris]

16 hours ago, Agent X said:

 

I hadn't seen that review (likely because I'm in the US), but that seems extremely harsh. I'd say that the Jaguar version is of NBA Jam Tournament Edition is the best home version of that game. (For reasons why, see this post that I wrote here many years ago comparing it to the PlayStation version.)

 

Heck, I'd even take it a step further, and say that outside of the arcades, it might even be the best overall game in the entire NBA Jam series until EA's revival a few years ago.

 

Can you look in the credits of the PlayStation and or Saturn version of NBA Jam and see how big the teams were that ported them? Because the Jaguar only had Adisack coding and Eric Nofsinger on sound/music I do believe. 

 

I'm just curious.

 

'That was the project from HELL for me. 1 Programmer and 4 months to port 400,000 lines of assembler. I still have no idea to this day how I was porting 3,000 lines of production quality assembler for 4 months straight.'

 

-Adisak Pochanayon

 

Edited June 29, 2020 by JagChris

[Lost Dragon]

On 6/27/2020 at 9:28 PM, JagChris said:

This is a digression from the main topic, however their tools, however you feel about the VERY subjective reviews of their games( I believe one magazine rated NBA jam worse than the SNES version). If Atari had paid attention to what HVS was trying to tell them they could have had these tools and gotten them into the hands of designers more to your liking.

 

Though the subject is about 3D on the Jag.

It's completely irrelevant what i personally think of any HVS title on the Jaguar (i am not a fan of basketball games, period) as it was the commercial games press, not I they needed to convince. 

 

The tools themselves aren't the sole issue either. 

 

It's the belief of the coders Vs that of the press. 

 

Take WMCJ as a prime example. 

 

The viewpoint from HVS:

 

 

The game is looking really good right now.  I have optimized and
optimized the game everywhere and right now it runs at about 15 fps
at a resolution of 320x220.  However, this could be faster if I didn't
need to unpack all the character animations on the fly but since there
are 12-15 Megabytes of sprite frames, I need to keep them compressed
and I unpack them immediately before they are displayed.  This amounts
to megabytes of compressed data being slung around which obviously
requires some additional work

    However, the game looks very good and has a very smooth feel to it
with the AI camera tracking the characters and all their moves.  The
entire zooming thing is amazingly non-annoying (I've played games with
continuously moving cameras and most tend to make you a bit dizzy or
simply detract from your ability to control the game).  Finally, I
have been spending a lot of time fine-tuning gameplay and paying
attention to little details (such as the the rim actually bending when
the ball bounces off of it).

    Anyhow, back to work.... gotta get this done soon.

adisak 

 

 

 

And:

 

A lot of Jag DOOM is in C.  It is far from optimized.  WMCJ actually

renders more than twice as many pixels per second than DOOM and I would
have gotten WMCJ to be faster if I would have had time to move the
decompression of sprites from the GPU to the DSP.  The reason I say twice
as many is that they are about the same frame rate while I have a resolution
of 320x220 (higher res in PAL) and they use 160x180.  ID is very good
and they made an excellent Jaguar game but they ported it over from
a heavy "C" base and didn't optimize much in assembly.  The theoretical
texture mapping pixel limit is around 4 MPixels/sec.

adisak

 

And :

 

 

 

     iD wrote their own sound code so they could run tasks in the DSP.
The Atari sound code fairly well takes over the DSP.  Plus the Atari
sound codes is a major drain on memory bandwidth.  The music/sound
driver I wrote for WMCJ and will use in NBAJ-TE uses 4:1 ADPCM compression
and is over 30 times more bandwidth efficient than Atari's sound code
(on average I do 1-memory access compared to Atari's code's 32 accesses
to play back a sample at 1/2 the max sample rate which is about standard
sample rates).  I noticed about a 15% improvement in my frame rate when
I dumped their sound code for mine and an additional 10-15% improvement
because I didn't have to split objects to let the DSP grab the bus more
often.

adisak

 

 

 

So we see the coder feeling confident in it, it's been optimized, running at a solid frame rate, decent resolution, camera system works well, everything looks good, runs smoothly, out does Jag Doom in some areas.. 

 

And he points out both he and Doom coders wrote their own sound code, rather than using Atari's own.. 

 

Come review... 

 

EGM :flag up blocky graphics, a confusing camera perspective, poor animation.. 

 

GamePro:bad graohics

 

Next Generation :occasional erratic camera movements 

 

ST Format :Gloomy colour scheme, players which are hard to distinguish between. 

 

Even if the game had achieved a faster frame rate, the commercial critics comments would still of applied. 

 

Maybe Atari weren't the only ones who needed to start listening, before they started talking.. 

 

Jaguar Doom to this day held up as a flagship Jaguar title, WMCJ is at the complete opposite end of the Spectrum. 

 

Adisak appeared to believe the camera system and graphics in general were above adequate, reviewers felt they needed improving on. 

 

 

Edited July 1, 2020 by Lost Dragon