Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure

[agradeneu]

1 minute ago, phoboz said:

I am sure the developer finally managed to also push the PS2 to it's limits. And every console has its gems. But I doubt that anyone would make the effort today for the PS2 (without a lot of money upfront)

 

By the way, is there a good library available for the Jag to draw triangles effiectly, e.g. if someone would like to make a 3D game for it?

The PS2 has a ton of gems, more than the DC actually, e.g. I doubt the DC could run something like GTA3. The PS2 was hard to program, but had a lot of processing power and Sony offered the necessary development support.

I dont know, who does 3D on the Jaguar? Dr. Typo coded a 3D engine some months ago.

[phoboz]

5 minutes ago, Bill Loguidice said:

Yeah, that's a crazy statement. It's definitely better hardware than the Dreamcast, although the Dreamcast could hang with a lot of the early- to mid-life PS2 stuff. 

I am sorry, but I was never that impressed by the PS2, maybe a saw it at the wrong time. I had a Nintendo GameCube at that time, and it had a cell shaded Zelda title, and Metroid Prime.

Edited September 30, 2020 by phoboz

[phoboz]

3 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

The PS2 has a ton of gems, more than the DC actually, e.g. I doubt the DC could run something like GTA3. The PS2 was hard to program, but had a lot of processing power and Sony offered the necessary development support.

I dont know, who does 3D on the Jaguar? Dr. Typo coded a 3D engine some months ago.

Is there a way to get in contact with Dr. Typo?

[Bill Loguidice]

13 minutes ago, phoboz said:

Still the PS2 is considered one of the most successful consoles of all time, but look at it today? No one will ever develop a game for it, and I am sure that people only developed games for it because they were paid huge sums of money by Sony.

 

 

 

Companies developed games for the PS2 in part because it was the follow-up to one of the most successful consoles of all-time, not because Sony was giving out cash. In terms of homebrews, that's not an indicator of much. The more powerful the console, the less likely it is to have homebrews developed for it. The Dreamcast is an exception for a variety of reasons, but most other advanced systems won't have the toolsets or interest to continue work on them. Anything post-NES has also been rather hit or miss in terms of being able to match the quality of commercial releases for obvious reasons. It takes much more time/effort/budget to get all you can out of more powerful hardware. And frankly, the more powerful the hardware, the less of an interesting "gap" (let's call it) between what you can play today on modern systems versus the older systems. 

[Bill Loguidice]

7 minutes ago, phoboz said:

I am sorry, but I was never that impressed by the PS2, maybe a saw it at the wrong time. I had a Nintendo GameCube at that time, and it had a cell shaded Zelda title, and Metroid Prime.

Yeah, I think you might have glossed over a few of its 4400+ commercial titles.

[agradeneu]

6 minutes ago, phoboz said:

Is there a way to get in contact with Dr. Typo?

He is here on AA.

[Leeroy ST]

51 minutes ago, Bill Loguidice said:

The 32X can actually do 50,000 polygons per second, while the Jaguar can supposedly only do up to 10,000 polygons per second (although I've read reports of that number being too low, but still the end result being shy of the 50,000). Obviously the Jaguar is better overall hardware than the piggybacked 32X, but there are definite pluses/minuses to both architectures when it comes to 3D. Certainly the 32X had better developers coding for it, although it had more than its fair share of duds too.

I don't know if the issue is "better" developers or "more developers working on each game" since the Jaguar seemed to be filled with games with only a small group of people working on them and even 1 person in some cases.

 

36 minutes ago, phoboz said:

Still the PS2 is considered one of the most successful consoles of all time, but look at it today? No one will ever develop a game for it, and I am sure that people only developed games for it because they were paid huge sums of money by Sony.

 

 

 

Actually they say the PS2 was intentionally difficult to program for to keep devs invested on the PS2 instead of other consoles taking advantage of partnerships and the PSXs success.

 

25 minutes ago, Bill Loguidice said:

Yeah, that's a crazy statement. It's definitely better hardware than the Dreamcast, although the Dreamcast could hang with a lot of the early- to mid-life PS2 stuff. 

This is from back in the days when Dreamcasts lack of relative aliasing in ti's games and the believe that the PS2 couldn't do the textures of a game like Shenmue early on, standing over a cliff with repetitive flat plant textures in the field below. People found that impressive I guess.

 

Truth is PS2 was easily stronger just harder to make games for and you see that early on.

 

45 minutes ago, marcio_napoli said:

Polys per second is marketing number you can manipulate according to marketing needs.

 

It depends on shading type, textures, if any sort of lighting is rendered, etc. The claimed number can be really high or really low depending on such factors.

 

And if that wasn't enough, also depends a ton on the code's optimization.

 

Take our friend, the N64.   It has games that look worse than the 3DO, and has games ***almost*** Dreamcast like graphics.   Variation so high depending on the team's abilities behind, of course. 

 

Between the Jaguar and 32X you really aren't going to have those elements involved all that much. I'm sure despite maybe 32X having a higher polycount that both can run many of the same games, I don't really see a game the 32X has that would cause problems with the Jaguar but do see it the other way around.

[phoboz]

21 minutes ago, Bill Loguidice said:

Companies developed games for the PS2 in part because it was the follow-up to one of the most successful consoles of all-time, not because Sony was giving out cash. In terms of homebrews, that's not an indicator of much. The more powerful the console, the less likely it is to have homebrews developed for it. The Dreamcast is an exception for a variety of reasons, but most other advanced systems won't have the toolsets or interest to continue work on them. Anything post-NES has also been rather hit or miss in terms of being able to match the quality of commercial releases for obvious reasons. It takes much more time/effort/budget to get all you can out of more powerful hardware. And frankly, the more powerful the hardware, the less of an interesting "gap" (let's call it) between what you can play today on modern systems versus the older systems. 

The Dreamcast was the first console I started to develop for, and it was wonderful for it's simplicity. The development environment was all open source (at least the one I used) It had a huge texture RAM, with runtime VQ-decompression. This meant that you could with a snap have super high resolution graphics like in Soulcalibur, that is what really impressed me at that time. This in my opinion compensated for the lower polygon count on the DC compared to the later PS2 titles.

On the other hand, on the PS2 you had to constantly move textures to a very small memory (barely enough to fit one medium resolution texture)

I am not sure how they finally managed to make impressive titles for the PS2. Maybe they used a lot of low-res polygons instead of using) high-res textures. But the high resolution graphics of the DC simply looks cleaner (in my eyes) on a high resolution monitor.

[agradeneu]

14 minutes ago, phoboz said:

The Dreamcast was the first console I started to develop for, and it was wonderful for it's simplicity. The development environment was all open source (at least the one I used) It had a huge texture RAM, with runtime VQ-decompression. This meant that you could with a snap have super high resolution graphics like in Soulcalibur, that is what really impressed me at that time. This in my opinion compensated for the lower polygon count on the DC compared to the later PS2 titles.

On the other hand, on the PS2 you had to constantly move textures to a very small memory (barely enough to fit one medium resolution texture)

I am not sure how they finally managed to make impressive titles for the PS2. Maybe they used a lot of low-res polygons instead of using) high-res textures. But the high resolution graphics of the DC simply looks cleaner (in my eyes) on a high resolution monitor.

Not for later games I think, Shenmue 2 has some quite annoying issues with weird edge/texture flickering and frequent and long loading times. That also happened with Sega GT (the weird flickering patterns).

 

Edited September 30, 2020 by agradeneu

[JagChris]

@phoboz here is the source code thread. In it you will find sources to Fight For Life.  Probably the most advanced 3D engine for the Jag available from Atari.

 

http://www.3do.cdinteractive.co.uk/viewforum.php?f=35&sid=1890ffafb1eb0dfd20809f3fa2de8bc3

 

Did you look in your SDK? You should have a sample 3D renderer in there.

 

Edited September 30, 2020 by JagChris

[JagChris]

2 hours ago, Leeroy ST said:

Well from the looks of it that demos doesn't have good performance in the first place, but the 3D and texturing seems nice but as you said without a fool game it's just another demo.

 

From the looks of it that Demo has fantastic

 performance.

[Austin]

1 hour ago, Bill Loguidice said:

Companies developed games for the PS2 in part because it was the follow-up to one of the most successful consoles of all-time, not because Sony was giving out cash. In terms of homebrews, that's not an indicator of much. The more powerful the console, the less likely it is to have homebrews developed for it. The Dreamcast is an exception for a variety of reasons, but most other advanced systems won't have the toolsets or interest to continue work on them. Anything post-NES has also been rather hit or miss in terms of being able to match the quality of commercial releases for obvious reasons. It takes much more time/effort/budget to get all you can out of more powerful hardware. And frankly, the more powerful the hardware, the less of an interesting "gap" (let's call it) between what you can play today on modern systems versus the older systems. 

Bill, you're making too much sense. That'll fly over most peoples' heads here in the Jaguar forum.

[Leeroy ST]

1 hour ago, agradeneu said:

Not for later games I think, Shenmue 2 has some quite annoying issues with weird edge/texture flickering and frequent and long loading times. That also happened with Sega GT (the weird flickering patterns).

 

Shenmue 2 also has people randomly appearing from 5 feet in front of you. Issue seems to only be fixed in the Xbox version slightly, fully when you put the Xbox version in a 360.

[JagChris]

On 9/29/2020 at 2:56 PM, phoboz said:

 

I didn't have a Jaguar back in the day (nor did I care about it), but I got one about a year ago and I absolutely love it (so much I even started to develop games for it myself)

 

And you already got Battlesphere for it? That's impressive.

[phoboz]

3 hours ago, JagChris said:

 

And you already got Battlesphere for it? That's impressive.

Well, actually I made myself a cartridge by burning it on EPROM. However, I really wish they would make a new run for Battlesphere gold. I would be glad pay a normal price for it.

Edited October 1, 2020 by phoboz

[JagChris]

Make a new thread, or find an old thread tell us what you think

[zzip]

18 hours ago, Bill Loguidice said:

Companies developed games for the PS2 in part because it was the follow-up to one of the most successful consoles of all-time, not because Sony was giving out cash.

The PS2 itself became the most successful console of all time with 155+ million units sold.    It didn't take much arm-twisting to find developers to want a piece of that pie :)

[Lost Dragon]

On 9/26/2020 at 12:14 AM, tripled79 said:

Would Jaguar CD been able to handle Pitfall 3D? The Playstation game? I actually liked that game...

Not found that much on the Playstation game but.. 

 

Toby Grant has been quoted as saying it was Activisions first internally developed Playstation title.. 

 

The team found the Playstation hardware easy to work with, it's libraries great and easy to modify for their needs. 

 

They mixed 2D and 3D for the visuals, as it was hard to get the environments looking the way they wanted, using just polygons.. 

 

They used the Playstation GPU to create moody lighting effects and were keen to add atmosphere to the game by using special effects where ever possible.. 

 

The volcano level is lit from below, creatures morph out of the environment, burrow into the ground etc. 

 

 

He also commented on how easy it was to implement the games camera system on the Playstation hardware.