could the atari jaguar ever handle the quake engine??

[LinkoVitch]

hell. you could always cheat a little and stick an old 3D accelerator chip in the cart to help a little I would expect.

 

well isn't the Quake source out there now? so someone could take up the gauntlet

[Stone]

Well, first off, the Jag doesn't have any dedicated video RAM at all...unless you're gonna count the scanline's-worth of buffer built into the OP

 

I'd disagree with people alagging off AvP as well...it was designed to be slow, for suspense reasons. It's nothing to do with the engine being craply-written...corner me at a JagFest and I'll show you a couple of betas where it runs at nearly twice the speed of the released game. It is not a slow engine.

 

As for Quake, I still think we should believe iD

 

Stone

[agradeneu]

@Stone

 

Iron Soldier is slow too BUT not choppy.

I think adequate frame rate wouldn't hurt AvP's suspense that much?!

 

If AvP was designed to be choppy.....it appears to me as more or less a general idea for all Rebellion games.

Thus Checkered Flag is suspense racing

[Tempest]

Thus Checkered Flag is suspense racing

 

HA!

 

Tempest

[ZylonBane]

@Zylonbane: If reasoning is dogmatizing than Im glad that Im not up to your definition of "reasoning".

Reasoning is (among other things) basing predictions on empirical data. The primary bottleneck of implementing Quake at a playable framerate is the full-screen, 100% textured all-polygon world that it presents.

 

There are very few games on the Jaguar that texture-mapped everything. Hover Strike CD and Skyhammer are generally regarded, by fans and developers alike, as about the best the Jag can hope to do when it comes to texture mapping. Games like Doom/Wolf/AvP are irrelevant to this discussion because their engines rely on flat perpendicular surfaces and a fixed player view angle.

 

So given that Quake requires a fully textured-polygon environment, and given that the only Jag games to do this run sluggishly at best, it is entirely reasonable to predict that Quake on the Jaguar would be a very slow, very unsatisfactory experience. Never mind the crippling lack of mouselook.

 

There are no crafty little hardware/software tricks that will suddenly grant the Jag the ability to do freeform texture mapping as well as a Playstation. It all comes down to brute force, and the Jag simply isn't fast enough.

 

 

Stone, holy crap, are people still confusing movement speed with frame rate after all these years? If the AvP beta genuinely runs faster, it's because it's not processing AI for hundreds of Aliens every second.

[Stone]

Stone, holy crap, are people still confusing movement speed with frame rate after all these years?     If the AvP beta genuinely runs faster, it's because it's not processing AI for hundreds of Aliens every second.

 

It's a fair point that the AI routines being processed are less complex (hell, it's the 68K, it's reasonable enough to assume everything slows down when you add stuff, I know it happens to me ) but I've been specifically told, by the coders involved, that the movement speed was dropped for the final release. I've not played the final version extensively, so I don't know how often you have framerate 'issues', but it certainly doesn't seem vastly different in the final version to the beta (and there are moments when everything slows down). If I missed someone mentioning the framerate being slow rather than the movement speed, sorry, I just tend to assume when people say 'speed' they're referring to how fast the Marine scoots about, which was definitely changed.

 

No need to at me for honest mistakes, I'm perfectly capable of admitting I can be wrong

 

Stone

[goatdan]

The thing that no one seems to be considering is that there is a lot of factors involved with both SkyHammer and Hover Strike that would not have been involved with Quake. Both SkyHammer and Hover Strike process HUGE areas of land at once, while most of Quake's landscape takes place inside buildings, and there were not too many angles in the original version.

 

Using AvP and DOOM as benchmarks is, in my opinion, a really poor way of comparing things. If we look at early PSX software and compare it to software that was recently released, there is a huge difference. Both AvP and DOOM were the first projects done by certain groups of people (Rebellion and iD, respectively). Other than DOOM's network errors, DOOM seems to operate nearly perfect at all times. AvP's engine seems to chug, either for atmosphere reasons or for AI reasons, who knows... But even Rebellion stated that they were planning on making AvP 2 for the Jaguar CD -- a unit that is much more crippled when it comes to memory and processing...

 

Which also happened to have a better, second version of Hover Strike on it.

 

The point that I'm trying to make is that the Jag's hardware was being utilized in new ways literally as the development went. Stating that Quake could never be run on the Jaguar is a very bold statement to make, especially because iD themselves said that it would've been handled by the Jaguar.

 

Quake ran on computer hardware without 3D graphic cards at 75 MHz (while also running OS junk) and did just fine. I think it would do the same on the Jaguar.

[ZylonBane]

But even Rebellion stated that they were planning on making AvP 2 for the Jaguar CD -- a unit that is much more crippled when it comes to memory and processing...

 

Which also happened to have a better, second version of Hover Strike on it.

The Jaguar CD is a storage device, period. The only thing it adds to the Jaguar is more data for games, and load times. The improvements in Hover Strike CD's renderer were due solely to greater programmer experience.

 

I never said the Jag couldn't do Quake. I said that it couldn't do Quake well.

 

The worlds in HS/Skyhammer may have been huge, but their clipping horizon was quite short. Also, being set outdoors at night, they often could leave large portions of the screen blank. Since Quake is mostly set indoors, it has to paint the entire screen almost every frame. So I'd say it's a tossup which game is slinging more polygons at any given moment.

 

Quake was a DOS app, so it had very little OS overhead to deal with.

 

The fact that id at one point said there was going to be a Jaguar version of Quake is meaningless, because this statement was issued before Quake's design was even finalized. In fact, I'll end this message with the words of John Carmack himself:

 

The jaguar CANNOT make a fully textured, full screen, full resolution game that runs at 30 fps.  The bus will simply not take that many accesses.  The 64 bit bus will let you do really fast shaded polygons, but texture mapping is done a single pixel at a time.

[Gregory DG]

I think I even ran Quake on a 60 Mhz Pentium I. Unfortunately, it wasn't very playable because the screen had to be reduced to the size of a postage stamp...

[LinkoVitch]

But even Rebellion stated that they were planning on making AvP 2 for the Jaguar CD -- a unit that is much more crippled when it comes to memory and processing...

 

Which also happened to have a better, second version of Hover Strike on it.

The Jaguar CD is a storage device, period. The only thing it adds to the Jaguar is more data for games, and load times. The improvements in Hover Strike CD's renderer were due solely to greater programmer experience.

 

I think the point here was that half Decent 3D was possible even with the added crippling effect of using the JagCD.

 

I think end of day, most if not all 3D games out there for Jag (possibly with exception of BS) are 1st generation games, so still quite rough. As time went on it may have been more feasible to have a game like Quake on the Jag as new tricks/ideas emerged and coding skills improved. Granted it wouldn't be like running it on a P166 or with Hardware 3D support, but would probably be akin to Doom on Jag vs Doom on PC.

 

Things like writing the whole engine in optimsed assembler would no doubt give it a boost.

[IronMongeR]

Saturn & N64 Quake were great. I think Jag would really have struggled to run a worthwhile version.

[Goochman]

The Jag could def do a port perfect version of Quake with a window this size:

 

[]

 

[Punisher5.0]

Battlesphere is able to maintain 30fps because the background is simple, there is little to no texturing, and the ships are usually far enough away that you can pull level-of-detail tricks to reduce the poly count to something tiny.

 

BattleSphere runs most of the time at 60 fps. And IIRC Thunderbird said at one point that each of the bases has as many polygons as a mission in Hover Strike has. Now don't hold me to that but I remember him saying something like that. That's pretty impressive.

 

@JagChris: I remember Thunderbird saying that too about Doom. That would be awesome to see!

[LinkoVitch]

Why is everyone so obsessed with Polygon's ? what do they matter! they have gone! we should be counting the polyhere's

[Tyrant]

I must be an idiot for getting involved here but there are some very stupid statements in this thread...

 

Dedicated 3D Hardware... huge bits of the Jaguar graphics subsystems were designed for throwing around gouraud shaded 3D using the gpu and blitter together, at 4 pixels per write. Yes the same chips can be used for 2D (and were designed to be) so technically its not dedicated, but you do have hardware specifically designed for 3D, even a matrix multiplier in hardware, so please, dont say the Jag wasnt designed for 3D. It was. It wasnt designed for texture mapped 3D no, and it is somewhat lacking in gpu local ram to do any texturemapping in, but, if gpu code could run reliably from main ram I think the Jag could handle texture mapped 3D better than it can, but it really does need significantly more ram and extra hardware maths to do it nicely.

 

Various times in this thread people have said "look at this game, its slow, the programmers were incapable of making it fast"... now not counting the fact that avp, doom, and wolf3D are all raycasting games and not polygon shifters (I dont consider doom to be a raycaster but its close enough for now), why would you assume that just because somebody didnt make something good/fast/fun/whatever, that they were incapable of doing so if given unlimited time and experience? It seems obvious that very little thought has gone into most (but thankfully not all) of the posts in this thread.

 

Im sure there were more things I wanted to rant about but thats all I can remember for now .

[Stone]

But even Rebellion stated that they were planning on making AvP 2 for the Jaguar CD -- a unit that is much more crippled when it comes to memory and processing...

 

Which also happened to have a better, second version of Hover Strike on it.

The Jaguar CD is a storage device, period. The only thing it adds to the Jaguar is more data for games, and load times. The improvements in Hover Strike CD's renderer were due solely to greater programmer experience.

 

See, by making sweeping statements like this you seriously weaken the impact of any further arguments you may make. The major disadvantage of the JagCD from the programming standpoint is that while you have to be maintaining a large data buffer in RAM to get any decent speed (as in fact you should be doing in cart games), the speed at which you can refill said buffer is greatly reduced by comparison to doing it from cartspace. What this probably means for you game is that without clever segmentation strategies and predictive loading, you'll end up having to keep large amounts of level data as well as your engine code in RAM, simply to achieve acceptable access speed. This could easily eat 25-50% of your RAM, which in turn gives you much less scratch space in which to store your various buffers and do calculations, which in turn makes things much less convenient when compared to a cart game. All this is also ignoring the effect on the bus access speed of streaming CD audio at the same time, which slows everything down significantly...it's a miracle we have any impressive CD games (Battlemorph!) at all

 

Stone

[Paolo]

Hey, Stone,

It seems that this JagCD is a wild beast to program. But I think that it will be very rewarding a good programming job with it, considering what can be done with all that space (hear the echo? )

I wonder if Atari developed tools for that predictive loading thing and all good strategies for enhancing the jagCD programming experience...

[Bill Loguidice]

@Dragonforce

 

I dont know which Doom youre playing but I think its just right on the Jaguar. BTW I dont like Wolfenstein as it makes me motion sick.

 

No music though, let's remember. I think Wolfenstein 3D was perfection on the Jaguar. Anything higher than that beyond AvsP was probably too much for the system overall... I'm sure Quake could be attempted, but at what cost?

[ZylonBane]

And IIRC Thunderbird said at one point that each of the bases has as many polygons as a mission in Hover Strike has.

I doubt he said any such thing, since BattleSphere supports a maximum of 256 polygons per object.

 

See, by making sweeping statements like this you seriously weaken the impact of any further arguments you may make.

Nothing you said contradicted my argument. In fact, it only strengthened it. The higher-performance HSCD renderer is truly the result of greater programmer experience.

[JagChris]

I love a good debate. How about you Link?

[Gunstar]

Well, first off, the Jag doesn't have any dedicated video RAM at all...unless you're gonna count the scanline's-worth of buffer built into the OP

 

I'd disagree with people alagging off AvP as well...it was designed to be slow, for suspense reasons. It's nothing to do with the engine being craply-written...corner me at a JagFest and I'll show you a couple of betas where it runs at nearly twice the speed of the released game. It is not a slow engine.

 

As for Quake, I still think we should believe iD

 

Stone

 

Not to mention that most people play as the Marine, which is intentionally slower because the Alien and Predators are a faster species and they wanted that disadvantage in the marine character; try playing the game as the Predator (runs about twice as fast) or the Alien (runs three times as fast as the marine frame rate!)

 

The Jag's processors are plenty powerful enough if programmed correctly (parallel processing), it's weakness was the limited ram; the 3DO has 1Meg of video ram, and the Saturn and PSX are similiar in the extra ram department. PLUS, you have to remember that these Jag games were done in a limited memory cartridge and if the Jag/CD had lasted longer, the games could be much better on the cd media with a possible 790Megs to store data and textures and whatnot that the cartridges never had. Top programmers (iD) have stated in interviews that the Jag could do Quake, they also said that if they could have redone Doom from the ground up, after learning the Jag better, that it could have had a much higher frame rate AND resolution (especially if more meomory of the cd were available). Everyone MUST remember that the Jag's life was very short and almost EVERYTHING on it is first generation, only a couple of games were second generation games, and they don't neccesarily show the Jag's best either. Most likely we will never know, since most homebrew developers don't have the time, money or resources to do great 3D games like this, that's why we see games like Painter, becuase it takes far less time, money&resources to do than a 3D game. But I'll still hope that years down the line new games will still appear just like with the 2600 or other old Atari systems and maybe one day more top quality 3D games will surface...especially for games like Doom or Quake were the source IS available to port (or upgrade in the case of Doom).

[ZylonBane]

Not to mention that most people play as the Marine, which is intentionally slower because the Alien and Predators are a faster species and they wanted that disadvantage in the marine character; try playing the game as the Predator (runs about twice as fast) or the Alien (runs three times as fast as the marine frame rate!)

For love of god, WRONG WRONG WRONG! The frame rate does not change depending on which character you're playing. The movement rate does. I can't believe people are still screwing this up years after AvP's release.

 

Top programmers (iD) have stated in interviews that the Jag could do Quake

No, they've said the Jag can't do Quake. Didn't you read the John Carmack quote earlier in this thread?

[JagChris]

Anyone remember the Gameboy Color for the SNES? Remember how it was a cartridge that fit into the SNES with the circuitry it needed to emulate the Gameboy? Then you fit the Gameboy cartridge in there and played it on your SNES?

 

Anyways, I was thinking something like that would of been cool for the JagCD. Instead of emulating anything, it would of pumped up the Jags main RAM and Video RAM and then you plug in the little memory track inside of it to save CD games. Ah, to dream huh?

[Punisher5.0]

And IIRC Thunderbird said at one point that each of the bases has as many polygons as a mission in Hover Strike has.

I doubt he said any such thing, since BattleSphere supports a maximum of 256 polygons per object.

 

I can't believe it but I actually found that post by looking just once.

 

Truth be told, games like Hover Struck clip the horizon so close to the viewer that they basically don't render all that much. When you get right up close to a starbase (or several of them) in BattleSphere, you're basically looking at more polygons onscreen than the typical planet-based scene in other games.

 

Close enough

 

Here's the link to the whole thread

[saturndual32]

Well, i think someone said that the Jag and the Falcon were pretty even when it comes to overall power, so i found this page http://membres.lycos.fr/pmandin/en/ports.html

Here you will find pics of Quake on the Falcon, as well as ports of other FPS. Just watch carefully the systems requirements, you need at least 14 megs of ram, ouch. And while the screenshots looks pretty good, i guess we would have to see it on movement.