ss_lemonade
Member
Anyone remember that secret comic you could find in the game? Was that a saturn exclusive easter egg?
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(DF) Quake on Sega Saturn - the impossible port
- Thread starter Renekton
- Start date
Yes, the US version have less graphics details and some missing replay angles.
http://segaretro.org/Sega_Rally_Championship
Hmm, it has just occurred to me that I own both the JP and US versions of Sega Rally but never thought to compare them. I need to check this out for myself.
Good. Then please share the differences because I couldn't find them but my Google skill is worse when I'm on mobile...
A Black Falcon
Member
Yeah, as much as I dislike Sony, it is ironic that the Lobotomy games are so often mentioned as these great examples of what the Saturn can do, while actual Lobotomy people say that working with the Saturn was difficult and they could have done Quake better on PS1 had the project been approved...
The Saturn is capable of some impressive things in 3d and I like that quads result in fewer warping textures than you see on the PS1, but the PS1 has the better 3d tech. Of course, then the N64 is better than that. But for systems in the same generation, how good the developer is at getting the most out of a system matters a lot -- think of how many people prefer Saturn Quake to N64 Quake. (As much as I love the N64 I'd rather just stick with the PC version I think, both console ports are big downgrades...)
IronicSonic
Member
That some great news! Speaking of Yu Suzuki, Ferrari 355 Challenge is quite a feat for Dreamcast in those days too. I remember reading something about the arcade machine running on 4 dreamcast or something like this
The link is broken sadly
Edit nvm
Dragon1893
Member
16 PS fanboys downvoted the video
Glad to hear more are on the way.
Glad to hear more are on the way.
The link is broken sadly
Strange, it's working normally here.
I think I will have a look on both versions on my modded Saturn to see If I can still find some diferences when playing on the real hardware. It will be a good test of my new scaler since I mostly used it with the Mega Drive. I will post later if I find the diferences, but I remember that the japanese version looked better, or maybe I'm just senile.
EDIT:
Or maybe not? Even the wikipedia entry of the game mention that there are differences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Rally_Championship
It works for me.The link is broken sadly
Clear
CliffyB's Cock Holster
Completely untrue as far as I know. Sony had nothing whatsoever to do with porting Q2. It was a job-for-hire deal between us (Hammerhead) and Activision.
If anyone from DF wants the skinny on the development process of that particular title, feel free to PM me. It was quite a time we had
Any general questions from GAF, fire away.
LFMartins86
Member
I just want to personally thank you for giving me and my friends an amazing summer. Quake 2 and multitap was the stuff of dreams.Completely untrue as far as I know. Sony had nothing whatsoever to do with porting Q2. It was a job-for-hire deal between us (Hammerhead) and Activision.
If anyone from DF wants the skinny on the development process of that particular title, feel free to PM me. It was quite a time we had
Any general questions from GAF, fire away.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Completely untrue as far as I know. Sony had nothing whatsoever to do with porting Q2. It was a job-for-hire deal between us (Hammerhead) and Activision.
If anyone from DF wants the skinny on the development process of that particular title, feel free to PM me. It was quite a time we had
Any general questions from GAF, fire away.
To this day, I almost cannot believe Quake II ran as well as it did on PSOne. I am interested in how you guys and gals got the hardware to sing...
The physics in Half-Life 2 seemed to kick its ass.
Clear
CliffyB's Cock Holster
Octant sort-lists.
Every object was stored as 8 seperate painter-order draw lists, with the correct list to draw for correct appearance being applied according to camera orientation.
The editor we built for it did an initial pass to try and figure it out programatticaly, but it still required a team of around a dozen "mappers" who's job was to laboriously hand tweak everything so it looked ok.
Do that for the scene objects and every key-frame of every enemy, and you have a very fast brute-force rendering method.
Obviously the sheer size of ID's original maps (which we stupidly tried to replicate) were far too large to fit into memory, and so after conversion and simplification had to be broken down in PSX-sized chunks. Each chunk was further sectored using a portal-based occlusion system to further reduce the draw overhead in real-time.
Other than that, just the usual PSX bits of business; surface subdivision where possible to get around the lack of perspective correction on textures, UV decals and lighting, the works. We already had a pretty solid tech-base from Shadowmaster the year before, but a huge amount of effort was poured into a bespoke unified editor program unimaginatively titled GLMFC (for OpenGL in a MFC wrapper) which basically did everything from world geometry construction from prefab chunks, lighting and texturing, level population, pathing and event triggering.
Bane of my existence for about 3 years lol.
LFMartins86 said:
Thanks for the kind words. I assume you had the first-party multi-tap? As I remember the Mad-Catz one having some weird issues due to it behaving slightly different electrically. That said, the 4x mouse/controller combo thing was more than a bit nuts
sixteen-bit
Member
Really neat video. The only Lobotomy Saturn game I have is Powerslave but Quake seems way more technically impressive.
A good game to compare ports across consoles is Nightmare Creatures (PS1, N64, PC).
The N64 port came after the PS1 original, and it holds up quite well. Aged better then other games on the N64 I would say. Texture resolution looks as good as the PS1 version surprisingly, and they have AA turned off, giving the game a cleaner look then most N64 games.
The game itself reminds me of Dark Souls in some aspects, hah. It's pretty cheap and easy to get a hold of.
Then there is Nightmare Creatures 2 (PS1, DC).
The N64 port came after the PS1 original, and it holds up quite well. Aged better then other games on the N64 I would say. Texture resolution looks as good as the PS1 version surprisingly, and they have AA turned off, giving the game a cleaner look then most N64 games.
The game itself reminds me of Dark Souls in some aspects, hah. It's pretty cheap and easy to get a hold of.
Then there is Nightmare Creatures 2 (PS1, DC).
Fantastic video. I loved the Saturn for what it was and really loved Lobotomy for their Duke Nukem port. Had great times with that, via co-op on Netlink. I never owned Powerslave but it was infamous among Saturn owners at the time. And I was able to download a Powerslave save via Netlink so I played tons of Death Tank on the Saturn. I got the XBLA remake but it unfortunately just didn't feel the same. Since I played Quake and Quake 2 on the PC I never experienced it on Saturn, so I really appreciate this video. Totally looking forward for more like this.
Did you ever do one for Doom 64? If not, I'd like to see that be made into a video, since that's widely acknowledged as the best version of Doom available.
Had to watch this. Fantastic video. So did Ezra leave the industry altogether after Lobotomy closed? I'd hope he landed somewhere else to continue his magic.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
It was worth it. I remember putting the disc inside my PS2, with plenty of time spent on Quake II on PC before and having read from magazines how good the port was... and it was still a surprising fun and great looking experience
.When you say every object, do you mean dynamic ones or some static ones too? What kind of morphing/effect would you apply to each of the 8 version of the rendered object to make it look correct (how did this speed it up)?
Were there major cases in which the solution egregiously broke down that you can remember?
Is the number of 8 lists chosen due to the painter acceleration structures in the PSX chip? How did you find the GTE matrix accelerator? Did you find it limiting at all?
Sorry for the barrage of questions
.jizzlobber
Member
I'm still a freaking southpaw because of Saturn quake and duke, there was an option to use a control method with the 3d controller... I believe it was called jevons after one of the lobotomy devs.
So you used the analogue stick to aim/look and the face buttons to move around.
Sounds clunky but it worked.
Quake 3 on the dreamcast had a similar option, so by the time halo was out I was a committed southpaw, and I've struggled with it ever since.
Lobotomy were gods, exhumed was amazing at the time.
So you used the analogue stick to aim/look and the face buttons to move around.
Sounds clunky but it worked.
Quake 3 on the dreamcast had a similar option, so by the time halo was out I was a committed southpaw, and I've struggled with it ever since.
Lobotomy were gods, exhumed was amazing at the time.
the androgyne
Member
They're really quite similar, the most obvious difference is on the hairpin turn on Forest track, which has a big mountain sprite in the distance in the Japanese version, nothing but sky in the others IIRC. To be honest i never noticed any other differences. The Japanese PLUS version is identical visually to the standard Japanese release too... but it supports the 3d controller, so it's the best one to get... and xband it seems, though i was never able to that out.
spazchicken
Member
Those projects ultimately ended Lobotomy, he says.
I guess they were very expensive to port and nobody bought them?
I guess they were very expensive to port and nobody bought them?
MrCunningham
Member
Completely untrue as far as I know. Sony had nothing whatsoever to do with porting Q2. It was a job-for-hire deal between us (Hammerhead) and Activision.
If anyone from DF wants the skinny on the development process of that particular title, feel free to PM me. It was quite a time we had
Any general questions from GAF, fire away.
I'm going by rumours, but it is nice to hear actual information from one of the people that worked on the game. The optimization that your team did for the game really is quite impressive.
GrantDaNasty
Member
Awesome video, hope to see it become a series.
Some of the crazy ways developers managed to port certain games to platforms that on the surface should've never have been able to handle them are super interesting.
I actually watched the Exhumed/Lobotomy video done by Leadbetter a while ago, got me fascinated with looking at Saturn games, specifically ports of 3D games to see how the Saturn managed them.
Some of the crazy ways developers managed to port certain games to platforms that on the surface should've never have been able to handle them are super interesting.
I actually watched the Exhumed/Lobotomy video done by Leadbetter a while ago, got me fascinated with looking at Saturn games, specifically ports of 3D games to see how the Saturn managed them.
Futurematic
Member
Just chiming in to add my support of more DF retro talk & face-offs. I absolutely love this stuff, and the discussion on this thread has been great. I knew some of the Saturn technical problems, but looking over that dev doc PDF
yikes.
Clear
CliffyB's Cock Holster
It was worth it. I remember putting the disc inside my PS2, with plenty of time spent on Quake II on PC before and having read from magazines how good the port was... and it was still a surprising fun and great looking experience
When you say every object, do you mean dynamic ones or some static ones too? What kind of morphing/effect would you apply to each of the 8 version of the rendered object to make it look correct (how did this speed it up)?
Were there major cases in which the solution egregiously broke down that you can remember?
Is the number of 8 lists chosen due to the painter acceleration structures in the PSX chip? How did you find the GTE matrix accelerator? Did you find it limiting at all?
Sorry for the barrage of questions
Remember there's no z-buffer on PSX, so in order to make an object look solid you need to apply the painter's algorithm to each face and draw it back-to-front relative to the camera. Rather than compute this every time for each face, we basically pre-generated 8 lists per object -be that a chunk of world geometry or an entity within it- then simply selected which one of the lists to use.
As a system it really had no major drawbacks other than the inherent limitation of the painter's algorithm which struggles with complex shapes. 8 angles pretty much covers all cases but its very manpower intensive to prepare it as what it entails is someone sitting there and manually selecting faces and pushing/pulling them around in the order until you have something that looks right as much of the time as possible.
Where stuff was problematic we either removed or rebuilt to work around the problem.
It was a pure code/data solution that required no hardware assistance, very old school in its reliance on pre-calcing as much as possible to reduce cpu overhead.
To clarify a bit on why 8 lists, its really simple if you imagine you are rendering a cube. A cube is made up of 6 faces, each made up of 2 triangles. Now if you look diagonally down on the cube's corner from above and build your face-draw order list, you are 1/8 of the way there.
Do all 4 corners looking diagonally down, you are half way. Then repeating the process looking up from below covers all bases because looking directly parallel can always be covered by the corresponding diagonal orders.
what kind of secret comic?
MrCunningham
Member
Gamasutra has a really good postmortem on the game here: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131556/postmortem_angel_studios_.php
I also did a small comparison between the character models and textures for the pS1 and N64 versions of RE2:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=197988793&postcount=212
I didn't get into huge detail. But this does still show some differences between versions.
afternoon delight
Member
This kind, as seen on Youtube in its entirety.
I played the everloving hell out of this port when I was a child and loved every minute of it! Thank you for sharing.
OMG I never realized Leon has pants textures repeated on the n64!
MrCunningham
Member
Yeah, Angel Studios cut a lot of corners on the character model textures just to fit it all into a 64MB cartridge. There are also a lot less texture variety and smaller resolution textures on the zombies and they do tend to repeat generic textures. The 2D backdrops are a mixed bag, sometimes they do get close to being the same resolution as their PS1 counterparts on the N64, but other times they do take a nose dive in resolution quality.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Labor intensive yes, but it shows what ingenuity can do and it paid off on screen.
After Lobotomy he ended up at Snowblind and worked on Champions of Norrath, then he went indie and I think he's still indie to this day. He put out a version of the Saturn Quake/Duke minigame Death Tank on XBLA a while ago.
Excellent. Looking forward to more retro videos.
Would love to see something like VF1 compared on SS, model 1 and 32x.
VF2 analysis would be great also for SS.
And Daytona would be ace also.
Virtua Racing ports.
Tomb Raider 1 ports.
I have to ask, did Leadbetter or anyone see anything regarding the mythical VF3 versions on the SS?
I haven't actually played it, but the PSX version seems like the best look for Quake 2. It strikes a nice balance between the excessively washed out look of software mode and the garish colored lighting nightmare of the hardware accelerated modes of the PC version. That lens flare effect is goofy as hell though.
As I understand it they massively underbid for those ports and they were not the biggest sellers in the universe. Though was spelled the ultimate doom for Lobotomy was a game called Shadow Madness.
Never knew about this. Only knew about that hidden game Death Tank. Never did unlock it...was it ...use|destroy all toilets in Duke, have save files present of two of the ports?
HueyFreeman
Banned
Great video - DF's been doing a tremendous job recently.
I hilariously remember getting really hyped after reading about this port, being a saturn fanboy - though despite never having any interest in quake. Lo and behold, I got it for Christmas and never played it.
I've just always really hated Quake's world and visual style. *shrugs*
dark10x, more retro please!!
I hilariously remember getting really hyped after reading about this port, being a saturn fanboy - though despite never having any interest in quake. Lo and behold, I got it for Christmas and never played it.
I've just always really hated Quake's world and visual style. *shrugs*
dark10x, more retro please!!
metsallica
Member
Just wanted to point out that dark's video led me down a Ezra Dreisbach hole, which led me to Top Gear, which led me to N64 racing games (oh man were there tons of good ones, so much nostalgia), which led me to running Beetle Adventure Racing through my Framemeister. Wow does that game still hold up; currently listening to the soundtrack on YouTube. Sad that in my research almost every studio associated with awesome N64 racing games (Paradigm, Boss, Snowblind, etc) is now defunct, but it was a long time ago now I suppose...
I'd love for digital foundry to do comparisons of games for the PS2 / Xbox / GameCube generation. I love reading your articles / watching your videos when I go shopping for used games I know which version to get.
ss_lemonade
Member
We only found it by accident. I think you had to walk through a glass window or something in one of the later castle like levels
IronicSonic
Member
SS VF3 was real and I think they did show footage at one (closed-doors?) event in Japan but I believe the footage of "SS VF3" shown publicly outside of Japan was confirmed to be a mockup based on the arcade version and not representative of the actual SS version.
One of the rumours about SS VF3 was that it used a co-processor cartridge that went in the module slot. I wonder if that same module was being used for SS Shenmue?
One of the rumours about SS VF3 was that it used a co-processor cartridge that went in the module slot. I wonder if that same module was being used for SS Shenmue?
Saturn Shenmue runs on a stock sega saturn
Additionally, there are at least 2 versions of VF3 for the Saturn that were shown off at different times. Yakumo at Assembler was present for one demonstration.