Presenting...

you know I'm kidding :P

 

Is something like the attached image considered substantial?

Hello, I am the 'chris coffin' that worked on sonic xtreme.
When/If anything can be released by me personally depends on number of factors I cannot discuss at this time.
I can try to answer if possible, any questions regarding my involvement in sonic xtreme or any saturn hardware questions related to sonic xtreme.
I have been talking with hxc for awhile now and I am in contact with some of the other devs for sonic xtreme and releases may be done by proxy or from an individual if possible and appropriate.

Please be patient and respectful, I personally have a very busy schedule as do others (still making games for a living) so there is no timeline for responses or disclosure of 'materials'.

I'll try to answer the questions/specualtion in this thread preceeding my post regarding what hxc has found when/if I can .
For starters you may want to check out sonic xtreme on wikipedia, as I made some personal annotations regarding the game development history there to clear up some specualtion that my work was based on NiGHTS code for example, which is wasn't. Yuji Naka and I didn't exactly get along through my correspondence with him :P

-Christina Coffin

 

Whoa! Dude! Welcome to S2B!

I can't thank you enough for the effort you are putting into this, especially with a full schedule of game development. I can say on behalf of S2B that we all are greatful for your contribution and possible future contributions.

 

Amazing, thank you so much for taking the time out of your schedule to register and post.

I, and I'm sure the rest of the members of the forum completely agree with Vangar. Presumably you're the one HXC got the screenshots from, and for that I can't thank you enough. Fantastic stuff.

 

Welcome to the board

Firstly I really hope you've backed up all that stuff you have! CD-Rs tend to deteriorate quite quickly, especially older ones.

But I'm really glad you've come here, I can imagine a site of hardcore sonic fans could be quite intimidating! However S2B is a mature place, we're not the kind of people to put unfair pressure on you, but still... share whatever you can! ^_^

 

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: YESSS :o

Welcome to the board =P

 

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Yes that version had lighting in it, sonic was make entirely from gouraud shaded polygons except for the pupil of his eyes which were a 4bit texture. And yes the lighting looks nights-ish, because I always used a contrasting color backlight for each light colored source (done on the dsp and I think I limited it to 3 max) to help sonic from looking flat.

That 'pudgy looking sonic' in that screenshot at the bottom looks like its from one of the early bonus game builds - notice the lack of lighting which makes him look very flat compared to the other shots.

 

The models in the sdk actually came from my builds of the sonic game because they demonstartated the rendering trick 'bug' where if you collapse opposite points of a saturn quad you get a triangle with one edge that's collapsed in and smoothly concave in screenspace at the pixel level.

To keep the edges around sonics eyes/stomach smooth at any size onscreen this trick was used. For the eyes the white polygons were rendered first and then special concave quads in blue, collapsed to these special triangles were drawn afterwards to 'trim' the excess white away.
The resulting effect allowed the camera to zoom into sonic's face for cutscenes and still look good.
The back of sonics body used quad polygons warped in a similar fashion to keep him from looking too low poly. Some special sorting tricks had to be worked out to keep sonic looking right at all angles because we were warping the quads to be very non planar.
The polygon sonic in those shots was modeled by an artist/designer originally from sega of japan that worked on a saturn arcade game called dynamite deka (renamed die hard arcade in the us)
Sonic only had aout a dozen bones in his skeleton so the transformation overhead and subsequent rendering (due to being gouraud shaded and not textured) was faster than decompressing one of sonic's 8bit palettized sprite frames from memory.

There were a couple other saturn rendering tricks rolled into xtreme before it was cancelled, such as environment mapping, done by using a paletted texture and hacking some mode bits to force gouraud shading and wrap any object in what appeared to be a 1x32 gradient environment map texture, a couple games like the port of wipeout used this.
Another trick implemented was proper, arbitrarily oriented transparent polygons on vdp1 that could be gouraud shaded and didn't have the doubled up transparent pixel artifacts, so we didn't have to resort to using the dithered 'screen mode' which looked awful in saturn titles.

After extreme I worked on R&D and assisted SoA/SoE/SoJ developer support regarding the saturn hardware so these discoveries were passed on and implemented in some late generation 3rd party titles and 1st party works like burning rangers so the time invested in xtreme did not feel like a total loss.

 

Hello, Christina, welcome to the board.

Thanks for everything.

 

ChristinaCoffin for Tech Member plz =P

Ahem, welcome to S2B
hxc briefly gave me a snippet where you mentioned the .mdl and .sg3 model formats. Viewing the formats is no problem since we have the Saturn SDK as well, nor is converting them to conventional formats a problem since the format was already documented way back: http://jamesseph.phpwebhosting.com/ms/sg3.txt
The .mdl format compiled or decompiled can still be read as well, so that presents no problem.

So if you need any 3D data de-coded, you know who to call =O

 

Wow, thanks for everything Christina, you're really helping a lot.


I wonder who was that guy from Dynamite Deka...

 

By the way, if Sanik fails, you can still call me when you're in trouble like, cracking compression formats or things like that.

Talk about shameless plug :P

 

You did? I forgot :P

 

Wow, this is all just too amazing.
Welcome to S2B, Christina!

 

Haha, drx and I are such goofs :P

But some serious questions now!


That image is from the Beta of Sonic X-treme that was sold to the highest bidder

I've always wondered about the map under the stage - since it's the floor outline for the Metal Sonic city stage. Was there a way to access it in the beta? Or was it just "there"

My next question goes into SEGA's model format... SEGA from the start of their 3D days till 2003 would compile their models from .c files (.mdl format for example) making it a pain in the ass for us later to rip these models since data is kept connected with RAM based pointers and not file offsets so the only way to read models is to rip them using algorithms which doesn't usually produce a full model... I just want to know where this idea came from, or who the bastard was that made my life harder by telling everyone at SEGA to compile their models =O

 

I believe his name was kunitake aoki - I might have the name reversed, you can't tell with some japanese names. I think this is common knowledge but softimage was used to model polygon sonic and the boss models. 3d studio was used to render the sonic sprites and other sprite art used in the main game.

 

Yes that image underneath the polygon terrain is the vdp2 plane for the metal sonic boss fight stage. Its 'just there' most likely because I just needed something to help align the vdp2 plane with the vdp1 polys and I wasn't concerned about having the right vdp2 tiles loaded.
Its appearance is tinted blue because the other vdp plane that's drawing that vista-pro style rendered mountains(programmer art lol) extends all the way down the screen with a blue gradient and transparency between both layers was enabled. That bottom 3d plane in later builds was aligned and transformed properly to link up with vdp1 polygons in the game with 3d sprites along the horizon to extend the apparent rendering distance of the world. Using some vdp1+2 tricks you could also cut out holes or make apparent dips+valleys in the vdp2 plane to make things more interesting visually.

If you look at a game like NiGHTS, what they did was draw their base heightfield terrain layer out alittle father, fogged it and made it hilly and downward sloping before they stopped drawing it so you wouldn't have such an unsightly horizon in your game. This is what xtreme did as well because it looks good, hence all the parallels and speculation that we had NiGHTS source.

That build is a very old one and its what I call a tester app which only has a fraction of the game's source in it because I would do a lot of tweaking/compile/rerun to refine the look of the game which didn't require everything in a level to be loaded. Surfing around in the sn debugger to mess with things could actually take longer than just a compile+rerun. cd emulators were slow too which is why alot of sega model formats spit out data in .c and .h files so you'd sacrifice ram during development by compiling in your biggest assets for the sake of less load time.
Think of that version as kind of like a little sandbox for sonic to play in, just contains the ability for sonic to move around, collect rings and a few other things. I used some code overlays which made that possible and it saved me alot of time.

 

Haha, well it's good to know that whoever bought the Beta can't do much with it. I was expecting to see them "drop down" to the Metal Sonic stage to show off, but I'm glad that ain't possible =P

Geez, thank God for emulators nowadays =O
I remember when I used to do Dreamcast Dev for the fun of it - would go through like 30 CDs per day - no joke

Did you do all your testing with CDs? Some devers would burn the game maps and stuff to one CD, and then send the newly made app through a serial cable or so, speeding up development tremendously. Although, when the betas were found, all they contained were data and no binary code

So I'm wondering if you had any builds like that - with only game data and no binary code? I think they had a special name for the system... although it might have consisted of cartridges instead of CDs ... bleh, my memory's fadin