Assembler games member has Sonic xtreme POV stuff

Jollyroger · Feb 19, 2015

This might be the first time ever the POV version of Sonic Xtreme has been displayed running on a Saturn outside of POV or STI.

I do not have a video capture device, so I cannot capture a video of it (yet), but below you can see a picture I took of the POV Xtreme tech demo running on my Cartdev/Mirage.

It clearly shows that, while it was nowhere near a playable game, as a tech demo it definitely shows POV would have been more than capable of producing a reasonable version of Sonic Xtreme for Saturn, if they had enough time...

Enjoy...

Jolly

Andrew75 · Feb 19, 2015

Sexy !

Saidian · Feb 19, 2015

Fantastic stuff!

Spinksy · Feb 19, 2015

wow.

Beltway · Feb 19, 2015

Incredible work, jolly!

SoNick · Feb 19, 2015

That's amazing, Jollyroger! It's greating seeing this after all of these years! :D

High Fidelity · Feb 19, 2015

Amazing! Great work guys.

Rockman Zero · Feb 19, 2015

Oh that looks beautiful!

InvisibleUp · Feb 20, 2015

This might be a silly question but where exactly did that Saturn build come from? Was it with all the other stuff?

TrackerTD · Feb 20, 2015

As a Saturn fanatic, I'm incredibly excited to see this. It looks so... beautiful.
Amazing work Jolly, this is nothing short of incredible.

Jollyroger · Feb 20, 2015

Thanks for all the comments. Of course I cannot take any credit whatsoever, I am just rebuilding (and fixing some issues) the code that someone else wrote, and running it on real hardware.

This is really interesting though, I had discovered this build in the archives, but I didn't expect it to be this nice...

Xeal · Feb 20, 2015

Jollyroger said:

Thanks for all the comments. Of course I cannot take any credit whatsoever, I am just rebuilding (and fixing some issues) the code that someone else wrote, and running it on real hardware.

This is really interesting though, I had discovered this build in the archives, but I didn't expect it to be this nice...
Click to expand...

It's a mighty fine job you did there. Really great work in putting this back together.

OKei · Feb 20, 2015

Such a monumental development. I can't wait to play a fully functioning public build.

Andrew75 · Mar 30, 2015

Okay guys some NEW news!
Since I lack the time to make a proper post at the moment, I'm just going to Quote JollyRoger's posts from Assemblergames.com.
To go along with Jolly's news, I'm also preparing a new cleaned up level pack containing more 037 compatable levels to go with the last v037 engine release.

Some more news: finally I got the sync code working properly, the engine now doesn't crash trying to force the VDP1 to draw while the framebuffer is changing without proper management of the end of write flags in the vblank interrupt.

I actually changed the code to not use the VBE erase/draw pass in the vblank, as from my tests I remember it was more beneficial to use a large polygon to clear the screen instead, and it makes the code less dependent on synchronization with the vblank, which in turn frees up some CPU cycles to do some work.

I also tried to do a full double buffer overlap between the VDP1 drawing and the CPU writing the new display list, but it was a naive attempt, as the code is really not written to access memory properly and in the end it made the frame rate actually slower due to contention between CPU and VDP for access to the framebuffer SDRAM.

With that largely out of the way, I fixed another giant issue in the polygon camera projection code, which did not perform any clipping whatsoever. For now the fix is just to identify troublesome polygons (exceeding the VDP1 coordinates region) and not draw them, eventually I will write a proper clipping fix.

The engine now seems to be relatively robust, using a very basic level it doesn't crash all the time, I can actually move Sonic around the level (slowly at times due to frame rate).

Depending on the amount of polygons and their size, the frame rate varies between 10 and 25 FPS, even 30 when the screen is mostly blank.

The way the rendering engine is written performs very poorly on the Saturn, which needs to overlap as much as possible CPU work with the VDP1, so eventually we will have make some pretty radical changes to speed it up.

Finally I can now resume working with Andrew75 on loading more complex levels, but first I would like to try to make a very simple "as-is" release, similarly to what we did for v37.

After the work on loading other levels I will get to profiling which parts of the code suffer the most and start tuning.

Stay tuned...

Jolly
Click to expand...

The plan is to progressively try to make it more playable, once the "as-is" code is in a state where it doesn't break all the time, but I it will likely never get to the level of AXSX, as I am doing this mostly for preservation rather than developing the game, and I just don't have the time.

Something I was considering is that perhaps at some point during the summer I could try to expose some of the engine internals through an API and release a binary that people can link other C code to, or embed in the engine a LUA interpreter so that people can add a better control system and perhaps AI for the baddies.

Just thoughts for now, but this would allow me to release something that people can extend/mod, without releasing the source code.

As for the editor, now that I am a bit more relaxed (fixing the Saturn interrupt data races is not too fun) we can prepare the v37 editor (on OpenGL) for release too.

Jolly
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SoNick · Mar 30, 2015

That's good to hear! :D Having an LUA interpreter is a great idea and I'm looking forward to seeing the release that has that feature!

Jollyroger · Mar 31, 2015

SoNick said:

That's good to hear! :D Having an LUA interpreter is a great idea and I'm looking forward to seeing the release that has that feature!
Click to expand...

Just to make it clear, at this point it is just an idea, it may never happen.

I am just thinking about how/whether to let people customize the engine in the future, given that I will not release the source code.

Jolly

Assembler games member has Sonic xtreme POV stuff

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