Sonic Xtreme E3 1996 promo video

That's sort of interesting because you can hear Sonic getting hurt. But I don't see any obstacles there that look like they would hurt him. Maybe another demo was there?

 

Well I find it interesting that the videos they had at E3 were demoing the crappy Saturn port of Ofer's engine that turned Sega off to his ideas on the Saturn, but then the playable demo was Coffin's more tame engine. That is the same engine you see in that tech demo that was released of Xtreme on ASSEMbler some time ago. Both used the same set of sprites (supplied by Ross Harris) but were otherwise totally independent of one another in development and concept for much of their early lives. It was only after Sega realized "Oh shit we've got two development teams splitting their resources to work on two totally isolated versions of the same game" that they started pressuring the two teams to come up with some sort of meshing of the two, leading to the use of Ofer's engine for general levels and Coffin's for bosses. Still, I have to wonder if that was the plan in 1996 at E3 or if they were just like "Hey let's show videos of one version and demo the other"

 

Both the PC version (fisheye engine) and Saturn boss engine were initially meant to be used together in a single game.
The PC version with Fisheye only got about 1 fps on Saturn hardware according to Mike Wallis.
There was a recorded interview on Sonic Cult some years back with Mike Wallis, some of it went in depth with the development time line, and the 2 engines.
Anyways it was not until later that one of the visiting sonic team members ( forgot who) pointed out which version of the engine should continue. that being the Boss engine for saturn.( make this one the game he said, ((Err or something))
Skip ahead to after Xtreme was canceled, Chris and Ross continued work on the PC version to pitch at Sega's PC division.

I'm missing lots of details here, but yeah I'm lazy today hahah.

 

Well the Saturn version of the fisheye engine was ported by some crappy third party group, hence why it ran so badly, they didn't understand the peculiarities of the Saturn nor the depth of Ofer's engine as they had not been involved with either. As for the boss engine I swear Coffin had been working on that one after seeing the NiGHTs engine (yes seeing, although it's been dispelled before I'll say it again, the NiGHTs engine itself was never a part of the Sonic Xtreme codebase, it was just inspiration). Ofer and Chris's team on the other hand were working on the PC version, Sega wanted the two squashed together, but that didn't happen after that company botched the Saturn port of Ofer's engine, so they carried on independently until the project died :P

 

Late reply, but after watching both videos a second time...I think you're right. I think the Jade Gully footage in the trailer was clips of gameplay of different areas in the game not shown in the promo. It doesn't help that the promo shows a bunch of these gameplay clips for a few seconds in rapid succession. :/

 

I was speaking with One Member of STI today and asked him about PC version and Saturn version of Sonic Xtreme
( sorry no names as we don't want a Ross Harris repeat disappearance, you know the one where so many Rabid sonic fans bombarding him to death with emails causing us to lose out on some premium information)

Anyways heres what my guy had to say......

That video is a compilation. The regular levels are Senn/Ofar's PC version, while the boss level shown is Coffin's running on the Saturn.

Ofar Alon originally convinced Roger Hector to let him develop the game on the PC,
because he felt the development would go faster, since he already had a lot of the tools created (level building, etc).
But the problem was when the game was ported to the Saturn,
it only ran at a few frames per second. Alon could could not achieve what he originally said he could—his code was far too bloated and did not capitalize on the strengths of the Saturn's architecture,
such as the dual processors and separate sound processor.

So Coffin took over the task of getting it to run on the Saturn, which he did from the ground up.

 

Update, Turns out Coffin successfully ported the fisheye engine over to Saturn with a good FPS, this was after E3 1996.

 

I have a feeling that his info will eventually get lost forever unless it gets wikied...