Would you play Resident Evil on the jag?

[Lost Dragon]

I just struggle to get my head around the whole PC/PS1 to Jaguar downgrade concept.

 

PS1 hardware arrived later, very focused on texture mapped 3D at the expense of 2D, unlike the approach Jaguar designers took.

 

A lot better in terms of development tools to boot.

 

Always viewed the Jaguar as another device from that difficult transition period from DSP chips on SNES and MD carts to PS1 and onwards era hardware.

 

CD32/Jaguar/32X and Original design spec Sega Saturn..none really ready for the direction the games industry was going to take in terms of 3D graphics.

 

I honestly cannot give it the mythical status some give it.

 

I bought mine on day 1, enjoyed a lot of it's games, but was well aware of it's short comings.

Edited May 18, 2018 by Lost Dragon

[Flojomojo]

I honestly cannot give it the mythical status some give it.

 

I bought mine on day 1, enjoyed a lot of it's games, but was well aware of it's short comings.

 

Are you talking about the Sony Playstation, or the Atari Jaguar here?

[ColecoGamer]

Capcom was able to crame Resident Evil 2 into an N64 cartridge, and the game was every bit as good as the PS1 version. So yes, I could see this working (and myself playing it) on the Jag.

Edited May 18, 2018 by ColecoGamer

[Lost Dragon]

Are you talking about the Sony Playstation, or the Atari Jaguar here?

I think i can honestly say in hinsight, both.

 

Both were bought by myself on day 1, got far more from than say my day 1 Sega Mega CD purchase, but both had some serious short comings.

 

My Jaguar never broke down on me,my Playstation suffered from the FMV skipping and loading issue faults caused by the lens holder warp and at that time, you didn't expect such an issue from a Sony electical product.

 

Sony had resources that dwarfed Atari, Commodore and Sega combined,so the Playstation was always going to succeed.. but there was no escaping it was weak at 2D and even it's polygon pushing power had issues with textures warping.

 

But a lot of it's supposed Killer Apps, left me cold.

 

How Tomb Raider with those awful controls became the phenomenon it did, always surprises me.

 

F.F.7 i completed and enjoyed but it's not the classic many refer to it as.

 

Alien Trilogy was awful, yet press went Ga-Ga for.

 

Friends of mine were playing titles like Wipeout 2097 on their PC's and you could easily see the gulf between then cutting edge PC hardware and the Playstation and i an glad PS1 Unreal never made it,it wouldn't of been the same experience.

 

Things like MDK and Quake II,once thought 'Impossible' on PS1, i bought an enjoyed,but knew weren't the full fat experiences.

 

Maybe it's because the Jaguar had a far shorter lifespan or it was Atari's last console or both or something completely different, but it seems to attract a lot of comments about how it could of competed with Saturn and Playstation on a technical level if only....

 

I just cannot buy into that,personally, too many commercial coders have made their feelings known and yes, new work arounds etc have been found since then which if had been known then,would of resulted in better 3D performance as would of putting more work onto the custom chips and not doing so much on the 68000 and so on and so on..these aspects have been discussed to death over the years.

 

But the simple fact remains..

 

Atari weren't Sega by time of the Jaguar and didn't have a fraction of even Sega's resources.

 

Sega themselves from a hardware point of view found themselves caught out badly in area of 3D performance, thinking only they only had the 3DO to beat.

 

The Playstation took the entire industry by surprise and the rest as they say was indeed history.

[Lost Dragon]

Capcom was able to crame Resident Evil 2 into an N64 cartridge, and the game was every bit as good as the PS1 version. So yes, I could see this working (and myself playing it) on the Jag.

Angel Studio's openly talk here of the sheer amount of work required to convert the game from PS1 to N64 and it's budget and how people like Factot 5, who'd assisted in the N64 sound hardware design, had been a great help it ensuring it was possible:

 

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131556/postmortem_angel_studios_.php

 

Atari didn't have the resources Nintendo had for hardware design, game budgets or teams like Angel Studio's.

 

Article makes for interesting reading when you look at task facing converting code from sytems of that era.

[Flojomojo]

You believe what you want, I'm not interested in counterfactuals. If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we'd all have a merry Christmas!

 

[Lost Dragon]

Speculation and talk of what could of been on the Jaguar,have gone hand in hand with the discussion of the Jaguar for as long as i care to remember, i'm not attempting to change that, just get a slightly better understanding of why,after so many years, it shows no signs of slowing down.

 

Amount of testimonial evidence from coders then and now who have worked on the hardware would of taken the shine off it perhaps?

 

Guess not..

 

The Angel Studio's article just offers a nice grounding in the realities of conversion work.

[swapd0]

Also the people forget that the jaguar can't expand textures from 2, 4, 8 bits to 16bits when you use the blitter, so you must store the textures as 16bits graphics and that takes a lot of memory.

Edited May 19, 2018 by swapd0

[Fredifredo]

Highlander engine ...

[JagChris]

Highlander engine ...

Probably not a great choice.

 

http://atariage.com/forums/index.php?app=forums&module=forums&section=findpost&pid=2232936

 

If Resident Evil where to be made for the Jag it should probably be considered being put in for an alternative branch off story. Instead of just playing the same game that came out on other systems.

 

Or just a Resident Evil knock off game that is also a survival horror.

[+Stephen]

Highlander engine ...

Oooh - 8 fps with 10 polygons on screen. Yeah - wicked engine there

[VladR]

Probably not a great choice.

 

http://atariage.com/forums/index.php?app=forums&module=forums&section=findpost&pid=2232936

 

If Resident Evil where to be made for the Jag it should probably be considered being put in for an alternative branch off story. Instead of just playing the same game that came out on other systems.

 

Or just a Resident Evil knock off game that is also a survival horror.

Knock off sounds just about right. I was just looking at a difference between Alone In The Dark 3 & 4, and it looks like Jaguar can technically pull off a very solid visual compromise between the two, even though AITD4 came out for systems like Dreamcast and PS2 - it just looks (from a quick glance - I could be wrong here) like those are still using character assets from PS1 (though with additional effects like bilinear filtering and such added).

 

- CD Version

- Backgrounds rendered at 720x240 at 65,536 colors

- Characters flatshaded or gourard shaded, though gourard would probably require lower resolution, which would mean scaling of the character's framebuffer via Objectprocessor (to match the background size)

- Engine could have an in-game option of texturing - for the brave player willing to accept the associated framerate drop But at least it wouldn't be forced

 

 

 

From art asset production standpoint, a competent 3D artist can generate a lot of rooms in, say, 3 months. I've seen it with my own eyes, when I was paying 3D artists when we were working on PC stuff a decade ago. First 3-4 weeks, he keeps creating and texturing all small in-room objects, but once those are done, it takes 2-3 hrs, to get a scene with nice lighting and camera set-up - so easily 2-3 rooms a day, 50-60 a month.

 

And let's not forget there's dozen DVDs for 3d artists out there, with already premade, pretextured 3d meshes, so once could entirely skip the initial generation of meshes, and just start combining them into rooms right away (but, of course, then the game looses its soul).

 

 

So, it's not entirely impossible. I'd even argue, that it's borderline Kickstartable for $5k-$10k (as long as the artist doesn't request a market U.S. salary, of course). Hell, there's plenty European 3D artists, that are charging 1,000 EUR/month, and I'm sure if one posted a project on one of those Indian sites, the art could be outsourced to some start[v]ing artist for half that. Of course, finding ~150 people willing to pay up for this specific game would be another -uhm- challenge

[JagChris]

There has gotta be some pretty good procedural texturing techniques out there by now that could mimic a lot of the textures needed.

 

Better chance of fitting something on cartridge. You can compress and recover a procedure far better than an actual image.

Edited May 21, 2018 by JagChris

[VladR]

There has gotta be some pretty good procedural texturing techniques out there by now that could mimic a lot of the textures needed.

Sure there are. I've done a lot of procedural texturing back in the day, in the pre-shader era (DirectX 8.0), but those algorithms ran for about a second. On ~1.0 GHz CPU. Sure, it was all C++, no hand-coded ASM, but you can easily imagine it would run more than an order of magnitude slower on jag. But, theoretically, doable during loading time, though certainly not per screen, more like per area (e.g. every 10 screens or so).

 

Here's the screenshot of the textured terrain I was mentioning above, so you get an idea of variability of the procedural texturing:

 

So, while doable, it would merely be replacing one portion of art pipeline. If I am paying the artist, he'd better haul ass and deliver textured meshes

 

 

Better chance of fitting something on cartridge. You can compress and recover a procedure far better than an actual image.

Yes, I did mention that I can render some snapshot, on demand, using my 3D engine. That's totally doable. During one second, you can get textured/lightmapped scene (possibly with some simple shadowing), antialiased in a postprocess shader (that I already have).

 

It's just not going to be anywhere near the visual quality of 3dsmax static render, that can use any number of movie-style effects (from radiosity, soft shadows, through volumetric lighting, to subsurface scattering). It would probably look close to something like Quake1/2, which is faaaaaar from 3dsmax static render.

 

But yes, it could fit the cart, and everybody would be able to buy it (compared to the few CD units out there).

 

 

 

On the topic of "playing" it - I'm afraid it couldn't possibly deliver the experience we first had with AITD. Few years ago, I played Resident Evil 6 - I prepared, played it at night, at dark, alone in room, with headphones. And nothing. It was horribly boring. I tried, like for 3-4 hours, but alas, nothing. Not a one twitch or scare. It was all so predictable, scripted, seen hundred times. And it was an actual Resident Evil game, which I'm sure had a budget of $10M+, with best level designers money can buy...

 

Dead Space, and few other games, set the bar so high last decade, that it's almost impossible to come up with some proper scare. So, regardless of how much money we'd throw at it today, as a horror game, it would still suck...

 

I would love coding it, as a mere technological exercise - to fit it onto a 6 MB cart. But I don't see, how, in this day and age, after having seen so many horror games fail on so many platforms, it could remotely present a proper horror experience for the player (unless they never played a horror game before)...

[JagChris]

Use procedural textures from the early 90s. Not modern ones.

Edited May 21, 2018 by JagChris

[VladR]

Fair enough, I would just generate much more lower resolution or could use simple blend-maps that are almost instant even for a jaguar, you just need a set of small base materials (say, 128x128, plenty of which would fit into 6 MB cart) and blend between them using those procedurally generated blend maps.

 

 

Now, what about the horror gameplay ? How would we actually deliver a non-laughable proper scare in year 2018, using game design of 1993 ? I'm sure out of ideas on that one...

 

I do know how it could work with Dead Space-style game - the moment you encounter the monster, the FPS camera becomes static till the end of fight, and all performance is transferred towards the 3D character animation, with player shooting at the plethora digits. But we already are doing that in this game (all powa goes towards 3d characters), yet we're missing the most important atmosphere element - the first-person camera.

 

 

Amazingly, Dead Space 1 still works even today, after a ~decade. It's obviously not as intense, as the first time, but it's still pretty darn good when playing at night with headphones, considering how old it is. Bonus experience if your dog suddenly scratches your foot or smacks you with his foot an hour into playing

[Lost Dragon]

@ValdR:Dead Space's origins actually go back to 2006 and the classic Xbox:

 

 

Loved the original, it's a far better experience than the 2 sequels that followed it.

 

Resident Evil 6 is dire..takes too much inspiration from likes of Gears Of War etc, Resident Evil 5 is better, but still weak.

 

Have you tried the likes of Deep Fear on Saturn or Cold Fear on PS2/Xbox ?

 

Both heavily flawed, but some interesting concepts in both for survival horror games.

 

Ditto The Thing PS2/Xbox?

 

The trust/paranoia aspect whilst flawed, was a nice concept.

 

There were some ambitious ideas thrown around for a number of years.

 

Call Of Cth:Dark Corners Of The Earth on Xbox was another superbly atmospheric game:

 

Edited May 21, 2018 by Lost Dragon

[Lost Dragon]

@ValdR:Atmosphere wise i also enjoyed Clive Barker's Undying:

 

 

And Realms Of The Haunting:

 

Far better than some of the crap Capcom served up in later Resident Evil games.

Edited May 21, 2018 by Lost Dragon

[VladR]

@ValdR:Dead Space's origins actually go back to 2006 and the classic Xbox:

 

 

Loved the original, it's a far better experience than the 2 sequels that followed it.

 

Resident Evil 6 is dire..takes too much inspiration from likes of Gears Of War etc, Resident Evil 5 is better, but still weak.

 

That DeadSpace is looking absolutely incredible for original XBOX (had no idea they had the build for old XBOX). They were totally using DirectX 8.1 early shaders - that is not a fixed-function pipeline by a very long shot !

 

 

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought DS2/3 weren't nearly as good as DS1, same for RE4 vs RE5 and RE6. I too liked RE5, but RE4 for me remains unsurpassed...

Same for PS2 Thing and Call of Cthulhu.

 

 

Resident Evil 6 is dire..takes too much inspiration from likes of Gears Of War etc, Resident Evil 5 is better, but still weak.

 

Have you tried the likes of Deep Fear on Saturn or Cold Fear on PS2/Xbox ?

 

Both heavily flawed, but some interesting concepts in both for survival horror games.

 

Ditto The Thing PS2/Xbox?

 

The trust/paranoia aspect whilst flawed, was a nice concept.

 

There were some ambitious ideas thrown around for a number of years.

 

Call Of Cth:Dark Corners Of The Earth on Xbox was another superbly atmospheric game:

 

Realms of the Hunting was also good, but I think I liked Blood 1 better - the audio work there was stunning, even though it was pixelated as hell!

 

It's a very hard genre to deliver a proper experience.

 

I think it would actually be easier (player-experience-wise) on jaguar to do something like PC's AVP Classic (with appropriately downscaled visuals, yet delivering the dark look and endlessly spawning aliens algorithm), as that split-second twitch concept will forever work because you basically never know which direction the alien will come from - it can be any wall, floor, ceiling, ventilation shaft, direction, paths vary (even for aliens coming from same spot), alien randomly jumps from any point, speeds up coming towards you, it's as unpredictable as it gets. It's basically an AI with 10 behaviours, and engine just cycles them endlessly. I'd argue that this would even work without textures - as long as the corridors are dark, and you see the silhouette of alien (3D mesh, of course) jump against few lighter walls, that's all that matters for the experience, after 5 minutes player won't notice it's flatshaded.

 

 

As a coder you spend 3 months working on that algorithm, after that it's just level design...

Edited May 21, 2018 by VladR

[Lost Dragon]

@ValdR:

My survival horror comments might be more suitable outside of a Jaguar thread .They are more aimed at pointing out advances in home console technology being rewarded with far weaker survival horror games.

 

You make a very good point about Rebellion's PC AVP being a good source of inspiration for use of dark corridors to instill a sense of dread.

 

Argonaut's Alien Reserection on PS1 used the medium just as well.

 

Dead Space II initally had some promising ideas. .clever use of your environment. ..blowing out windows to vent necromorphous into space etc, but it just degenerated into a gore fest/room clearing exercise.

 

Clear use of audio as well is key to games like these.

[JagChris]

I didn't realize that Clyde Barker made a horror game. Though not like alone in the dark it's a 3D shooter.

 

But I have to grab it. Never played it or Alice before and they have a combo pack for sale.

Edited May 21, 2018 by JagChris

[Austin]

I didn't realize that Clyde Barker made a horror game. Though not like alone in the dark it's a 3D shooter.

 

But I have to grab it. Never played it or Alice before and they have a combo pack for sale.

 

Another one he worked on is Jericho (2007).

[VladR]

@ValdR:

My survival horror comments might be more suitable outside of a Jaguar thread .They are more aimed at pointing out advances in home console technology being rewarded with far weaker survival horror games.

I don't think we're off-topic here when discussing such an important element of RE-like games : the horror atmosphere. There's only so many games that actually delivered that experience (unlike, say, FPS or racing genre, which are much easier to accomplish, from game design standpoint)

 

 

You make a very good point about Rebellion's PC AVP being a good source of inspiration for use of dark corridors to instill a sense of dread.

I'm just guessing here, but even flatshaded, with some depth-based shading (e.g. distance darkening fog), and drawing lights as bright thin polygons against dark walls (with related brightening of those walls) could instill some atmosphere.

 

Cannot recall right now if there were FPS games in past that would be flatshaded, probably not. As even on PC, wolfenstein used raycasted texturing. I need to experiment with this, as it could be a relatively original visual style...

[VladR]

Oooh - 8 fps with 10 polygons on screen. Yeah - wicked engine there

Well, my engine is not a miracle for 3D characters either, but despite not having a separate character drawing codepath I simply had to try importing one of my older 3D meshes from PC. The original is 1,800 polys, and I quickly reduced it to 548, inevitably visually butchering a lot of the detail in the process (but it's ok for this quick performance test).

 

Of course, if a 3D artist started from scratch, with such polygon budget, such a character can look indeed very nice.

Testing different versions of same mesh, I'm getting 50 fps at 548 triangles, and 60 fps at 400 triangles.

Note that this is merely using the environment render codepath (from Stunrunner), and as such, does not have caching of vertices (which are shared 4x, yet right now are loaded/stored/transformed to/from slow main RAM 4x), so spending a day or two implementing local caching would most certainly result in additional performance boost.

 

 

But, it gives us some real number as to what is realistic to expect from jag. Even using a single-threaded renderer, we can have 30 fps with 2 characters, and about 800 triangles total. If we used DSP for processing the second character, we could have a polygon budget of about ~1,400 triangles at 30 fps. Not bad. Definitely visually closer to AloneInTheDark4 on Playstation than AITD3.

 

Of course, this assumes using memory intensive keyframe animation (not IK/FK, which incurs heavy cost per each polygon). But, with a CD version, we really only need to store in RAM 1 background image (300 KB), some audio (200 KB), 2 Framebuffers (2x150 KB), leaving us with over 1 MB for keyframe animation frames.

 

Totally doable and absolutely within the reach of jaguar - so quite easy from technological perspective. Still, very hard from game design perspective though (invoking the horror atmosphere)...

[Lost Dragon]

@ValdR:

 

This one took a slightly more comical visual approach, lot of bright colours etc, but still managed to convey a creepy atmosphere.