Magic Carpet on Jaguar CD? Alex Trowers Lead Designer answers my question.

[JagChris]

 

I'm not going to get into this with you. You have show how much of a total asshole you are several times. Anyone taking you on face value (Disky, beware) deserves all they get. Frankly, I'm amazed you are still allowed to even post here.

 

You've been taking jabs at me for a while now. I didn't say anything to you. Not this time until you jumped in here taking pokes. And not the last few times you've jabbed at me in conversations I'm not even in. Chill out. You're falling apart. Go relax. It's just the internet.

[+CyranoJ]

 

You've been taking jabs at me for a while now. I didn't say anything to you. Not this time until you jumped in here taking pokes. And not the last few times you've jabbed at me in conversations I'm not even in. Chill out. You're falling apart. Go relax. It's just the internet.

 

LOLs. Annnd Ingore list.

[Lost Dragon]

My personal thanks again to both Alex+Mike for taking time out to help answer my questions and extra thanks to Mike for going the extra mile to post on here just what was attempted, how far along it got and hardware issues encountered.

Sorry to see the thread go rapidly south since....and briefly before, but for those who are interested in the story behind the attempted evaluation of wether it'd be feasable (even if it was just one coders efforts) it's very much appreciated.

[Goochman]

I just want to make a point that Magic Carpet was one of those games I had to check off my bucket list and complete - but I also want to point out the last level was COMPLETELY UNFAIR! - I think it took me over 3 hours to finish it!

[sd32]

>I am a little confused. I thought he said Atari was working on the Jaguar version of Magic Carpet? So who was working on it? Him? Atari? Both?

 

Mike Diskett here, just to clear this up.

 

I spent a couple of days evaluating Jaguar for magic carpet before later moving onto porting Theme Park /Syndicate to it.

 

This evaluation was done in my own time and wasnt anywhere near as complete as I would have liked but I did at least get all the gameplay and render code running without any texturing. Zero optimisation and the 3d projection was all running on the 68000 (which is probably what you would have to do in a final build because the GPU would be busy drawing polys).

 

While I was porting theme park, atari bought the rights to magic Carpet (so I was told) to produce the game themselves, they could have been working on it internally or have hired a third party, at that point it was totally out of Bullfrogs hands.

 

The Jaguar struggled with Texture mapping because the blitter wasnt designed for it, even a gourad shaded poly needed the blitter to be issued draw commands line by line

With texture mapping you would have to do it all in Software, on its 'GPU' processor, this processor only had 4k for code and data and only had indirect access to main memory, it would have to keep stopping and dma'ing memory into its work buffer.

Mike D.

Thanks for sharing the info with us disky. So, in your opinion, with proper funding and time, do you think you could have gotten a Jaguar version of Magic Carpet that at least retained the essence of the original?. We all know it wouldnt be a perfect conversion, but like the Street Fighter 2 games on the SNES and Genesis, with the right compromises, they retained the overall feeling and look of the arcade game.

[JagChris]

Magic Carpet was an awesome game when it came out - still is fun to play as last year I decided to blast through the whole game - tough as nails but checked it off my bucket list

 

This would be a fun game to play on the Jag but alas no ST version to 'convert'

 

Just a warning - stay away from Magic Carpet 2 - utter crap.

They're selling them on gog.com! I'll get to play them finally.

[JagChris]

Oh God these controls...

[VladR]

Oh God these controls...

The controls can be brutal, initially, yes

 

You liking it ? How far are you ? How does the game look like for you (as you haven't played it back then, correct ?) ?

[JagChris]

Correct.

 

The game looks fine. Draw distance is short. I really don't need super flashy. I grew up in this era so I'm absolutely ok with it.

 

This landscape could be done I believe in the 'voxels' of the day.

 

Haven't gotten anywhere except dead. Attacked by Eagles. And generally receiving an ass kicking.

Edited August 24, 2018 by JagChris

[VladR]

It's unfortunate you didn't get a chance to experience the next-gen wow moment at that time.

 

Running Magic Carpet for the first time, I don't think there's been 5 other games in my life that delivered such wow factor and such amazing longlasting complex and brutally hard gameplay. Sir Molyneux at its best

 

Technically, you're right about the voxels, I just couldn't accept it for this game

 

 

While it might not look like it, the first 30 levels are just a tutorial

The real hell starts with Level 31, Idirya, the infamous Water level

 

gamers today would sue the company for mental damages, if you released this game today

[JagChris]

I mean the draw distance is short even for the era.

 

Yeah. I got this game and Soul Reaver. Which according to one source is the first PSX CD game to hide it's loading times successfully.

Edited August 24, 2018 by JagChris

[VladR]

is it ? I mean, it's an open-world, huge maps, and you have deformable terrain. Kinda hard to find comparable games. But, perhaps those consoles had similar games ?

 

I played a lot of flight simulators at that time (that's what drove all those crazy upgrades), and while those had much higher draw distance, their detail level was way way below Magic Carpet. And forget about deformable terrain. Or dozens of entities roaming about the map. Or 8 AI opponents systematically decimating all other opponents and creatures.

 

 

It's an incredible 3D engine. Especially in later levels, where huge swarms of bees alongside dozens other creatures roam the map in real-time, you throw a spell that smoothly starts flattening the hills down to the water level (with dynamic realtime reflections), on one side of the newly formed valley, the fire burns the trees, the mana explodes from the bee swarm that was just flying over it that particular moment, and on the other side of that valley, dragons attack the opponent's castle, which got leveled down by 1 level, with dozens mana balls slowly bouncing down the new hill and 4 baloons carefuly trying to catch them while they're rolling, all the while why you quickly swap between meteor spell you just threw onto the castle and lighting spell to zap the other opponent.

 

That something like that runs on 486, to this day escapes me. What other game of the era, even if it was on console, offered experience like this ?

 

 

Forget Abrash or Carmack. Whoever coded this is a GOD.

 

 

It's funny you would bring it up now - I was playing Morrowind on PS4 2 days ago and it reminded me how simple that game really is compared to Magic Carpet, as there was one scene with the castle on the hill that reminded me of MagiCarpet. Just very few (like, 5 at most) enemies on screen, with occasional human player showing up. Wouldn't Magic Carpet in current visuals be awesome ?

[Goochman]

It's unfortunate you didn't get a chance to experience the next-gen wow moment at that time.

 

Running Magic Carpet for the first time, I don't think there's been 5 other games in my life that delivered such wow factor and such amazing longlasting complex and brutally hard gameplay. Sir Molyneux at its best

 

Technically, you're right about the voxels, I just couldn't accept it for this game

 

 

While it might not look like it, the first 30 levels are just a tutorial

The real hell starts with Level 31, Idirya, the infamous Water level

 

gamers today would sue the company for mental damages, if you released this game today

 

Magic Carpet was so good when it was released that I had to finish it as a bucket list item. My 486-33 at the time and Trident VGA card couldnt keep up with the game. Turns out the game is somewhat locked in its max performance as I ran it under DOSBox on my current rig and the last level was like .01 frames per second even when I tried to speed it up.

 

Speaking of the last level, I dont see how anyone finished that back on a 486. I think there were 6 dragons, swarms of bees and mana bubbles flying all over the place. I believe it took me over 2 or 3 hours to finally win the damn game.........but it was worth it

[Lost Dragon]

@ValdR:

 

Don't give Peter Molyneux too much credit for his role on Magic Carpet.

 

Glenn Corpes coded the engine and the game itself was thanks to the hard work of a big team:

 

 

Engine Programmed by:

Glenn Corpes

Executive Producer:

Peter Molyneux

Management:

Les Edgar

Producer:

Sean Cooper

Lead Programmers:

Sean Cooper, Mark Huntley

Programmers:

Simon Carter, Phillip Jones

Lead Artist:

Findlay McGechie

Graphics and Art Concepts by:

Paul McLaughlin, Michael Man, Mark Healey, Eoin Rogan, Barry Meade, Tony Dawson

Introductory Sequence by:

Chris Hill

Introductory Support by:

Michael Man, Paul McLaughlin, Eoin Rogan, Sean Masterson

Level Concepts and Architecture:

Sean Masterson

Level Design:

Barry Meade, Alex Trowers, Jonty Barnes

 

It used to annoy seeing Molyneux interviewed in UK magazines when the companies games were the results of so many talented individuals.

 

Had the same with Hide Kojima. .think C+VG were the only magazine i saw interview a leading female artist who worked on MGS..

 

Magazines just lover to focus on the figure heads i guess.

 

When he slagged off every game the company had produced in an issue of the official Dreamcast magazine, whilst hyping DC Black And White, which Sega got tired of waiting for and canned..

 

I lost a lot of respect for him.

 

Don't even get me started on what he promised but failed to deliver in Fable and Fable II....

Edited August 24, 2018 by Lost Dragon

[+CyranoJ]

Black and White was horrible - The entire game was in the first level, after that it had nothing.

[Lost Dragon]

Claims were that Dreamcast Black And White would offset the reduction in graphical detail, by having more spot effects than in the PC version.

 

Plus it would use the Dreamcast internal clock to simulate the passing of time.

 

If you were online with your DC it would check the weather maps for your area and have accurate weather in the actual game related to where you were playing.

 

A lot made of the support for the DC keyboard and mouse. .though another source from the company let slip they thought it very unlikely Sega would ship copies of the game with these.

 

It was just classic Molyneux hype.

 

Playstation 1 version also planned?.

[Lost Dragon]

Bit of info from Magic Carpet coder Glenn Corpes for VladR:

 

Glenn:I wrote the 3 DDA (U, V and shade) affine texture mapper for Magic Carpet to replace my original vertical scanning voxelish engine (never released but there is a movie of it inside the flight simulator ride in Theme Park if anyone is sad enough to look).

 

It was reused for Hi-octane, slightly upgraded for Magic Carpet II and Syndicate Wars and rewritten with optional PPro optimisations and a few new modes for Dungeon Keeper.

 

At some point along the way it should have had subpixel

accuracy added.

 

IMO the way the lack of z-buffer forced us to use smaller polygons paid off pretty well in making Dungeon Keeper at least look different.

 

Carpet 2 used an updated version

of the carpet engine, Hi-octane used an early version of the Keeper

engine but apart from that there is no common code outside the polygon

routine.

 

Populous 3 uses another variation of the same texture mapper.

 

I've always found that Glenn spoke very openly and happy to admit when others work had surprised him...

 

The Saturn version of Loaded for example, being closer to the PlayStation version than he had expected.

 

He was among the earliest coders i saw stating that custom lighting and transparency effects like those on the PlayStation, were possible, but they were just very 'expensive' in terms of system resources.

[Lost Dragon]

I hadn't seen Phase Zero developer comparing the Magic Carpet engine to their own before,if it's of interest to anyone, a few comments from them':

 

On question of if the game used a true Voxel engine:

 

' Nope,it’s not voxel, it’s interpolated height field’s. No 3-d pixels here ;)'

 

'It (the confusion) stems from the confusion created by the Nova

Logic people. Thier game, and our game do not use voxels, we use height fields.'

 

'Magic carpet uses a height field connected by polygons, Commanche uses a height field rendered by drawing lots of 2-d rectangles.

 

Phase Zero uses interpolated height fields (similar to magic carpet, but instead of large patches of texture mapped polygons, it’s tiny patches of goraud shaded thigies. They count on the detail in the texture maps to make upfor the relatively low detail of the height field, we use a height for every ‘pixel’ in our texture maps, and then smooth(interpolate) inbetween them to avoid the jaggies Different techniques, cool results either way.'

 

Source:

Jeremy Gordon

President/Senior Programmer

Hyper Image Productions, Inc.

Edited August 30, 2018 by Lost Dragon

[Stage_1_Boss]

Years later I was working at Krome studios on MS Arcade (the xbox 360 arcade game emulator) were I got to write emulators for atari 2600 and arcade temptest/battlezone, and Jaguar was on the roadmap for that and I was really looking forward to delving back into Jaguar hardware, but alas MS canned Arcade.

 

Mike D.

I'd just like to say thank you, I had a blast with Krome's Game Room on 360.

[JagChris]

Bit of info from Magic Carpet coder Glenn Corpes for VladR:

 

Glenn:I wrote the 3 DDA (U, V and shade) affine texture mapper for Magic Carpet to replace my original vertical scanning voxelish engine (never released but there is a movie of it inside the flight simulator ride in Theme Park if anyone is sad enough to look).

 

I wonder if this is shown in the Jaguar version. Has anyone seen it?

 

I haven't really played with my copy yet.

Edited October 29, 2018 by JagChris

[PeterG]

I wonder if this is shown in the Jaguar version. Has anyone seen it?

 

I haven't really played with my copy yet.

There are no movies in the Jag version.

[agradeneu]

is it ? I mean, it's an open-world, huge maps, and you have deformable terrain. Kinda hard to find comparable games. But, perhaps those consoles had similar games ?

 

I played a lot of flight simulators at that time (that's what drove all those crazy upgrades), and while those had much higher draw distance, their detail level was way way below Magic Carpet. And forget about deformable terrain. Or dozens of entities roaming about the map. Or 8 AI opponents systematically decimating all other opponents and creatures.

 

 

It's an incredible 3D engine. Especially in later levels, where huge swarms of bees alongside dozens other creatures roam the map in real-time, you throw a spell that smoothly starts flattening the hills down to the water level (with dynamic realtime reflections), on one side of the newly formed valley, the fire burns the trees, the mana explodes from the bee swarm that was just flying over it that particular moment, and on the other side of that valley, dragons attack the opponent's castle, which got leveled down by 1 level, with dozens mana balls slowly bouncing down the new hill and 4 baloons carefuly trying to catch them while they're rolling, all the while why you quickly swap between meteor spell you just threw onto the castle and lighting spell to zap the other opponent.

 

That something like that runs on 486, to this day escapes me. What other game of the era, even if it was on console, offered experience like this ?

 

 

Forget Abrash or Carmack. Whoever coded this is a GOD.

 

 

It's funny you would bring it up now - I was playing Morrowind on PS4 2 days ago and it reminded me how simple that game really is compared to Magic Carpet, as there was one scene with the castle on the hill that reminded me of MagiCarpet. Just very few (like, 5 at most) enemies on screen, with occasional human player showing up. Wouldn't Magic Carpet in current visuals be awesome ?

Honestly the Playstation version looks and feels terribly outdated compared to later offerings from 1995 onwards. Quite impressive for it's time but i would be more cautious with hyperbole for a height map engine with 4 Color sprites animation for moving objects, running barely acceptable on an 486. Tie Fighter from 1994 actually IS a proper 3D engine and I'm more impressed with it than MC.

Edited October 29, 2018 by agradeneu

[Lost Dragon]

Jeff Minter was a Magic Carpet fan:

 

- D2K is not going to be a first-person-perspective game. I wish to

preserve the essence of the original game which is a horizontally scrolling

game. There will be bonus rounds which include 3D effects though.

 

- BTW, one of the best 3D shooters I have played is the new Bullfrog game

'Magic Carpet'. It's awesome. Highly recommended to any of you with a PC..

 

\

(:-) - just had my morning game of Defender

/

[Lost Dragon]

Might as well throw these in here.

 

Developers who attempted Voxel type enines on later consoles with mixed results:

 

 

"Been there, tried that myself. Implemented by height mapped

terrain on the Saturn and PSX. Sure it was a nice Gouraud shaded

16 bit, but slowwwwww... Problem with any kind of "voxel" type calc on the game platforms is you cannot really use

the polygon engine. That is the only advantage that the console

have. Without it, using only the CPU, the PSX is a slow 486 running

at 33 mhz. Saturn is a little better with 2 cpu's but still to slow.

 

For consoles, stick to polys. That's seems to be the best option.

 

Jeff Lander

(Accent Media Productions)

 

 

 

For anyone whos interested in new graphics technologies, we've put

a downloadable Win32 demo of a 3D sprite system on our Web Page...

 

 

The demo includes a couple of Voxel Sprites, plus a player program,

all wrapped up in a small Windows program.

 

It isn't as feature-rich as we'd like it to be - we've got more

ideas for optimising it and adding features, but haven't had

time yet. It was going to be part of a current product of ours,

but we needed it to work on PSX, which has proved difficult.

 

Hope you like it!

 

Martin Green

Director

ATD Research

Edited March 19, 2019 by Lost Dragon

[82-T/A]

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