Road Rash pre-alpha on Jaguar at 30 fps

[LinkoVitch]

I'd suggest you finish and test the game with the likes of Skunk/Alpine/FlashCart before committing any money/time to board manufacture. Will allow you to better target the physical devices required based on size etc, and save you stockpiling a bunch of hardware you don't immediately need. Would suck to buy up a bunch of EPROMs to then find out you need larger capacity ones etc, or different boards because you decided on some extra features and now need 6MB support.

[+madman]

Worrying about production before a game is anywhere near finished. Where have I heard this before?

[Paul Westphal]

In any project, you have to consider everything, especially when you are the only one on it ?

[VladR]

In any project, you have to consider everything, especially when you are the only one on it

Yeah, but you can't really expect madman to understand the concept of "time is money"

 

Given how many moving pieces (that need to be ordered and shipped) are involved in cart production, I am actually starting quite late. He completely missed that

 

But I'm not gonna make him happy by falling for that trap. He's gonna post shit anyway, because -as we all know- he's incapable of saying anything nice, but at least he's quite entertaining

[Albert]

Yeah, but you can't really expect madman to understand the concept of "time is money"

 

Given how many moving pieces (that need to be ordered and shipped) are involved in cart production, I am actually starting quite late. He completely missed that

 

But I'm not gonna make him happy by falling for that trap. He's gonna post shit anyway, because -as we all know- he's incapable of saying anything nice, but at least he's quite entertaining

 

This is true for everyone in this (and other) threads, but I'm calling you out here since you just posted this. Stop with the insults and name calling. Focus on your projects.

 

..Al

[WAVE 1 GAMES]

This is true for everyone in this (and other) threads, but I'm calling you out here since you just posted this. Stop with the insults and name calling. Focus on your projects.

 

..Al

 

He never called anyone any names. He simply stated that Madman didnt understand.

[Albert]

He never called anyone any names. He simply stated that Madman didnt understand.

 

I also stated insults, and please don't defend this behavior.

 

..Al

[VladR]

He never called anyone any names. He simply stated that Madman didnt understand.

Thanks, but please, don't come to my defense. You are getting more than enough crapped on in your jagzombies thread (well, it's more like free-crapping-for-all, and obviously unmoderated), and I really hate you getting more here, because of me

Besides, I was being indirectly sarcastically provocative, just like madman.

 

I merely forgot, that I'm not allowed same liberties, silly me, so serves me right if I needed to be reminded

 

 

This is true for everyone in this (and other) threads, but I'm calling you out here since you just posted this. Stop with the insults and name calling. Focus on your projects.

 

..Al

Sure.

 

Peculiar timing, that response of yours, if I may say so.

 

It's 5 weeks before the PGRE retro show, and I was hoping we would talk there about my carts, now that I've been doing fulltime Atari coding for some time (and certainly will be for some time) and am close to first release. And if I don't hit any unsurmountable issues with cart production (it's gonna be my first time dong carts, so I don't know what I don't know yet), I certainly expect to have first small batch of carts there.

 

Nevermind, forget it. Back to coding...

[VladR]

On an unrelated note, I just saved almost 1 MB of cart space by doing a heavy refactoring or track generation.

 

Instead of just loading 3D mesh, straight from 3dsmax, I have finally implemented procedural generation of the track at run-time

- compression factor 26:1, so when previously a 2,000 piece long track took 100 KB, now takes just less than 4 KB

- this allows me to do things like other major racing games - horizontal mirroring (already implemented) and reverse mirroring (in the middle currently)

- just the mirroring will multiply the total amount of tracks by a factor of 4, which should bode well for the main gameplay mode

[WAVE 1 GAMES]

I also stated insults, and please don't defend this behavior.

 

..Al

Not trying to be THAT guy. Not trying to piss you off and not trying to get banned but Al you really should apply that same attitude towards Madman as he has hurled more insults to more members and produced more negativity than anyone in this entire forum. To come to his aid of all people is kind of shocking.

 

Im just saying be fair

[Albert]

Not trying to be THAT guy. Not trying to piss you off and not trying to get banned but Al you really should apply that same attitude towards Madman as he has hurled more insults to more members and produced more negativity than anyone in this entire forum. To come to his aid of all people is kind of shocking.

 

Im just saying be fair

 

Report the posts or write me directly about individual posts. I don't see everything on the forum when there are nearly 1,000 posts a day here.

 

..Al

[swapd0]

IMHO you should release a demo version to get some feedback from the users, and of course listen to them.

[Clint Thompson]

IMHO you should release a demo version to get some feedback from the users, and of course listen to them.

 

I'd be happy with video.

[VladR]

IMHO you should release a demo version to get some feedback from the users, and of course listen to them.

Oh, darling - nice try, but you conveniently keep forgetting I'm not some clueless fucking manager, but I write every single goddamn line of the code

 

Disclaimer:

This is not a free-time, weekend-only activity anymore. In fact, I burn through over $100 a day (monthly living costs / 30.5), just breathing. It [hopefully] shouldn't take a genius to calculate that I burn through $10,000 cash in under 3 months. Now, I'm way past that already, but the life experience encountered along the way, is way,way, waaaay more than just worth it, even if I don't sell a single cart

 

I've been a hardcore player of racing and sim games my whole life, for way over 30 years (though,admittedly, most of that time as a hardcore PC gamer). Like in each genre, there's dozen subgenres and people will argue to death why they don't like certain features of game A vs game B (despite the fact that game A sold over 1 million units). I don't need to listen to that crap, I know better than that, as I've done the exact same mistake with one of my PC games, over decade ago, when I listened to such "feedback". Sorry to burst your bubble, but I tend not to make the same mistakes again

 

I am making the game that *I* want to play and like. Financial reality obviously won't allow me to implement all the features from my ToDo list, but I will release it only when I'm happy with it.

 

Besides, even if I burnt through another $20k of my savings to implement the full ToDo List, The Magnificent Seven, just like they're demonstrating in the *fully unmoderated* JagZombies thread, will still tear it to pieces, and it won't sell significantly more anyway.

 

 

 

If you don't like it, just don't buy it. Shouldn't be a Rocket Science, but just shut the fuck up and get the fuck out Are there any other inquiries I can help you with ?

[VladR]

I'd be happy with video.

I know. I'm very sorry, but after reading through JagZombies thread, I have decided that I will only release the video once it's time to PreOrder. Time-wise, should happen within 6 weeks, prior to PGRE in Portland.

 

It's unfortunate, but majority has to suffer because of the very vocal minority (The Magnificent Seven).

 

I can, however, confirm two details that to counter the risk those that preorder undergo:

- I will include a remake of one 8-bit game running on my engine (which obviously won't be present in regular build, because at that point, there will be no risk for the buyer)

- there will be 30% discount

- free-for-all : no limits - if somebody wants to own 10 carts, and then sell them for $700 on eBay, I don't care - just business, nothing personal

[phoenixdownita]

....

 

Disclaimer:

This is not a free-time, weekend-only activity anymore. In fact, I burn through over $100 a day (monthly living costs / 30.5), just breathing. It [hopefully] shouldn't take a genius to calculate that I burn through $10,000 cash in under 3 months. Now, I'm way past that already, but the life experience encountered along the way, is way,way, waaaay more than just worth it, even if I don't sell a single cart

 

...

I thought you said you moved to Montana, at 3K per month what are you renting?

I was under impression that Montana is cheap, now if instead you are in NY city (I believe you stated once you lived there) then yeah, 3K likely afford you a very small apt.

[+CyranoJ]

Despite what you may think, or constantly say, meh... if you produce something complete, working and most importantly *FUN* I'll be at the front of the line to buy it. I hope you do.

 

However, if you are already comparing your output to JagZombies...

[VladR]

I thought you said you moved to Montana, at 3K per month what are you renting?

I was under impression that Montana is cheap, now if instead you are in NY city (I believe you stated once you lived there) then yeah, 3K likely afford you a very small apt.

Yes, Montana is much much cheaper. Just this week, and it took basically a year of living here, my car insurance rate finally dropped from ~$160 / month to just $75.

My burn rate is less than half compared to NY/NJ. It's gonna take couple years, till I pay off credit cards and loans taken there, though. Without debts, it's possible to live here under $1k.

 

Anecdotally, rent in my building is quite literally (I know, I use that word very often) order of magnitude lower than in one of the apartments I lived in, some 5 years ago in Chicago. And it wasn't even an expensive building there, which is just crazy And by Manhattan "standards" ...

 

Financially, as crazy as it sounds, it makes more sense to work for $70k per year in Montana, than $130k in Jersey or $160k in Manhattan. That doesn't even take into account the traffic and a drastically lowered quality of life in those places.

 

 

I know that many people want to retire at a place where just property tax is $15k+ per year, but to me, that's just flat fucking insane to be saving whole life to pay $0.5 Mil just for stupid property taxes in retirement. To each its own, eh...

 

 

I'm only now discovering new lifestyles outside of the Corporate Grind. I think I could live in an RV, and just drive from one National Park to another, and keep coding jaguar between the hikes

[Lost Dragon]

I have finally handled the last remaining high-risk item: Audio. Till last week, I wasn't sure (hence the high risk), if I'm going to use Atari's audio code (the fulsyn) or just roll my own from scratch. I ended up with a compromise - I use only Atari's DSP code now, but had to completely ditch all their tune/patch/initialization code and wrote my own API on 68000.

 

While I have previously statically linked Atari's sample and it played a tune alongside my 3D engine, there was a lot of work remaining as Atari's fulsyn is not an API, it's just a very raw basic code, with all kinds of insane hardcoded stuff. Not being able to directly run all the old DOS tools (initially) didn't help either, but they run now, so all is good.

 

Getting everything to compile and link was a challenge due to the way Atari "structured" the library, but it works now.

 

 

 

I still need to write some code to handle sound effects on available channels, but that shouldn't be a big deal, compared to completing the whole puzzle (that the fulsyn absolutely is).

 

I now have 3 tunes there, with 3 different sets of patches (something the Atari's code can't handle at all), all table-driven at compile-time, and obviously, tune selectable at run-time.

 

I think I'm ready to start ordering cart equipment so that it's ready while I finish remaining gameplay items.

 

 

 

In retrospect, I certainly would have written the basic audio lib in the time it took me to troubleshoot everything around Atari's audio code and tools, so that was clearly a mistake. Oh, well, relying on someoneelse's code always is...

 

 

Looking at my to-do list, the two biggest (the rest is a lot of small things) remaining coding items are:

- power-ups

- coloring of track inside 3dsmax (just one more export node to parse, really)

 

Hardly a moderate (let alone high) risk, by any stretch of imagination...

Talking of audio on the Jaguar..

 

'ID wrote their own sound code so they could run tasks in the DSP.

The Atari sound code fairly well takes over the DSP. Plus the Atari

sound codes is a major drain on memory bandwidth. The music/sound

driver I wrote for WMCJ and will use in NBAJ-TE uses 4:1 ADPCM compression and is over 30 times more bandwidth efficient than Atari's sound code.

 

 

(on average I do 1-memory access compared to Atari's code's 32 accesses to play back a sample at 1/2 the max sample rate which is about standard

sample rates). I noticed about a 15% improvement in my frame rate when i dumped their sound code for mine and an additional 10-15% improvement because I didn't have to split objects to let the DSP grab the bus more often.

 

Adisak P.(HVS)

[VladR]

Talking of audio on the Jaguar..

 

'ID wrote their own sound code so they could run tasks in the DSP.

The Atari sound code fairly well takes over the DSP. Plus the Atari

sound codes is a major drain on memory bandwidth. The music/sound

driver I wrote for WMCJ and will use in NBAJ-TE uses 4:1 ADPCM compression and is over 30 times more bandwidth efficient than Atari's sound code.

 

 

(on average I do 1-memory access compared to Atari's code's 32 accesses to play back a sample at 1/2 the max sample rate which is about standard

sample rates). I noticed about a 15% improvement in my frame rate when i dumped their sound code for mine and an additional 10-15% improvement because I didn't have to split objects to let the DSP grab the bus more often.

 

Adisak P.(HVS)

Thanks, that is a phenomenal find! I can certainly very much appreciate it at this point!

 

I only noticed 1.9% performance drop when I was playing the Atari supplied audio tune, so this was not an issue, yet. However, there were no almost no instrument samples (like, 2 out of 14). So, it remains to be seen what happens once I supply my own samples (or, play samples-only tunes). I could still live with 10% drop, but if it becomes 30%, shit...

[Lost Dragon]

Your welcome.

 

Whilst it's been so many years since i owned a Jaguar console and i have zero plans to return to it, i do enjoy discovering how commercial coders used the hardware then and how people are using it now.

 

With this year being the Anniversary of the machine itself, it's been nice to discover many new comments from the likes of Andrew Seed, Rob Nicholson, Adisak, John Carmack, Andrew Whittaker, Caspain Software,Eclipse etc in terms of what they had discovered and planned along their time on the machine.

 

Just as it is to read through your journey.

 

I'm not sure if your familar with the UK magazine, ZZAP64,but they used to have a regular monthly feature where a developer documented how work was progressing on their latest title:

 

Jeff Minter, Andrew Braybrook, Rowland Bros and Martin Walker,talked the reader through the frustrations of bringing game concepts to life.

 

I view discussion threads like this as a modern day equivalent.

 

I'm not a coder,so can't contribute a damn thing myself,other than the various quotes like the one earlier.

 

If only a handful of people enjoy then, it doesn't matter as long as they've helped someone.

[VladR]

I think I recently browsed through some older issues of ZZAP, if I recall correctly.

 

I always very much appreciate, whatever you can dig up on a particular game or developer, especially given the historical context where I'm from...

[VladR]

Man, I love procedural content generation, especially for flatshading

 

Just created few routines that colorize the track dynamically at run-time with nice smooth transitions between various shades. Same track looks totally different now.

 

This totally removes the need to do any manual colorizing in 3dsmax, which would only take time, and be static and inflexible anyway.

 

Of course, there's zero performance cost, as the colorizing happens at load-time. The engine couldn't care less if the track color data was generated in 3dsmax or a milisecond earlier by the same chip

[VladR]

I love procedural content generation

 

- I finished run-time reversal (back-to-front) of the same track, which combined with mirroring (left-to-right) creates 4 different versions of the same track

- This is what all major racing games do, after all (offer same track in mirrored and/or reversed mode)

- Even just 10 base tracks, across 5 environments will result in 10*5*2*2 = 200 different tracks, which should keep one busy

 

- I didn't really think I'd do this for my first game, but I created a Championship mode where each all tracks are divided evenly into separate areas, and each area unlocks upon finishing all tracks within it

- I had to create a related menu system (for selecting the track) similar to Bit.Trip.Beat, but the order of playing the tracks within area is up to player

 

 

[Lost Dragon]

I think I recently browsed through some older issues of ZZAP, if I recall correctly.

 

I always very much appreciate, whatever you can dig up on a particular game or developer, especially given the historical context where I'm from...

As long as there are people like yourself that find the misc quotes i occasionally stumble across, interesting, i will continue to share them.

 

☺ They aren't from Edge magazine though as some have assumed.

 

That publication proved it was happy to make quotes from coders up at a whim, long ago and joined my RetroGamer, Gamestm and so many other magazines in the piles that went to the recycling center every week.