Robinson's Requiem at AGE

[Gunstar]

Jag not powerful enough for voxels?! *cough*Phase Zero*cough*

 

 

Stone

 

From reading that interview, it looks like he was depending too much on the 68000, it's all 68000/DSP code from what I understood, which may cause a problem with a voxel engine if your mainly using the 68000. He Also mentions that the Jag wan't powerful enough because of "it was too limited by it's bus and it's 68k using only 16/32". It seems to me, that he was very new to the Jag, RR is a first generation game, and he relied FAR too heavily on the 68000. Again showing Atari's mistake of including tht chip to give developers "a familiar place to start". I'm sure Phase Zero doesn't rely on the 68k that much. Looks to me like he was (at first) trying to parallel the Falcon development which isn't a goog ideas since the Falcon's 68030 is much more powerful than the Jaguars 68000. If he had avoided 68000 as much as possible and actually used the blitter and object processor more, he could have pulled off a voxel engine easily like they did with PhaseZero. Even his new 3D engine apparently relied on the 68000 too much. But he obviously managed to pull something good out after transfering some code to the DSP since he said it finally ran at 25fps instead of the 5-10 on the 68000. It all comes down to being Atari's fault once again, with inclusion of 68000 chip, poor documentation and developer support. But at least RR and Ishar were done, even if not improved too much over the other versions. I can't wait!

[Stone]

The 68K is really good for reading the joysticks and doing logic though It's just if you try to do hardcore maths with it that things slow to a crawl...that and trying to access data with the GPU/DSP *while* doing lots of calculations on the 68K. I've had some horrible crashes like that

 

Stone

[JagChris]

Arf !

 

it's Pocket who translated this interview !

 

Thanks Pocket for the translation !    

 

( the original was in french )

 

Ah, crap. Sorry pocket. Thanks for the translation.

[Thunderbird]

Thanks for translating that interview for us. It's always fun to read about the life of other developers and Atari.