Is Skyhammer the most ambitious Jaguar game?

[Cobra Kai]

It's too bad this game is incomplete and glitchy. Every time I pop this in and start playing I get a feeling that this game has a grand scope, with the massive city to explore, and the upgrade system to the ship. Dare I say it has a hint of simulation to it with the first-person cockpit view, but only just a touch. I think this game feels like an RPG more than any other game on the system too, even more than Towers II. 

 

 

[sirlynxalot]

Yeah I agree it's amazing and maybe one of the best 3d games on Jaguar. I heard there's actually 3 cities in the game and the game is completable. I've personally never stuck with it to get through the missions at the beginning though.

 

Btw I've owned two copies over the years, one had a bunch of glitches, primarily related to audio and game saving, and the other one consistently played well without those particular glitches. I've heard of others having the audio and save glitches so there must have been an issue with one or more of the runs of the game that got ironed out later 

Edited September 25, 2022 by sirlynxalot

[Cobra Kai]

I've read in the past that the more you upgrade the ship, and the deeper into the game you get, the game starts to suffer unplayable slowdown.

[sirlynxalot]

Yeah the framerate starts to chug the more enemies you're dealing with. I assume later stages have even more enemies to up the difficulty. I didn't get far in my playthroughs but I don't remember it becoming unplayable by jag standards (I'm sure people used to 3d games running at 30 or 60 fps would consider it unplayable). 

 

I enjoyed this review of skyhammer awhile ago. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ-sOxUWemw really hypes it up in a fun way, but I agree with his sentiment that it's amongst a handful of games that I would have felt delivered a next gen 64 bit experience if I'd played it back in the day. Not sure I'd agree with him that Nintendo and Sony are quaking in their boots though 😜

Edited September 25, 2022 by sirlynxalot

[JagChris]

This has got to be one of the largest collection of programmers to work on a single Jaguar game. 

 

@Lost Dragon you ever talk to these guys about the development of this game?

Edited September 25, 2022 by JagChris

[tripled79]

3 hours ago, Cobra Kai said:

It's too bad this game is incomplete and glitchy. Every time I pop this in and start playing I get a feeling that this game has a grand scope, with the massive city to explore, and the upgrade system to the ship. Dare I say it has a hint of simulation to it with the first-person cockpit view, but only just a touch. I think this game feels like an RPG more than any other game on the system too, even more than Towers II. 

 

 

Wait. It's incomplete? Since when? It's not advertised as being incomplete!

[JagChris]

I never bought this game because of all the glitches and freeze ups I've heard about. 

[Cobra Kai]

1 hour ago, tripled79 said:

Wait. It's incomplete? Since when? It's not advertised as being incomplete!

Ok, perhaps I'm incorrect, but I consider it incomplete because it's not a finishable game. But other posters are saying it's possible to finish this game, but I've never seen evidence of it.

[RollOut]

I beat it a few months back. It is glitchy, but I had the most issues in the first city. Sometimes, entering a section of the city will cause the game to freeze. If that happened I would restart the game and take a different mission (so I could avoid that section). After playing through the mission and saving progress, I found the glitchy, off-limits area would suddenly be fine again. 

 

The game does have a grand scale, and it can be a lot of fun if you work around the couple of glitches. I would recommend it, and it's definitely beatable.

[Cobra Kai]

6 hours ago, RollOut said:

I beat it a few months back. It is glitchy, but I had the most issues in the first city. Sometimes, entering a section of the city will cause the game to freeze. If that happened I would restart the game and take a different mission (so I could avoid that section). After playing through the mission and saving progress, I found the glitchy, off-limits area would suddenly be fine again. 

 

The game does have a grand scale, and it can be a lot of fun if you work around the couple of glitches. I would recommend it, and it's definitely beatable.

 

[sirlynxalot]

Does it have an ending scene?  Any cool graphics or anything at the ending, or maybe just a page of text?

 

Is the final mission any different from the others?  Any boss fight or anything, or is it more of the same old "find this" or "destroy all enemy ships"?

[RollOut]

36 minutes ago, sirlynxalot said:

Does it have an ending scene?  Any cool graphics or anything at the ending, or maybe just a page of text?

 

Is the final mission any different from the others?  Any boss fight or anything, or is it more of the same old "find this" or "destroy all enemy ships"?

There is no boss battle or anything. You just play the missions until all of the territory in all 3 cities is under your company's control. Sorry, I didn't take a shot of the ending, but I remember it being a pretty simple text screen, that gave me a hard time for not playing on the hard difficulty (I think I played medium or whatever it's called in this game). 

 

The mission types are randomly sorted, but there are only 7-8 different types. It's a lot of "attack this, find the nukes, recover a data pod, you're under attack". This is one department where I think the game falls short, as more mission variety would have helped things stay fresh. 

 

That said, it's full textured polygons on the Jag with a reasonable frame rate, and not too much slow down (only a bit with huge waves of enemies). On a technical level, I was very impressed.

[sirlynxalot]

As someone who never made it to the other two cities, do they look substantially different from the first city? Or do they all use exactly the same textures and similar layouts?

[agradeneu]

The mission mode is boring, battle mode is great where you must conquer all zones of a city and move to the next.

 

[RollOut]

2 hours ago, sirlynxalot said:

As someone who never made it to the other two cities, do they look substantially different from the first city? Or do they all use exactly the same textures and similar layouts?

Each city has a different layout and different textures for the buildings. They're not massively different, but each one is unique.

 

The second city (San Diablo) has sections that are closed off from one another, so you have to use the underground transport system (costs money) to get to certain sections. This can play into what missions you decide to take, and when. 

 

The third city (Troy) is more open than the second one, but your company starts with far less territory than the competing companies, so you start with your back against the wall.

[sirlynxalot]

How many hours do you think it took you to beat the game?  It'd be great to see some video or images of the later cities, heck, this is probably one of the very few games to not have a full playthrough on youtube.  Who will stand up to the challenge!

[Editorb]

6 hours ago, sirlynxalot said:

heck, this is probably one of the very few games to not have a full playthrough on youtube.

 

It seems like there are lots of games without playthroughs. And I've been highly disappointed by some non-Jag playthroughs I've seen, including arcade Zookeeper and Robotron that stated a cheat was enabled when down to one life. My buttocks! In both games some gweeper just ran through enemies from get-go, not even bothering to jump in Zookeeper. I've also seen longplays that were two hours of someone playing the game for the first time and failing utterly.

[RollOut]

19 hours ago, sirlynxalot said:

How many hours do you think it took you to beat the game?  It'd be great to see some video or images of the later cities, heck, this is probably one of the very few games to not have a full playthrough on youtube.  Who will stand up to the challenge!

Yeah, I couldn't begin to tell you how long it took. I guess I wasn't paying attention to that. It kept me busy with occasional playing sessions (I was playing a couple other games too) for a bit over a month.

[Gummy Bear]

On 9/27/2022 at 1:07 AM, Editorb said:

 I've also seen longplays that were two hours of someone playing the game for the first time and failing utterly.

That's known as a "shlongplay" 

 

I do agree that Skyhammer is a pretty good representation of what the Jag can do 3Dwise. 

Definitely sub-PS1, but not by an awful amount if used correctly. 

[ArneCRosenfeldt]

17 hours ago, Gummy Bear said:

That's known as a "shlongplay" 

 

I do agree that Skyhammer is a pretty good representation of what the Jag can do 3Dwise. 

Definitely sub-PS1, but not by an awful amount if used correctly. 

But that does not match the slow downs. We all know that the blitter is slow. So I don't really know what evil trick they used with their textures, but till now I only read about one guy trying two days to implement a spanbuffer to avoid overdraw. The blitter cannot even do transparency, so another possiblity of slow down avoided. Quake uses span buffers succesfully in its software renderer. Skyhammer seems to rely on z-buffer a lot. Already at corners around houses the double overdraw ( most of the scene + the house corner over it ) halve the frame rate.

[Gummy Bear]

10 hours ago, ArneCRosenfeldt said:

But that does not match the slow downs. We all know that the blitter is slow. So I don't really know what evil trick they used with their textures, but till now I only read about one guy trying two days to implement a spanbuffer to avoid overdraw. The blitter cannot even do transparency, so another possiblity of slow down avoided. Quake uses span buffers succesfully in its software renderer. Skyhammer seems to rely on z-buffer a lot. Already at corners around houses the double overdraw ( most of the scene + the house corner over it ) halve the frame rate.

Aha! But you forget that when you octobuffer the reticulated splines of the transtator array, you can also octuple the quantum throughput of the phased wobble inducer. 

 

You silly sausage! 

[sirlynxalot]

16 hours ago, ArneCRosenfeldt said:

But that does not match the slow downs. We all know that the blitter is slow. So I don't really know what evil trick they used with their textures, but till now I only read about one guy trying two days to implement a spanbuffer to avoid overdraw. The blitter cannot even do transparency, so another possiblity of slow down avoided. Quake uses span buffers succesfully in its software renderer. Skyhammer seems to rely on z-buffer a lot. Already at corners around houses the double overdraw ( most of the scene + the house corner over it ) halve the frame rate.

Is Arne a bot? 

[JagChris]

17 hours ago, ArneCRosenfeldt said:

. The blitter cannot even do transparency, so another possiblity of slow down avoided. 

Doesn't MC3D use transparency?

[jguff]

10 hours ago, sirlynxalot said:

Is Arne a bot? 

 

[42bs]

10 hours ago, sirlynxalot said:

Is Arne a bot? 

I am not sure. Checking his comments on LinkedIn, you see the same blubbering.