The best 3D engine on Jaguar ?

[Fredifredo]

Just post your new demo and I vote for you

Edited January 8, 2006 by Fredifredo

[Gunstar]

I am curious why nobody mentioned Phase Zero. I know it is unfinished game, but the same is for BIWN. And I realy like the voxel engine in Phase Zero.

995105[/snapback]

You are absolutely right! This game has an amazing engine, and shows that 3D Does NOT have to be done with polygons! I forgot about it otherwise it would be on my short list too!

[Gunstar]

Hi! just fiering of a replye here:

 

Hmm.. best 3D engine... well considering that almost all jaguar games here have already been mentioned, concluding that the answer has no conclusive answer, I will form one of for my self:

 

Well my own! offcourse

 

Best thing with it is that I learned allot of jaguar HW when doing it, and got indepth useless knowhow of how 3d gets drawn on screen...

 

 

 

..and hence can say this about BIWN... Im rather shure that they use the same "blitter trick" that all early texmap games used.. and hence can conlude that it is not realy the texturemapper that is wrong but the camera routine.

If the view are alowed to come to close to the wall "affine interpolation" will look truly crappy (se almost all PS1 games!) but if you are not alowed to do that but clip/stop player from moving, keeping greater distance to the wall.... and voila! it looks much better!.. (all 3D texmapped jaguar games, I can say with almost sertanty, OBS true 3D, since games like battlemorph/Doom will never get this "texture wobble" effect since they always work in vertical columns.

 

 

..to get pack to voting: Feeding the greedy bastard in me I will give my vote for myself --muaahhahha--

 

Whats that? ..you cant vote on yourself? ...Blaaasted! I wasted my vote!

 

/Sym

996298[/snapback]

I *think* you meant AvP/Doom right? Not Battlemorph? Since Battlemorph is a true-3D polygon game.

[LanDi]

BIWN is a very simple enigne, just a little texture mapping on polygons, even IronSoldier id more impressive as it is a #d world. Haven't seen Battlemorph but it looks mighty impressive. What I'd like to see is a cartridge with extra ram included so they can use the Z buffering. Then you'll get a vision of what the Jag can really do....

 

Z buffering is basically a feature that allows only the visible polygons to be processed at a time.

 

You may say Im a dreamer but I'm not the only one (Lennon)

[LanDi]

BIWN is a very simple enigne, just a little texture mapping on polygons, even IronSoldier id more impressive as it is a #d world. Haven't seen Battlemorph but it looks mighty impressive. What I'd like to see is a cartridge with extra ram included so they can use the Z buffering. Then you'll get a vision of what the Jag can really do....

 

Z buffering is basically a feature that allows only the visible polygons to be processed at a time.

 

You may say Im a dreamer but I'm not the only one (Lennon)

996459[/snapback]

I forgot to mention Zero 5 anyone?

[ZylonBane]

You are absolutely right! This game has an amazing engine, and shows that 3D Does NOT have to be done with polygons!

Are you even reading this thread? Phase Zero does not have a 3D engine. It has a voxel heightmap renderer. Yes, voxels can be used to represent arbitrary 3D objects... but Phase Zero's engine doesn't do that. It's not a 3D engine. Why are people having such a hard time grasping this distinction?

[Starcat]

Hi!

 

BIWN is a very simple enigne, just a little texture mapping on polygons, even IronSoldier id more impressive as it is a #d world. Haven't seen Battlemorph but it looks mighty impressive. What I'd like to see is a cartridge with extra ram included so they can use the Z buffering. Then you'll get a vision of what the Jag can really do....

 

Z buffering is basically a feature that allows only the visible polygons to be processed at a time.

 

You may say Im a dreamer but I'm not the only one (Lennon)

996459[/snapback]

 

Somehow a lot of your posts are confusing me. You seem to repeat things others said before and think you have to throw terms into the discussion and explain them in a strange way, even though most people know them for years. And for those who don't know them, there are countless sites on the net to explain them correctly and understandable.

 

Also your talk about what the Jaguar can do or what it can't do or how it should be done is really misplaced. You don't need to explain what the Jaguar is to the coders on this board. And those topics have been discussed a thousand times by people who actually did 3D coding for example, so most fans know those answers as well. People like Sym or Atariowl are the remaining Jag 3D gods. You don't need to explain to them how things work.

 

Also the Jaguar doesn't need any additional hardware to do 3D, it just needs skilled people who want to do it. If there are no people to support it, even the best hardware add on would be useless. And a ram cart doesn't help much with 3D at all. It doesn't make calculations faster, and doesn't give the Jaguar a higher bus bandwidth either.

 

Probably all 3D games on the Jag use Z buffering I think.

Your explaination is not exactly wrong, but it's more complex than it needs to be.

 

Z buffering is simply to make sure that polygons that are behind others don't get drawn in front of them.

If you don't use Z buffering, you get the typical clipping errors you could see in tomb raider 1 for example, when you stand in front of a wall and it looks like you could go through it, as platforms or passages behind that wall get drawn, though the wall should be hiding them.

 

And Z buffering is really mainly used to avoid those clipping errors as I mentioned. If you only want to render the visible polygons of a scene, there are many better approaches than just Z buffering and with Z buffering alone you don't get far either.

 

Btw, the Jaguar Blitter actually has an option for z buffering, so you don't need a ram add-on for that.

 

Regards, Lars.

[ZylonBane]

You're not helping.

 

A Z-buffer is a bitmap layer (just not a visual one) that tracks the depth of every pixel that's rendered. Whenever the 3D engine goes to draw a given pixel, it first checks against the value in the Z-buffer. If the pixel is closer than what's already in the Z-buffer, it gets drawn. If not, it gets discarded. Z-buffers are necessary to do pixel-perfect intersection of 3D objects.

 

However, Z-buffers also slow things down. Even the Jag's hardware Z-buffer inflicts a performance hit. This is why the best-performing 3D engines (on low-spec hardware, anyway), don't use a Z-buffer. Instead they use Z-sorting, which is a software approach where all the polygons in a scene are sorted front-to-back before rendering. Zero 5, for example, uses Z-sorting.

[Atari_Owl]

Nevermind, forget this post

Edited January 10, 2006 by Atari_Owl

[Godzilla]

Has anyone mentioned Battlemorph? I was really impressed with that at the time. Though, overall, I'd have to give the nod to Skyhammer. I would have LOVED to have seen what this game would have looked like AFTER rebellion finished it, since, IMHO, the beta is already the best looking 3d on the jag.

[Symmetry of TNG]

hmm... skyhammer is one of the games I havent seen AT ALL! on the jaguar... nor have i found any good vid grabs of it so i can see how it looks like.... got the feeling its "descent like" ?...Would be interesting to observe it.... from a coders point of view..

Perhapps one day..

[doctorclu]

I would like to put in my bid for "American Hero" for best 3D. There were some parts of that game I swear I could reach out and touch in that movie.

 

Yeh, would love to see the Jag VR of that game.

[Astrobeej]

I fully agree with Atariowl about BIWN, though.

Actually I never understood why people were raving about it being so impressive graphics wise...

Okay, you are walking through "a city", which was something you couldn't do in many games back in 94 or 95.

But what is it really that you are walking through actually?

 

A bunch of blocks with very repetive and average quality textures. And while textures aren't the Jaguar's strongest point, there really isn't much more graphically impressive to that game. The polygon counts on screen are minimal compared to other Jag games.

 

And Atariowl is totally right about the engine being far from bug free...

Clipping is bad, you often get into situations where you look through buildings, the camera angle is fixed and annoying, there are no doors, you walk through the walls to get into a different room and as Atariowl said already the texture warping is terrible, worse than in any PSX game (and I remember some people having prejudices against the PSX and flaming it because some early games also had slightly warping textures).

 

It might not be fair to compare BIWN with finished games as it's far from being finished, but for what it is, I think the myth of BIWN is impressing more people than the actual visuals. Although that seems to be true for many unfinished or rare games out there.

 

Ok, so I found this thread a year late. So sue me.

 

Yeah, I have to agree with the consensus here. Our graphics engine was far from ideal, perhaps even for the Jag. The "myth" of BIWN, I hope, has far, far more to do with the characters, scenarios and storyline we put together than it has to do with our engine. For those who have seen it, the real power of Black ICE had to do with our mythos, with our open ended, non-linear story lines, with our not pinning our player characters down to a pre-defined morality -- or even mode of game play -- and a truly original take on immersive C-punk gaming.

 

It would be easy to point fingers at this late juncture, but consider this; BIWN was created by internal development. If there was some techonological innovation that was held back from my team, what does that say about the environment in which we were developing our game? We had to battle to get trivial things like printer ink cartridges, and hard drives large enough to store the game assets and code we were creating. If anyone should have had an inside track on leveraging the power of the Jaguar, it should have been us. Our coders got zero support from the company, any more than we artists did. The third party developers who got more out of the Jag than we did were able to do so by the sheer talent, experience and determination of the people they had available.

 

If Atari had truly been dedicated to bringing awesome, innovative games to their customers, the Jaguar would have been as great a success as it was a failure, and the company would still be around today.

 

Beej

[kevincal]

Ya but what % complete was rev.18? Less than 75% right? For a work-in-progress, the graphics, videos, and text were pretty interesting.

[Atari_Owl]

I fully agree with Atariowl about BIWN, though.

Actually I never understood why people were raving about it being so impressive graphics wise...

Okay, you are walking through "a city", which was something you couldn't do in many games back in 94 or 95.

But what is it really that you are walking through actually?

 

A bunch of blocks with very repetive and average quality textures. And while textures aren't the Jaguar's strongest point, there really isn't much more graphically impressive to that game. The polygon counts on screen are minimal compared to other Jag games.

 

And Atariowl is totally right about the engine being far from bug free...

Clipping is bad, you often get into situations where you look through buildings, the camera angle is fixed and annoying, there are no doors, you walk through the walls to get into a different room and as Atariowl said already the texture warping is terrible, worse than in any PSX game (and I remember some people having prejudices against the PSX and flaming it because some early games also had slightly warping textures).

 

It might not be fair to compare BIWN with finished games as it's far from being finished, but for what it is, I think the myth of BIWN is impressing more people than the actual visuals. Although that seems to be true for many unfinished or rare games out there.

 

Ok, so I found this thread a year late. So sue me.

 

Yeah, I have to agree with the consensus here. Our graphics engine was far from ideal, perhaps even for the Jag. The "myth" of BIWN, I hope, has far, far more to do with the characters, scenarios and storyline we put together than it has to do with our engine. For those who have seen it, the real power of Black ICE had to do with our mythos, with our open ended, non-linear story lines, with our not pinning our player characters down to a pre-defined morality -- or even mode of game play -- and a truly original take on immersive C-punk gaming.

 

It would be easy to point fingers at this late juncture, but consider this; BIWN was created by internal development. If there was some techonological innovation that was held back from my team, what does that say about the environment in which we were developing our game? We had to battle to get trivial things like printer ink cartridges, and hard drives large enough to store the game assets and code we were creating. If anyone should have had an inside track on leveraging the power of the Jaguar, it should have been us. Our coders got zero support from the company, any more than we artists did. The third party developers who got more out of the Jag than we did were able to do so by the sheer talent, experience and determination of the people they had available.

 

If Atari had truly been dedicated to bringing awesome, innovative games to their customers, the Jaguar would have been as great a success as it was a failure, and the company would still be around today.

 

Beej

 

 

Hello Beej, glad to see you here.

 

I'm sorry if my posts my have seemed a little harsh, they were referring ONLY to some technical aspects, BIWN is of course fascinating from a game design point of view, and presaged many of the gaming concepts which have since become standard..

 

Cheers

[Video]

I would have to say, of released engines, that Iron soldier 2 is the best. Followed closely by I war. I war is lower only cause of no textures. But IMO it's more comples otherwise.

 

I've not notiecd the horrendus framerate that was mentioned, but then I suck at the game and never got very far, not more than 30 or so levels, so I may not have run into them yet.

 

As for Doom not being 3d, as far as the computer processing goes, it is 2D, as far as how it looks, it's 3D. And there IS enough info in the map (wall placement, demensions, height, angle, etc) that a 3d model could be made, quiet easily from what is there. The charactures would be a little harder, maybe to the point of redrawing them to be 3D would be easier than making a computer program to make them appear 3d from their 8 sided 2D images. Same for Voxel engines, there's enough there to draw an actual 3D image, Though, I'm not sure why you would want to...

 

Someone mentioned looking up and down, Well, Duke Nukem is a raycast engine that allowes you to look up and down

[RJ]

ZylonBane, you failed to jump on LanDi for mentioning Zero 5 after you already did...

[The_Laird]

I would have to say, of released engines, that Iron soldier 2 is the best. Followed closely by I war. I war is lower only cause of no textures. But IMO it's more comples otherwise.

 

I've not notiecd the horrendus framerate that was mentioned, but then I suck at the game and never got very far, not more than 30 or so levels, so I may not have run into them yet.

 

As for Doom not being 3d, as far as the computer processing goes, it is 2D, as far as how it looks, it's 3D. And there IS enough info in the map (wall placement, demensions, height, angle, etc) that a 3d model could be made, quiet easily from what is there. The charactures would be a little harder, maybe to the point of redrawing them to be 3D would be easier than making a computer program to make them appear 3d from their 8 sided 2D images. Same for Voxel engines, there's enough there to draw an actual 3D image, Though, I'm not sure why you would want to...

 

Someone mentioned looking up and down, Well, Duke Nukem is a raycast engine that allowes you to look up and down

 

 

I-War's engine is not even close. The best is Hoverstrike CD followed very closely by Missile Command 3D.

 

HS:CD gives us total 3D polygon enviroments with full texture mapping at a decent frame rate! Incredible and a big improvement on any other Jag game including its cart version.

 

MS3D manages to convey a 3D enviroment better than I have ever seen before, it even seem virtual without the headset and then once you get to play it that way, man its awesome!

[EmOneGarand]

MS3D had a nice 3D engine cause it had vivid backgrounds but to be honest in my opinion Dactyl Joust had the best use of 3D in the environment that I've seen, no black void/starfields that I believe the Sega CD could pull off without too much effort. Thats just my two cents Wish the prototype for Joust could have been found would have been amazing

Edited January 10, 2007 by EmOneGarand