Voxels?

[A31Chris]

Ah ok, that makes more sense, just felt out of the blue or like walking into a conversation half way. Yeah I heard about the trouble they had going from quads to triangles as well, heard about it from some 3DO developers one of which made Escape from Monster Manor. Interesting to hear about, never had a 3DO.
https://www.youtube.com/user/BolsEwhac/videos

I think PO"d lost a lot of color as well going to the PSX. It was a very very interesting commentary to listen to. Its interesting how supposedly older hardware thats not suppose to be as powerful with less than half the bandwidth can do some things that chokes down a newer system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_m4wZLqk2M

Another thing is the PSX and Jag versions of Doom. The Jaguar version has better coloring and shading. It handles the bitmaps better and more smoothly. You don't have to be a master coder to see this or really tech savvy. You can see this if you play JagDoom for about a half an hour then hop over to the PSX version. You can notice how chunky it gets with the bitmap movement and scaling. You can notice it in the fireballs coming at you and the elvators going up and down etc. The Jaguar just does that sort of thing better and far more smoothly. Though after playing the PSX version for a half hour you stop noticing it.

The Saturn can't do transparencies yet the Jag, 3do and PSX can. All these systems have their strengths and weaknesses and they're all fun. I have all of them except the 32x and PSX.

[BladeJunker]

No, and I don't intend to post that first try. It's like posting a video of Bobby Brown beating Whitney when asked if men can be good husbands.

Okay I understand.

[BladeJunker]

I think PO"d lost a lot of color as well going to the PSX. It was a very very interesting commentary to listen to. Its interesting how supposedly older hardware thats not suppose to be as powerful with less than half the bandwidth can do some things that chokes down a newer system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_m4wZLqk2M

Another thing is the PSX and Jag versions of Doom. The Jaguar version has better coloring and shading. It handles the bitmaps better and more smoothly. You don't have to be a master coder to see this or really tech savvy. You can see this if you play JagDoom for about a half an hour then hop over to the PSX version. You can notice how chunky it gets with the bitmap movement and scaling. You can notice it in the fireballs coming at you and the elvators going up and down etc. The Jaguar just does that sort of thing better and far more smoothly. Though after playing the PSX version for a half hour you stop noticing it.

The Saturn can't do transparencies yet the Jag, 3do and PSX can. All these systems have their strengths and weaknesses and they're all fun. I have all of them except the 32x and PSX.

Yep all hardware has its quirks, not many people understand hardware down to bone quite like some people like Steve Wozniak for example, not many dudes like that around. Yeah ewhac talks about chip makers actually being quite an obstacle towards better hardware performance, they do whatever is easy for them and just tell people that don't know any better that this is the way it has to be.

I have mixed feelings about JagDoom since although the engine performs silky smooth it came at the cost of music which I kind of regard as mandatory. Reminds me of C64 or Amiga music where games would have SFX or Music but not both a lot of the time, I wonder how hardcore Commodore fans overlooked that. It's the same on how the Jaguar didn't have dedicated sound chip and instead had a CPU for that, where developers used it for extra performance and skipped a key audio feature altogether. Chips cost money but there must have been something cheap and good from off the shelf they could have added. Actually was thinking a soundcard add-on for the Jaguar would fix that issue easily.

Color depth is a funny thing, to me for example the Snes 256 and the Genesis 64 colors is 'apples and oranges' when really they're both outputting the same 4-bit color sprites. Global palette work tends to level off most color limit differences, its not how many colors you have but rather how many you can use repeatedly throughout and across many textures that creates the perception of gradient richness. Jag didn't have many color limits but the 3DO did since they couldn't do much better than 32 color texture maps and still fit into texture memory.

The Saturns lack of transparency ability really hurt the console quickly, seems trivial but that effect did get a lot of good uses in early 3D. Mostly just too generic a design the Saturn, good 3D when you consider it being sort of shoehorned in after the fact but not good at competing with the PSX or N64. I did like the Ram cart idea, just slapping in bigger sizes when needed was a smooth expansion model.

[Chilly Willy]

It's not that the Saturn couldn't do transparency, it was that it was harder to work with. VDP2 can use transparency when combining its output with VDP1's, and that was what many games used for transparency when possible. VDP1 could render quads with transparency, but the quad had to be a perfect plane to avoid problems. If multiple texture pixels mapped to the same output pixel, each one affected the transparency. So in general, you could really only use VDP1 transparency for sprites (and they couldn't be scaled smaller), not 3D polys.

Because "real" transparency was difficult, many Saturn games used the stiple mask instead. That was fine for composite output where the pixels blend together. As people got larger screens with better input, checker-board transparency didn't look as good.

[matteus]

Doesn't Magic Carpet use a Voxel engine? Would that be too much for the poor old MCD?

[Chilly Willy]

Doesn't Magic Carpet use a Voxel engine? Would that be too much for the poor old MCD?

Link?

[saturndual32]

LOL, voxels are so common. What i wanted to see is more games that used ellipsoids:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SsR5fPjGu4
Its a shame the 3DO port of Ecstatica got canceled.
Are elipsoids more demanding than polygons?

[saturndual32]

I have mixed feelings about JagDoom since although the engine performs silky smooth it came at the cost of music which I kind of regard as mandatory. Reminds me of C64 or Amiga music where games would have SFX or Music but not both a lot of the time, I wonder how hardcore Commodore fans overlooked that. It's the same on how the Jaguar didn't have dedicated sound chip and instead had a CPU for that, where developers used it for extra performance and skipped a key audio feature altogether. Chips cost money but there must have been something cheap and good from off the shelf they could have added. Actually was thinking a soundcard add-on for the Jaguar would fix that issue easily.

Lets remember that given the state of Jaguar software development, Doom is basically a first generation game. Carmack himself said on an interview, that if he were to do the game again from scratch, he was confident that he could up the frame rate, resolution and add music to Jag Doom, while keeping the improvements it had over the PC counterpart, which would be color and lightning, i guess. Those werent his exact words of course, but something like that.

I always wished that the Jag had been more successful, because i think that since its hardware was flexible and not so catered towards texture mapped polygons, we could have seen some pretty cool and diferent engines from what was the norm on other consoles. Even in Doom, you can feel that the Jag is doing it on a diferent way than PS1 and Saturn. Same thing with the pixel shatter effects in Tempest 2000, the Saturn port doesnt do them as well, i think. And i hate the t-mapped lightsourced look ot PS1 Tempest.

Dammit, we keep derailing BladeJunker very cool thread!

[BladeJunker]

LOL, voxels are so common. What i wanted to see is more games that used ellipsoids:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SsR5fPjGu4
Its a shame the 3DO port of Ecstatica got canceled.
Are elipsoids more demanding than polygons?

Voxels are a data structure so you can plug in any kind of 2D unit you want, ellipsoids, spheres, squares, texture tiles, prerendered 3D sprites, etc. I mean the rasterizer isn't fussy about the representation you use.

[BladeJunker]

Lets remember that given the state of Jaguar software development, Doom is basically a first generation game. Carmack himself said on an interview, that if he were to do the game again from scratch, he was confident that he could up the frame rate, resolution and add music to Jag Doom, while keeping the improvements it had over the PC counterpart, which would be color and lightning, i guess. Those werent his exact words of course, but something like that.

I always wished that the Jag had been more successful, because i think that since its hardware was flexible and not so catered towards texture mapped polygons, we could have seen some pretty cool and diferent engines from what was the norm on other consoles. Even in Doom, you can feel that the Jag is doing it on a diferent way than PS1 and Saturn. Same thing with the pixel shatter effects in Tempest 2000, the Saturn port doesnt do them as well, i think. And i hate the t-mapped lightsourced look ot PS1 Tempest.

Dammit, we keep derailing BladeJunker very cool thread!

Yeah I heard it was a rush job on 32X as well so I hear what you're saying that it would have been better with more time, hard to get Carmack back though unless he does it pro bono or you have a spare space rocket you could trade him, hear he's into space travel. I don't deny the beauty of JagDoom, looks great.

Tempest 2000 is a good example of awesome but abstract graphics, hard time back in the launch of the Jaguar since its not like now where indie retro aesthetics are actually appreciated although that is getting kind of stupid with time IE. Indie=fat ugly pixels+chips tunes+blur filters+emo hero. Japan had some interesting PS1 visuals as they never had gamers getting turned off by graphics with outdated methods like 2D in general and 2D mixed with 3D or even vector graphics or untextured polygons. Examples iS Internal Section, Rakugaki Showtime, Tobal 1&2, LSD, and Vib-Ribbon.

I kind of hated the Jaguar for so long but with homebrew I'm starting to warm up to it, not pity but I empathize with anyone who buys a less than successful game console. CD-I owners, poor bastards.

Don't worry about derailing a little, you'd be amazed how my mind wanders from platform to platform all within the same day.

[BladeJunker]

Doesn't Magic Carpet use a Voxel engine? Would that be too much for the poor old MCD?

No it looks like textured polygons but it doesn't mean it couldn't be done with voxels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6p4ZaOGPyA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3zsPl4Ampw

[Chilly Willy]

No it looks like textured polygons but it doesn't mean it couldn't be done with voxels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6p4ZaOGPyA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3zsPl4Ampw

Actually, other than the original voxel demos like on the Amiga and Atari ST, most voxel demos used polgons for rendering. Modern voxel demos use OpenGL to draw the display. Magic Carpet 1 and 2 in the links looks like polygon renderer voxels.

The advantage of using polygons for rendering is it takes fewer rays to raycast, and most platforms can render polys faster than individual columns of pixels. Check out this article for a good look at (fairly modern) voxel rendering of backgrounds. Especially part 6.

http://www.flipcode.com/archives/Rea...oduction.shtml

[zyrobs]

It's not that the Saturn couldn't do transparency, it was that it was harder to work with. VDP2 can use transparency when combining its output with VDP1's, and that was what many games used for transparency when possible. VDP1 could render quads with transparency, but the quad had to be a perfect plane to avoid problems. If multiple texture pixels mapped to the same output pixel, each one affected the transparency. So in general, you could really only use VDP1 transparency for sprites (and they couldn't be scaled smaller), not 3D polys.

Because "real" transparency was difficult, many Saturn games used the stiple mask instead. That was fine for composite output where the pixels blend together. As people got larger screens with better input, checker-board transparency didn't look as good.

The pixel artifacts weren't the real problem, the problem was that the VDP1 was slow as hell and transparent stuff took 3x as long to draw.
That, and it wasn't transparent compared to backgrounds. It was really half-assed.

[A31Chris]

My understanding is 'Voxels' is not exactly a correct term to use with such old consoles as ours because it takes lots of horsepower to do true 'voxels'. And what we see on our old systems like Comanche or Fallen Angels is height mapping.

[A31Chris]

I have mixed feelings about JagDoom since although the engine performs silky smooth it came at the cost of music which I kind of regard as mandatory. Reminds me of C64 or Amiga music where games would have SFX or Music but not both a lot of the time, I wonder how hardcore Commodore fans overlooked that. It's the same on how the Jaguar didn't have dedicated sound chip and instead had a CPU for that, where developers used it for extra performance and skipped a key audio feature altogether. Chips cost money but there must have been something cheap and good from off the shelf they could have added. Actually was thinking a soundcard add-on for the Jaguar would fix that issue easily.

It's got a quite powerful DSP chip for sound. As for JagDoom music it was a rush job to get it out for Christmas Season. They didn't really spend a great deal of time fighting with these things. Using the same engine some indie guys now have Heretic playing while its playing music on the Jaguar. And they re nowhere near the league of coder that Carmack is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ubP2StMocU

ok last derail from me.