This Channel is so cool. To hear someone from the gaming industry explain the technicalities of games rather then just design is so refreshing from the rest of youtubes content. So glad i subscribed
I'm willing to bet Nocturne in the Moonlight would've been way better if they put in the effort as well. I genuinely believe the Saturn could do a lot with its limited hardware, as evident with many of its imports from 1998 that mastered transparencies. Hell, even a game for the console in 1995 had them, but only Europe got the localization. I believe the Saturn deserved a full run and I'm depressed at how quickly they threw it away.
Medachod ...Don't be depressed! Sega self destructed. We the fans only did what qas natural..namely, purchase the better console that incidentally, was less expensive! What were we supposed to do? There was no Sonic. No SOR. Nothing from Genesis to attract us.
Mo Go Seriously, Sega of America really screwed it when it came to the Saturn. Bernie Stolar, president of SOA at the time, decided that the American catalog of Saturn games should be composed of only 3D games, not allowing either RPGs or 2D games (the one thing the console was very good at) for localization. When FFVII and SotN came out on the PS1 and convinced everyone that both RPGs and 2D games were cool, he decided to drop the console right away instead of, say, finally localize all those japanese games (and some european and even american developed ones, too) that were RPGs, 2D, or both (the Saturn was pretty big in Japan because of those games). Also, about Streets of Rage... there was a 4th game being developed for the Dreamcast but apparently the staff at SOA at the time was different from the staff from the Genesis era and didn't know (or cared) about the series so they forced SOJ to cancel that, too. Something tells me Bernie was involved in this...
Jorge Enrique Riera I spent that summer wrkng my but off for a ps1. 300.00 is a lot when you're a kid Makin min. Wage. 300+50for a game+25for a 2nd controller. All I knew, PS1 was such an interesting console. But, had Sega given us, Sonicv32bit, EVEN A2D... If they hadn't given up on 32x and cd....I may have been more open minded.
Finding out the ways in which the Saturn works differently than a PS1 instead of just hearing "its different" is super interesting. Hope you do more Sega Saturn stuff.
Hearing how the two consoles technically work like in this video is interesting. I'll probably always wonder how games can stream CD audio and not have to show loading screens often...the systems must have a lot of RAM if it could load once then have it all there without having to stop playback.
There's a video on UA-cam made by some chinese guy I think (very thick accent but subtitles available), who explains in lengthy details exactly how the Saturn works for 2D and 3D rendering, including all its quirks and limitations and how devs worked around it. It's super interesting, very well-explained (it's technical yet understandable for the layman), you should totally check it out, you'd probably be interested. I can't remember the name but if you search for keywords such as Saturn VDP explanation or something, you should be able to find it.
The Saturn and Playstation didn't have much RAM. Hell, even the Dreamcast only had 16MB. But remember that Redbook audio and FMV take a huge amount of storage, so the rest of the game should be fairly small if the game uses them. And if they don't, then no need to stream (the Playstation at least, and probably the Saturn too I'd wager, had a kind of midi-like format with samples if devs wanted to - it sounds much better than, say, on the SNES, because you can use 44Khz samples, + you're less limited in the amount of samples, amount of channels, audio ram for longer samples etc.). Think of a game like Wipeout: it uses redbook audio, but the game data itself (code + textures etc.) takes a small amount of storage. Heck, Wipeout 64 has full-length, not-sample-based tracks and the whole game fits in an EIGHT MEGABYTES cartridge. You heard this right : eight (8) megabytes. Music tracks included.
As I recall Tomb Raider was the first game to stream in game data as you played. So playing audio tracks wasn't really an issue for most games as they loaded the whole level up-front, no streaming.
I wonder...Is this the spirit of a great game? Developers needed to be really creative to archive certain things on limited hardware. They had to put much more thought into it. Focus on key elements. Today these limitations are not that present(i am sure, there are also other kind of limitations which needs to be considered), but todays game engines are so powerful, packed with features, even free for anyone...maybe you need these limitations from the past to concentrate on the key elements of a game and get them right. Maybe you tend to think to big without limitations and in the end the game will be full of stuff, but shallow.
@@ColeZero yeah, I am still thinking that they make a particle system for 16 bit games. I recently created a particle system and it was lagging on morden hardware. Imagine they did on 16 bit games without lagging at all.
Jon - you're an absolute genius. What you pulled off back in the late 90s for Saturn, made me the proudest Saturn owner ever, =D. I'd got an N64, and then found the cart games way too expensive, and picked up a Saturn as they were going cheap at the time, and Sonic R felt like a solid 3D world like Mario 64, but with all the detailed texture maps of a playstation game...and so subsequently, felt like the best of both worlds, and superior to anything I'd played, graphically, up to that point, surpassed only by Panzer Dragoon Saga the following year. The draw distance on split screen was pretty bad, but I had hours of fun playing the tag game mode in two player. I love playing around spinning the R on the title screen, and using the shoulder buttons on the menus, to make the rotating models bigger and smaller - I typically switch between left and right shoulder buttons in time with the music, ^_^. I always assumed the title screen's R and the silver balloons with your race position on them in the the finishing screen, were real time, yet had always assumed the loading screen sonic head, was a FMV video clip of something you'd rendered on an SGI workstation. You've absolutely blown me away to reveal it was all you and your team's own coding, running on Saturn. You sir, are a genius! And disregarding the race in order to initially explore for those five sonic coins (I say initially, 'cos the eventual aim was to pick 'em up mid race) had us believing Saturn really was capable of doing a 3D Sonic exploring a 3D world, miles better than the NiGHTS engine or that horrible Sonic Jam thing that I always thought looked awful. The person I used to play Sonic R tag with developed such a fondness for Traveller's Tales from the game, he went out and bought Rascal for PlayStation afterwards - although I got the impression, stunning graphics on that aside, it wasn't as fun as Sonic R, =). I just completed Sonic R again at the weekend (had lost my saved game), unlocking all unlockables including Super Sonic. Thanks so much for this awesome game, and doing us Saturn owners proud. Even had my sister's friends thinking Saturn was a new console....in 1997, XD. Haha. Sega was so bad back then, the PlayStation generation had barely even heard of the machine, ^_^.
It's a bloody good game! If you haven't enjoyed it, try using the shoulder buttons when you turn, and your handling will improve. Also, I always played with the 3D Pad's analogue stick - never tried to race with the D-pad before. So analogue control and shoulder buttons, and control is a lot easier. But yeah, uplifting music, great graphics, tonnes of shortcuts to master, and an exhilerating racing experience, ^_^.
So Lame Tbh Sonic R is flawed especially in its controls, and it’s quite short and easy to beat 100% but other than that it’s actually pretty good and well-made for the time. I don’t think it deserves its reputation because it’s actually okay. Not the best by far, but playable and enjoyable.
ajmetz82 I've always liked it, since growing up with it on GameCube as a kid. It was upsetting to hear the awful reception it got as I got older... Same with Sonic Adventure.
But why are your videos so short?!?! I love Coding Secrets! Wouldn't mind a documentary on the games you made(30 min+). You're honestly an inspiration Mr. Burton! I mean, who converts C to Assembly???? Who does that?!? 😕😕
I usually design something in a higher level language which is easier and then convert it to assembler to get the speed when doing retro stuff. Also a C compiler makes assembler anyway, so u can just use that and then tweak it by hand.
Yeah, it does. Ugh, I don't know how I missed that. But then again, it's impressive how you do it. I touched C a while back, didn't do any assembler(I can guess what's happening), so for me, it's mind blowing.
Constraints always exist. You're not doing it right unless you're pushing the envelope of the hardware available, whatever it may be. This is why we still get 30 FPS games on console
Spoiled? You can still develop a super hard game engine that nobody will want to make games with it. Wouldn't you want to make good games easier? Would you rather develop games for a shitty hard engine and make a good game?
Well that explains why you guys were so proud of the logo. I played Sonic R for the first time this year so kinda missing the general knowledge of what was impressive back in 1996.
I always thought that people were too hard on this game's graphics, and now we have the creator of the game proving how "good" they really were for the Saturn. This is fascinating stuff!
People are too hard on plenty of perfectly good games. Especially if it's in the same genre as something they personally prefer. The only critisism i ever aimed at Sonic R is that it's really short on content.
Ah, classic Traveler's Tales! Performing the "Impossible" on consoles that really stand out and all the complex, hard coding work definitely shows. Even by today's standards, as these effects stand out among the other games at the time. Bravo!!
I can only imagine you did this "off the grid" away from any managers. I can't imagine trying to persuade them that you needed to invest time into it. Though I, and all other fans, are so very glad you did. Awesome channel.
Wow, writing a software renderer into the game on the Saturn, that's cool. Speaks to me especially since I'm currently writing a software renderer in C++ for a university assignment :P
Nice! I remember doing that assignment some 10 years ago now. I don't think I've ever really used those skills again (and I'm a senior programmer at Epic working on UE4), but I'm not a rendering programmer, so YMMV :)
ChaosXLR Ah, fair enough. I'm not sure how much I'll use these specific skill in the future but it's been a fun module and it's increased my familiarity with C++ which is also a plus (unintentional pun is unintentional).
I just went digging through my old Uni archives and found my implementation of that assignment (several in fact, in various states of optimisation). I'd be curious to give it a go again now TBH, see if I can optimise it any better now that I have 10 years more experience :)
Any other UA-camr would've just said "reflections weren't possible on the Saturn hardware so we coded a renderer of our own" but you went into just enough detail to be both easy to understand AND informative. I love this channel
Well... it works. At least it's not like "You WILL NOT BELIEVE how we did these IMPOSSIBLE EFFECTS on Sonic R! I cried when I saw line 342 of the code! But line 501 will CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOREVER!"
DaVince21 It's not clickbait if the title is accurate to the content of the video. It's appealing and it grabs the attention of the viewer, but you get exactly what's advertised in the title. That's like purchasing a product you saw on a massive billboard, finding that it is/does exactly what the billboard said, and calling the product a scam.
Very interesting! You were certainly one of the most talented Saturn programmers out there. It’s too bad you didn’t have opportunities to use the Sonic R or similar engines for more Saturn games, the visuals and effects were beyond amazing!
Homebrew developer XL2 has created hardware-based reflective effects on the SS using a flat shaded polygon, with a form of gouraud shading providing the reflection. Absolutely amazing, and apparently less memory intensive than a textured polygon!
Seriously, the Radiant Emerald track with real-transparency on the Saturn it's just beautiful to look at. How did you managed to pull that off? Great video as always Jon! Sonic R fan present as always :-)
You wrote your own code to overcome the console's limitations to do something that should have been impossible on said console. You and your team are practically gods, this is insane.
This is my favorite one yet. Would animated tiles work in a similar fashion if you employed that (similar to achieving overlapping parallax effects on the NES and PC Engine) in order to make a pseudo-environment map or would that be too memory intensive?
Game Sack need precalc for different coords for all 4 quad points. if small number of frames, effect will be very jumpy, not representing smooth reflective surface at all.
I remember finding it interesting learning how the Sega Saturn worked on a fundamentally different way than other 3d consoles (rendering polygons with quadrilaterals instead of triangles, for example) but of course you figure out a way around it by just rewriting how it works completely. I can't help but imagine you guys are still doing screwy stuff with the Lego games today.
Interestingly, a lot of popular indie games these days are 2D. The Saturn is actually most robust out of the three main consoles that generation when it came to 2D power, so in a weird way it was also somewhat accurate to the future of gaming.
@72speedway Actually most indie games these days are fully 3D rendered games, the camera viewport follows a single plane projection to appear 2D. Bitmap BLIT BLT using a library like Direct 2D is seldom used, 3D texture mapped object are rendered using Direct-X and OpenGL instead. One annoying artefact caused by this switch in rendering technique includes flickering around sharp sprite edges caused by oscillating object position, especially when two 2D plane objects are close together. Pixel perfect results are very hard to get using 3D.
+Player One Start Sega were always ahead of their time. They already attempted pseudo-3D experiences during the 80s with groundbreaking games like Zaxxon and later on Space Harrier. And then they definitely established 3D gaming with Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter during 90s debuts thanks to their model 1 arcade board. But probably that with the Saturn they thought that at the time, console weren't powerful enough to do 3D well enough so they stayed with 2D at first but finally also went with 3D even though awkwardly designed but still pretty capable as can be seen with Panzer Dragoon Zwei, Virtua Fighter 2 or Last Bronx. Also Daytona USA, one of the most impressive games ever in terms of technical achievement, impressive 3D racer at high frame rate. It took many years for others companies to reach something of the same level. btw Sega also pioneered online gaming, already with the Mega Drive and Saturn but definitely established it with the Dreamcast. A shame that such a brillant company in terms of hardwares and games were at the same time such a mess in terms of management :( (but for those who don't know, Sega are still doing lot of stuff: arcade boards, consoles games, PC games... they only stopped consoles which, anyway, is not much needed these days)
You'll get there @Kimarnic - and control gets a lot smoother when you unlock characters like Super Sonic too, =). Come on run away....we don't have to stay....we're nearly out of time.... but you're doing fine.... ^_^.
These videos are very interesting. It's amazing seeing how clever these tricks are and the tech wizardry pulled off in them. I honestly took the visuals in these games for granted, and seeing how they were built makes me appreciate them much more.
This was so fascinating, I am blown away by how innovative you and your team were when problem-solving such complicated hardware limitations. Truly inspiring
I love this. Especially when you are dealing with the Sega Saturns limitations . The Saturn is an amazing system and i hope the sega fan community of developers and coders can some day bring new life to sega saturn games like Burning Rangers, which was a great concept but had some rough edges
That is really quite incredible. No tricks -- just sheer brute force. And it worked beautifully! That old Saturn had more in it than many of us thought!
Thank you for these wonderful insights into the painstaking process of programming on this kind of hardware. I'm always amazed at what kind of innovation came out of such limited hardware.
Just the other day, while watching another of your videos about Sonic R's graphics, I was telling my girlfriend how impressed I was by the load screen Sonic head, because before this game my teenage self thought environment mapping was impossible on the Saturn. I always knew there was some magic behind it, but it's taken this long for me to find out just how amazing it actually was! Thank you for doing this video. I'm looking forward to many more!
This has easily become my favorite channel on UA-cam! This is all absolutely fascinating! What would be really cool IMO is if you had a "GameHut University" series where you discussed some of these effects more in-depth, talking about how exactly you accomplished stuff, not shying away from the math or the more complex details for those who can grok them.
That's amazing, I love how much one can push a console to do things it couldn't do naturally with enough knowledge about its hardware and some creativity.
This is why I'm so impressed with your effects! You could've easily just gone in and pre-rendered that graphic but you wrote a software renderer instead just to create that effect!
Come to think of it, I did think the environment mapping effects in Sonic R were really impressive when I first saw them. Thanks for sharing what went into this.
amazing... these coding secrets videos are an absolute TREAT. all your videos are great, I am especially loving coding secrets. better than freaking cable, man.
Traveler's Tales must have been staffed by some of the most insane coders. It's honestly jaw-dropping seeing the amount of effort you all were willing to go to just to make metallic reflections a possibility.
I literally screamed "You did WHAT?" at my computer just now when you said you created a triangle rendering engine for the Saturn. You're a wizard and I can't handle it.
I loved this on the Saturn. You guys were absolute geniouses. Keep these videos going! You could try and really explain how the Saturn generated 3D using only sprites. That would be super cool.
Thanks for these vids and your coding skill on the Saturn. Such a shame we never got to see more of your coding greatness on the Saturn with games using a improved Sonic R engine
Thank you for this video! You guys are wizards, and truly pushed Sega hardware to the limits. I would have loved to see how far you could have pushed the Dreamcast. I hope you talk about your super fast conversion of Sonic 3D from Genesis to Saturn while still being able to make enhanced artwork at higher resolution and color, and all while still new to the Sega Saturn hardware itself, in the near future.
Writing a proprietary software renderer in ASM, to do environment mapping through 2D Logic, then using it mostly to display a Shiney logo. That's a real "to make an apple pie, you must first create the universe" scenario. Impressive levels of overkill.
This is so impressive! Sonic R is such a showcase of many different limitations of the Saturn hardware spec that used clever and ingenious workarounds. I know the 3D Sonic Jam museum was done using the Nights Engine, which was also a true masterpiece of coding, but for a company that wasn’t part of the legendary Sonic Team, Traveler’s Tales was one of the few, along with Lobotomy Software, that showed what the Saturn could do in the right hands.
Wow! Just wow... It's so fantastic that your team put so much effort into really pushing the limits and doing things that couldn't otherwise be done on the hardware. If only all developers showed this level of passion, or even half this amount, we'd have some spectacular games these days...
The Saturn was such an interesting and bizarre hardware design. Sadly, not many programmers had the skill and patience it took to create solutions like this. Bravo.
Steering worked much like wipeout, never had problems with that, about the coding bit, as a saturn owner for about 21 years who purchased Sonic R at the time, I was truly amazed, now I am more
I definitely want to hear more about using the second processor on the Saturn. Some developers just turned it off but you guys seemed like you found ways to manipulate it to be useful, a rare thing indeed.
This Channel is so cool. To hear someone from the gaming industry explain the technicalities of games rather then just design is so refreshing from the rest of youtubes content. So glad i subscribed
I'm willing to bet Nocturne in the Moonlight would've been way better if they put in the effort as well. I genuinely believe the Saturn could do a lot with its limited hardware, as evident with many of its imports from 1998 that mastered transparencies. Hell, even a game for the console in 1995 had them, but only Europe got the localization.
I believe the Saturn deserved a full run and I'm depressed at how quickly they threw it away.
Medachod ...Don't be depressed! Sega self destructed. We the fans only did what qas natural..namely, purchase the better console that incidentally, was less expensive! What were we supposed to do? There was no Sonic. No SOR. Nothing from Genesis to attract us.
Mo Go
Seriously, Sega of America really screwed it when it came to the Saturn. Bernie Stolar, president of SOA at the time, decided that the American catalog of Saturn games should be composed of only 3D games, not allowing either RPGs or 2D games (the one thing the console was very good at) for localization. When FFVII and SotN came out on the PS1 and convinced everyone that both RPGs and 2D games were cool, he decided to drop the console right away instead of, say, finally localize all those japanese games (and some european and even american developed ones, too) that were RPGs, 2D, or both (the Saturn was pretty big in Japan because of those games).
Also, about Streets of Rage... there was a 4th game being developed for the Dreamcast but apparently the staff at SOA at the time was different from the staff from the Genesis era and didn't know (or cared) about the series so they forced SOJ to cancel that, too. Something tells me Bernie was involved in this...
Jorge Enrique Riera
I spent that summer wrkng my but off for a ps1. 300.00 is a lot when you're a kid Makin min. Wage. 300+50for a game+25for a 2nd controller.
All I knew, PS1 was such an interesting console. But, had Sega given us, Sonicv32bit, EVEN A2D...
If they hadn't given up on 32x and cd....I may have been more open minded.
Jorge Enrique Riera
Why do I say this? Because, look...Sega had created this rep. of getting customers to buy in and then would leave them hanging.
Finding out the ways in which the Saturn works differently than a PS1 instead of just hearing "its different" is super interesting. Hope you do more Sega Saturn stuff.
Hearing how the two consoles technically work like in this video is interesting. I'll probably always wonder how games can stream CD audio and not have to show loading screens often...the systems must have a lot of RAM if it could load once then have it all there without having to stop playback.
There's a video on UA-cam made by some chinese guy I think (very thick accent but subtitles available), who explains in lengthy details exactly how the Saturn works for 2D and 3D rendering, including all its quirks and limitations and how devs worked around it. It's super interesting, very well-explained (it's technical yet understandable for the layman), you should totally check it out, you'd probably be interested. I can't remember the name but if you search for keywords such as Saturn VDP explanation or something, you should be able to find it.
The Saturn and Playstation didn't have much RAM. Hell, even the Dreamcast only had 16MB. But remember that Redbook audio and FMV take a huge amount of storage, so the rest of the game should be fairly small if the game uses them. And if they don't, then no need to stream (the Playstation at least, and probably the Saturn too I'd wager, had a kind of midi-like format with samples if devs wanted to - it sounds much better than, say, on the SNES, because you can use 44Khz samples, + you're less limited in the amount of samples, amount of channels, audio ram for longer samples etc.).
Think of a game like Wipeout: it uses redbook audio, but the game data itself (code + textures etc.) takes a small amount of storage. Heck, Wipeout 64 has full-length, not-sample-based tracks and the whole game fits in an EIGHT MEGABYTES cartridge. You heard this right : eight (8) megabytes. Music tracks included.
Xane Myers because many saturn and ps1 games play midi music instead.
As I recall Tomb Raider was the first game to stream in game data as you played. So playing audio tracks wasn't really an issue for most games as they loaded the whole level up-front, no streaming.
That is an excellent reference photo of the T-1000.
Video Fever why thank you!
Jon is a god, when he encounters an hardware limitation he laughs: "Haha limitations... challenge accepted".
Rodrigo Badin -> I laught because it's a fact told in a fun way!! 😂
But not everyone spent time on details they could just leave as "the hardware can"t handle it".
I wonder...Is this the spirit of a great game? Developers needed to be really creative to archive certain things on limited hardware. They had to put much more thought into it. Focus on key elements. Today these limitations are not that present(i am sure, there are also other kind of limitations which needs to be considered), but todays game engines are so powerful, packed with features, even free for anyone...maybe you need these limitations from the past to concentrate on the key elements of a game and get them right. Maybe you tend to think to big without limitations and in the end the game will be full of stuff, but shallow.
@@ColeZero The spirit lives on in PICO-8 game devs and modern C64 and Amiga devs.
@@ColeZero yeah, I am still thinking that they make a particle system for 16 bit games. I recently created a particle system and it was lagging on morden hardware. Imagine they did on 16 bit games without lagging at all.
"wrote the entire mapping engine in C" *screams*
"then I converted it into assembly" *soul is shaken out of body a a aaa A A A A A *
Jon - you're an absolute genius. What you pulled off back in the late 90s for Saturn, made me the proudest Saturn owner ever, =D. I'd got an N64, and then found the cart games way too expensive, and picked up a Saturn as they were going cheap at the time, and Sonic R felt like a solid 3D world like Mario 64, but with all the detailed texture maps of a playstation game...and so subsequently, felt like the best of both worlds, and superior to anything I'd played, graphically, up to that point, surpassed only by Panzer Dragoon Saga the following year. The draw distance on split screen was pretty bad, but I had hours of fun playing the tag game mode in two player. I love playing around spinning the R on the title screen, and using the shoulder buttons on the menus, to make the rotating models bigger and smaller - I typically switch between left and right shoulder buttons in time with the music, ^_^. I always assumed the title screen's R and the silver balloons with your race position on them in the the finishing screen, were real time, yet had always assumed the loading screen sonic head, was a FMV video clip of something you'd rendered on an SGI workstation. You've absolutely blown me away to reveal it was all you and your team's own coding, running on Saturn. You sir, are a genius! And disregarding the race in order to initially explore for those five sonic coins (I say initially, 'cos the eventual aim was to pick 'em up mid race) had us believing Saturn really was capable of doing a 3D Sonic exploring a 3D world, miles better than the NiGHTS engine or that horrible Sonic Jam thing that I always thought looked awful. The person I used to play Sonic R tag with developed such a fondness for Traveller's Tales from the game, he went out and bought Rascal for PlayStation afterwards - although I got the impression, stunning graphics on that aside, it wasn't as fun as Sonic R, =). I just completed Sonic R again at the weekend (had lost my saved game), unlocking all unlockables including Super Sonic. Thanks so much for this awesome game, and doing us Saturn owners proud. Even had my sister's friends thinking Saturn was a new console....in 1997, XD. Haha. Sega was so bad back then, the PlayStation generation had barely even heard of the machine, ^_^.
ajmetz82 Did I fall into an alternate universe where Sonic R is regarded as a good game?
It's a bloody good game! If you haven't enjoyed it, try using the shoulder buttons when you turn, and your handling will improve. Also, I always played with the 3D Pad's analogue stick - never tried to race with the D-pad before. So analogue control and shoulder buttons, and control is a lot easier. But yeah, uplifting music, great graphics, tonnes of shortcuts to master, and an exhilerating racing experience, ^_^.
So Lame Tbh Sonic R is flawed especially in its controls, and it’s quite short and easy to beat 100% but other than that it’s actually pretty good and well-made for the time. I don’t think it deserves its reputation because it’s actually okay. Not the best by far, but playable and enjoyable.
ajmetz82 I've always liked it, since growing up with it on GameCube as a kid. It was upsetting to hear the awful reception it got as I got older... Same with Sonic Adventure.
ajmetz82 What about on PC?
But why are your videos so short?!?! I love Coding Secrets! Wouldn't mind a documentary on the games you made(30 min+).
You're honestly an inspiration Mr. Burton!
I mean, who converts C to Assembly???? Who does that?!? 😕😕
I usually design something in a higher level language which is easier and then convert it to assembler to get the speed when doing retro stuff. Also a C compiler makes assembler anyway, so u can just use that and then tweak it by hand.
Yeah, it does. Ugh, I don't know how I missed that. But then again, it's impressive how you do it. I touched C a while back, didn't do any assembler(I can guess what's happening), so for me, it's mind blowing.
Back in the day you couldn't trust the assembler C created so I wrote from scratch...
A documentary would be amazing!! Plus your close to 100k subs congrats!!
It's so cool what you've done. I'm very impressed.
Modern 3d game engines have spoiled me so badly. The constraints you had to work under are ridiculous! You're a damn wizard!
Constraints always exist. You're not doing it right unless you're pushing the envelope of the hardware available, whatever it may be. This is why we still get 30 FPS games on console
Spoiled? You can still develop a super hard game engine that nobody will want to make games with it. Wouldn't you want to make good games easier? Would you rather develop games for a shitty hard engine and make a good game?
It's the future, this stuff from the 64 era it's now easier, so stop being a fucking bitch
yes constraints always exist but some constraints are easier to work with than others.
Somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bed.
An entire environment-mapping display engine, in C, ported to the Saturn? Holy hell that's impressive. I wonder how many man-hours that took to do.
Well that explains why you guys were so proud of the logo. I played Sonic R for the first time this year so kinda missing the general knowledge of what was impressive back in 1996.
I always thought that people were too hard on this game's graphics, and now we have the creator of the game proving how "good" they really were for the Saturn. This is fascinating stuff!
Actually this game is usually praised for its graphics and overall technical achievement but problem is the gameplay.
Yohko M. Really? I only ever heard people who say stuff like "this is the worst 3d ever in a video game".
Trolls exist! Doesn't mean you should bother with them ;)
Saturn is a pretty interesting piece of hardware too bad it was so tricky to make games for
People are too hard on plenty of perfectly good games. Especially if it's in the same genre as something they personally prefer.
The only critisism i ever aimed at Sonic R is that it's really short on content.
Ah, classic Traveler's Tales! Performing the "Impossible" on consoles that really stand out and all the complex, hard coding work definitely shows. Even by today's standards, as these effects stand out among the other games at the time. Bravo!!
Hello, there. Seriously, you'd be surprised how many other people I know also happen to enjoy this channel too. It's pretty great.
I can only imagine you did this "off the grid" away from any managers. I can't imagine trying to persuade them that you needed to invest time into it. Though I, and all other fans, are so very glad you did. Awesome channel.
Wow, writing a software renderer into the game on the Saturn, that's cool. Speaks to me especially since I'm currently writing a software renderer in C++ for a university assignment :P
University of Derby?
ChaosXLR Yes, actually! :P
Nice! I remember doing that assignment some 10 years ago now. I don't think I've ever really used those skills again (and I'm a senior programmer at Epic working on UE4), but I'm not a rendering programmer, so YMMV :)
ChaosXLR Ah, fair enough. I'm not sure how much I'll use these specific skill in the future but it's been a fun module and it's increased my familiarity with C++ which is also a plus (unintentional pun is unintentional).
I just went digging through my old Uni archives and found my implementation of that assignment (several in fact, in various states of optimisation). I'd be curious to give it a go again now TBH, see if I can optimise it any better now that I have 10 years more experience :)
Any other UA-camr would've just said "reflections weren't possible on the Saturn hardware so we coded a renderer of our own" but you went into just enough detail to be both easy to understand AND informative. I love this channel
GameHut: where the video titles are clickbaity, but the content high quality, accurate and interesting. :P
DaVince21 That’s cool, at least they’re not written IN CAPITAL LETTERS like other annoying clickbaiy titles...
But they're not clickbaity??? They tell you exactly what he's talking about
quote on quote "impossible" hardware and how he achieved it
Well... it works. At least it's not like "You WILL NOT BELIEVE how we did these IMPOSSIBLE EFFECTS on Sonic R! I cried when I saw line 342 of the code! But line 501 will CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOREVER!"
SONICR TOP10 IMPOSSIBLE EFFECTS - GAME DEVS SECRET REVEALED ✈ #8 WILL CHANGE HOW YOU PLAY FOREVER ✈
DaVince21 It's not clickbait if the title is accurate to the content of the video. It's appealing and it grabs the attention of the viewer, but you get exactly what's advertised in the title. That's like purchasing a product you saw on a massive billboard, finding that it is/does exactly what the billboard said, and calling the product a scam.
Very interesting! You were certainly one of the most talented Saturn programmers out there. It’s too bad you didn’t have opportunities to use the Sonic R or similar engines for more Saturn games, the visuals and effects were beyond amazing!
Homebrew developer XL2 has created hardware-based reflective effects on the SS using a flat shaded polygon, with a form of gouraud shading providing the reflection. Absolutely amazing, and apparently less memory intensive than a textured polygon!
Seriously, the Radiant Emerald track with real-transparency on the Saturn it's just beautiful to look at. How did you managed to pull that off? Great video as always Jon! Sonic R fan present as always :-)
You wrote your own code to overcome the console's limitations to do something that should have been impossible on said console.
You and your team are practically gods, this is insane.
Sonic R DX
Make it happen, Jon.
Maybe in 2020
Maybe in 2120
Maybe in 2220
2.2.2222, baby
Apparently, 2/2/2222 is difficult for me to say in one go...
This is my favorite one yet. Would animated tiles work in a similar fashion if you employed that (similar to achieving overlapping parallax effects on the NES and PC Engine) in order to make a pseudo-environment map or would that be too memory intensive?
waaaay too memory intensive. For just a 16-pixel square texture on a polygon you'd need 4,294,967,296 animation frames...
I hear ya, but my math gives me 256 frames for the same 16x16 square.
I cant wait until you do this guy in another parody
Game Sack need precalc for different coords for all 4 quad points. if small number of frames, effect will be very jumpy, not representing smooth reflective surface at all.
I had wondered when the day would come that I saw Game Sack here. I knew Joe would like this channel.
*SHINY AND CHROME!*
Everything is chrome in the future!
HE'S RIGHT!
**throws brick**
I remember finding it interesting learning how the Sega Saturn worked on a fundamentally different way than other 3d consoles (rendering polygons with quadrilaterals instead of triangles, for example) but of course you figure out a way around it by just rewriting how it works completely. I can't help but imagine you guys are still doing screwy stuff with the Lego games today.
Thanks for the all the content you make. It's amazing.
Wow, amazing how far off Sega was in designing the Saturn for the future of gaming. Really cool coding trick.
Player One Start The Saturn was more designed for 2D games than 3D. Apparently the 3D parts were just rushed.
Interestingly, a lot of popular indie games these days are 2D. The Saturn is actually most robust out of the three main consoles that generation when it came to 2D power, so in a weird way it was also somewhat accurate to the future of gaming.
72speedway yeah but 2d games have a much smaller public compared to 3d AAA games
@72speedway Actually most indie games these days are fully 3D rendered games, the camera viewport follows a single plane projection to appear 2D. Bitmap BLIT BLT using a library like Direct 2D is seldom used, 3D texture mapped object are rendered using Direct-X and OpenGL instead. One annoying artefact caused by this switch in rendering technique includes flickering around sharp sprite edges caused by oscillating object position, especially when two 2D plane objects are close together. Pixel perfect results are very hard to get using 3D.
+Player One Start
Sega were always ahead of their time. They already attempted pseudo-3D experiences during the 80s with groundbreaking games like Zaxxon and later on Space Harrier. And then they definitely established 3D gaming with Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter during 90s debuts thanks to their model 1 arcade board. But probably that with the Saturn they thought that at the time, console weren't powerful enough to do 3D well enough so they stayed with 2D at first but finally also went with 3D even though awkwardly designed but still pretty capable as can be seen with Panzer Dragoon Zwei, Virtua Fighter 2 or Last Bronx.
Also Daytona USA, one of the most impressive games ever in terms of technical achievement, impressive 3D racer at high frame rate. It took many years for others companies to reach something of the same level.
btw Sega also pioneered online gaming, already with the Mega Drive and Saturn but definitely established it with the Dreamcast.
A shame that such a brillant company in terms of hardwares and games were at the same time such a mess in terms of management :(
(but for those who don't know, Sega are still doing lot of stuff: arcade boards, consoles games, PC games... they only stopped consoles which, anyway, is not much needed these days)
Sonic R is a technical marvel!
Absolutely agree. And a joy to play (use the shoulder buttons when steering for easier control).
Yah people say its hard to control but its really not if you use them
It is hard even using them, you just cling into walls
You'll get there @Kimarnic - and control gets a lot smoother when you unlock characters like Super Sonic too, =). Come on run away....we don't have to stay....we're nearly out of time.... but you're doing fine.... ^_^.
Can you explain the transparency effects for this game in your next coding secrets?
That’s a heck of a work-around to get the effect to work. Kudos to you guys for actually pulling it off.
god i love this channel
These videos are very interesting. It's amazing seeing how clever these tricks are and the tech wizardry pulled off in them. I honestly took the visuals in these games for granted, and seeing how they were built makes me appreciate them much more.
This was so fascinating, I am blown away by how innovative you and your team were when problem-solving such complicated hardware limitations. Truly inspiring
Think you'll ever do a "director's cut" for Sonic R?
INeverWanted2010 i need that in my life
Cant wait.
Complete with environment mapping on Metal Sonic, Metal Knuckles, and Amy's car.
Brody Hands I haven't heard of any Redux?! *makes a beeline for Google*
That'd be silly, since Sonic R's been heavily superannuated by All Stars Racing Transformed.
These Coding Secrets video are all awesome. Please keep making them.
I love this channel so much. These insights into old games and consoles always make my day, thank you!
You are incredibly brilliant and I love your videos.
Please keep making such informative coding vids.
Man, I love this channel! It's so cool and interesting to look at those codings, how those teams achieved such things and all, it really amazes me
Cool stuff like this is why this is easily my favorite channel of all time.
Amazing to see these behind the scenes videos. Sonic R on the Saturn was my childhood!
always impressively creative and a brilliant display of coding skill coupled with hardware understanding.
This is so awesome, I'm am so glad I discovered this channel. Keep up the good work!
I love this. Especially when you are dealing with the Sega Saturns limitations . The Saturn is an amazing system and i hope the sega fan community of developers and coders can some day bring new life to sega saturn games like Burning Rangers, which was a great concept but had some rough edges
Wow. There you have it! Excellent programming! Amazing how you did that . Love to see how you were able to conquer Saturns transparency issues
Damn, that's the coolest trick I've seen on your channel yet! You guys were (are) geniuses!
Great video! Your explanations and animations of the processes were incredibly cool to listen to.
That is really quite incredible. No tricks -- just sheer brute force. And it worked beautifully! That old Saturn had more in it than many of us thought!
This is starting to become my new favorite channel
Thank you for taking the time to carefully explain this! It is awesome!
Thank you for doing this, you are a great man. I'm very interested in Saturn / Dreamcast technology. I also wish these videos were longer.
Incredible, I remember booting this up as a kid and being blown away by those shiny metallic polygons. Such great work!
Thank you for these wonderful insights into the painstaking process of programming on this kind of hardware. I'm always amazed at what kind of innovation came out of such limited hardware.
Traveller's Tales games always have impressive hardware achievements! You are an inspiration
Just the other day, while watching another of your videos about Sonic R's graphics, I was telling my girlfriend how impressed I was by the load screen Sonic head, because before this game my teenage self thought environment mapping was impossible on the Saturn. I always knew there was some magic behind it, but it's taken this long for me to find out just how amazing it actually was! Thank you for doing this video. I'm looking forward to many more!
This has easily become my favorite channel on UA-cam! This is all absolutely fascinating!
What would be really cool IMO is if you had a "GameHut University" series where you discussed some of these effects more in-depth, talking about how exactly you accomplished stuff, not shying away from the math or the more complex details for those who can grok them.
Fascinating, as always. And beautifully explained.
I’ve never met a Sonic game that I liked playing, but I’ll watch every one of these videos with a smile on my face!
Thank you!
This is epic. Having an idea and doing what you can to achieve it under the limitations.
As a game dev enthusiast, your videos are the perfect length. Thanks and enjoyed this ep.
I'm surprised you put these videos out so fast, I love it!
Your videos are amazing. I love how thorough and detailed you are!
That's amazing, I love how much one can push a console to do things it couldn't do naturally with enough knowledge about its hardware and some creativity.
This is why I'm so impressed with your effects! You could've easily just gone in and pre-rendered that graphic but you wrote a software renderer instead just to create that effect!
Come to think of it, I did think the environment mapping effects in Sonic R were really impressive when I first saw them. Thanks for sharing what went into this.
amazing... these coding secrets videos are an absolute TREAT. all your videos are great, I am especially loving coding secrets. better than freaking cable, man.
That’s a really interesting workaround. Sonic R had a lot more effort put into it than I thought before.
Your videos are absolutely incredible. I can't help but smile!
Awesome video series, a real inspiration for creative coding workarounds.
i’m sorry, _WHAT?!_
you put SO much effort into this game WOW
And pls talk more about the saturn. Its one of m favorite systems. Love to hear how stuff was made to be able to ran on it.
Awesome. I loved coding for the Saturn, but never managed to get much use out of the second SH2. Good stuff.
Traveler's Tales must have been staffed by some of the most insane coders. It's honestly jaw-dropping seeing the amount of effort you all were willing to go to just to make metallic reflections a possibility.
Holy cats!! I'm impressed man. You're one of my new favorite UA-camrs. I hope I'm as good at programming as you are some day!!!
I'm addicted to your videos ! I'm so glad I found your channel, big like !
I wonder if maybe this tech was the reasoning behind so many metal characters in the game? I think there were 4 or 5.
Chaosian01 metal sonic, tails doll, metal knuckles, and eggrobo. That's 4
I literally screamed "You did WHAT?" at my computer just now when you said you created a triangle rendering engine for the Saturn. You're a wizard and I can't handle it.
Oh, the console isn't capable of this feature? Whatever, we'll code it ourselves entirely in software.
I loved this on the Saturn. You guys were absolute geniouses. Keep these videos going! You could try and really explain how the Saturn generated 3D using only sprites. That would be super cool.
Thanks for these vids and your coding skill on the Saturn. Such a shame we never got to see more of your coding greatness on the Saturn with games using a improved Sonic R engine
Thank you for this video! You guys are wizards, and truly pushed Sega hardware to the limits. I would have loved to see how far you could have pushed the Dreamcast. I hope you talk about your super fast conversion of Sonic 3D from Genesis to Saturn while still being able to make enhanced artwork at higher resolution and color, and all while still new to the Sega Saturn hardware itself, in the near future.
Very great! So it‘s software rendering, that‘s actually quite incredible.
all that work is incredible as always
Writing a proprietary software renderer in ASM, to do environment mapping through 2D Logic, then using it mostly to display a Shiney logo. That's a real "to make an apple pie, you must first create the universe" scenario. Impressive levels of overkill.
Amazing! My thoughts exactly.
This is so impressive! Sonic R is such a showcase of many different limitations of the Saturn hardware spec that used clever and ingenious workarounds. I know the 3D Sonic Jam museum was done using the Nights Engine, which was also a true masterpiece of coding, but for a company that wasn’t part of the legendary Sonic Team, Traveler’s Tales was one of the few, along with Lobotomy Software, that showed what the Saturn could do in the right hands.
Hot damn, you're a wizard Jon. You really bang out that ASM good
I'd love to see a video about the transparency effect in Sonic R, that was amazing for the Saturn!
I love these! it is so interesting to get a insider's view on coding games!
Wow! Just wow... It's so fantastic that your team put so much effort into really pushing the limits and doing things that couldn't otherwise be done on the hardware. If only all developers showed this level of passion, or even half this amount, we'd have some spectacular games these days...
"So, how do we get environment mapping on the Saturn? Well, we wrote our own software renderer..." You absolute madmen, what a solution
Man I love your videos "The hardware can't do it" >> "Up yours, we're doing it anyway"
The Saturn was such an interesting and bizarre hardware design. Sadly, not many programmers had the skill and patience it took to create solutions like this. Bravo.
That's insane to me. That's a lot of work and I think it's a real shame that the gameplay side of things really didn't quite hit it outta the park.
I think this channel has more consistently good content than practically any other channel I've seen on UA-cam.
Sonic R is the best religion
I love these videos so much, please keep up the great work! So cool!
So happy to see a new video! I wish you would be uploading more frequently :(
I know nothing about coding and you explain it for dummies so thank you. You’re the best
Steering worked much like wipeout, never had problems with that, about the coding bit, as a saturn owner for about 21 years who purchased Sonic R at the time, I was truly amazed, now I am more
I definitely want to hear more about using the second processor on the Saturn. Some developers just turned it off but you guys seemed like you found ways to manipulate it to be useful, a rare thing indeed.
Absolutely genius! I also admire how you aren't afraid to call the software renderer the "slave" in proper (yet un-PC) terminology haha.
I love playing the shiny R in the title screen. All of the shiny objects in this game are one of my most memorable objects in my gaming life.