I love how you just happen to have an old build of a canceled Madagascar game lying around. Someday you’re just gonna nonchalantly turn up with an alpha build of Half-Life 3 or something. lol
*Basically "So, to show you more about these effects, I'll show you a almost never before seen prototype from a cancelled madagascar game I have here"* *That's why I love your channel so much, Jon! keep up the astonishing work!*
Most likely the rays were done by having a single tall beam texture per particle. The particles would then be given a reasonably long lifespan so they would shimmer instead of flicker. The emitter was then placed on an angle to simulate the light direction. There is probably an option on the emitter to use a texture to determine the colour of each particle in a UV coordinate space, so by using the same stained glass texture for that, you get the illusion of multi-coloured light rays.
think of them as partially textured transparent objects with fullbright turned on so lighting and shading doesnt affect them and there you have it. they are objects not particles.
@gNightrow Vector Processing Unit. They execute instructions on groups of numbers at once. Good for 3D math and other kinds of parallel processing tasks.
I would have appreciated a bit more of a technical explanation, like you do in your other Coding Secrets. This was more of a demonstration of the particle editor.
ano1nymus1 since 2000 until today, there wasn't need to code everything, except for the gameplay itself and the in-game cutcene sequences, however that doesn't mean that it's really easy to make a good enviroment for the level design, the video shows how complex could be making the "indicated" effects for a level enviroment.
erm, every single one of those features in the editor, including the editor itself, was coded. it doesn't just pop into existence. this was just an artist-level demonstration. yeah, it's a great system, but people want to know how it works.
This video may not be heavy on source code, but it's a neat look behind the curtain on how effects are added to a scene, and how versatile those effects systems can be.
I never played the home consoles version of the Madagascar game, however I saw a walkthrough of the PS2 version, and let me tell you, the Toys for Bob version looks piss poor compared to Traveller's Tales' prototype. Heck, the latter looks like a seventh gen game in comparison, crude lighting aside.
From what i remember the PS2 was actually the weakest console of its generation, possibly besides the Dreamcast. But it was certainly far from impossible to make fantastic looking games on, as its library can attest to.
@@RFC3514 actually yeah, the PS2 was technically weaker than the rest of it's generation, but that didn't stop us from playing these amazing games they've thrown at us. (Just look at Black, with little to no difference between XBOX and PS2 tbh.)
I've always found particle effects to be very fascinating imo. This might be a stupid idea, but I've love to see a game that uses solely particle effects to create a fully 3D world that's able to scale and morph dynamically without having to worry about the polygon count or draw distance.
I will say that I think just a video on the lighting system and how it interacts with Crash and Coco might be nice due to being able to see certain effects on my damaged PS2 copy.
"I could do follow-up videos to show how specific effects such as stained glass windows were achieved, or a video to explain just how we programmed the VPUs to give us such a fast system." I actually want BOTH. :D Your Coding Secrets videos never fail to always absolutely FASCINATE me.
I would be interested in seeing EVERYTHING. i especially want to see the coding tricks used to achieve the system. Personally, my favourite videos of yours are the behind the scenes optimisations for these classic consoles. Having an industry professional's perspective is incredibly interesting and useful. Great work man.
thumbs up to the idea of a more technical video on the system, just hearing anything in-depth about the PS2 sounds fun due to how weird of a console it was. Definitely curious as to how the stained glass rays were achieved as well.
Absolutely astounding. I was amazed by the use of the scaling transform to give the leaves the look of a 3D particle! Not to mention the surprise Madagascar prototype!
That's a blast from the past, I didn't expect to see the Madagascar game again. Nice to see the in game editors in action too after all of this time, that was such a great way to build and tweak level effects and objects.
Man I kinda want to see both follow up videos! Seeing how you made the system so fast would be awesome, and seeing its other capabilities would be even greater! Dude as a person really into older games this whole channel is a gold mine! Thanks for this and I hope for more!
This really is amazing. There is SOOOOOOOOOOOO much talk online about how powerful the PS2 was, how great and misunderstood the VUs were, but no real examples. Thank you, and any and all further examples would be greatly appreciated.
Tools like these never fail to fascinate me... or to remind me how fortunate I am to be doing similar work with 2020s tools, complete with all their niceties.
The light rays and VPUs are both of interest to me, as I've never seen so many particles render on the PS2 without any slowdown. I'm genuinely impressed by that.
I'm happy to hear all the stuff you've got to say about this! In honesty I kind of stopped noticing large development in 3D effects around the PS2 era (compared to the 32bit) so it's great to see and learn all the neat tricks that were going on.
Seeing you mess around with that flame reminded me of messing with the adjustable particle systems in the Insomniac Museum in Ratchet and Clank 2 and 3. Specifically 2. Those ones were just so cool!
Outstanding! I was always amazed how Crash games was always technically advanced. Engines of most crash games are just masterpieces in graphical quality and performance.
It's essentially a very simple yet incredibly powerful and robust particle builder and setter akin to something like UE's Particle Editors. This is brilliant. Fantastic work, dude!
Excellent channel! Nowadays, few such precious content can be found on youtube. Thank you very much! I'm 21 now and when I learned that you were working on iconic video games like Lego Star Wars or Crash Bandico, then I just needed to thank you for making my childhood more beautiful. Thanks!
This is the COOLEST THING! I've worked with the Source Engine's particle editor for several years. Seeing other game engines' editors is such a treat, especially seeing how similar they all sorta are!
That's got to be one helluva kick in the pills. You work with a team creating a game from nothing. You built with your on hands a fully realized 3d environment filled with things a player can interact with. You spend countless hours coding, fixing, and creating this complex thing...then a bunch of bean counters slam the door shut. I can't even begin to imagine how frustrating that would be. Especially for those people like you who pour your heart into a project no matter what it is. That's pretty amazing.
wrath of cortex was one of my ABSOLUTE favorite childhood games .. i love your videos we need more developers to open up like you have because you guys have some insane amazing stories to tell .. that knowone will know or think anything of until they are told.. absolutely incredible !! ... have a nice Saturday evening and enjoy the rest of your weekend !:)
So Ingenious and interesting. I'd love some extended versions of your videos. I could watch them for hours. You sir are an unsung legend of your industry.
"It was a flame, and now five minutes later, it's a storm of leaves." How does it feel to *play god?* Seriously though, that's a ridiculously good editor! And I wanna see how you did the window beams. Many thanks.
I would love to see how the rays were created, how collision works with the emitter, and also how you achieved the ridiculously low performance impact! This is incredible to me!!! Thank you for sharing this.
Funny that you mention particle effects, Metroid Prime 2 Echoes also has particle effects. One example is when the character of that game: U-Mos’ idle animations attracts moths to his beam of light he shines from his hand. Particle effects are very intriguing to me. Seeing this on Crash & Madagascar Party is really cool!
I am not a developer in any capacity, but this is incredibly interesting to me. I like seeing how things work in the background that most people don't think about.
I'd love to hear both about how specific effects work and about how the programming behind this works! Both sound like such extremely interesting topics!
Reminds me of Ratchet and Clank Up your Arsenal, in the Insomniac Museum they had a few particle effects you were free to edit with a debugging menu that popped up when you stood on a pad near the particle effect.
I've only just found your channel and absolutely loving it, I was coding games around the dx7 era of pc programming and the particle system I wrote was remarkably similar (although I only had start and end colours rather than many points throughout it's life). I also didn't make such a nice editor for it! But particle systems are definitely the thing that makes games stand out. Well, shortly after particle systems came foliage systems which were the thing that made games stand out! Awesome videos, I really enjoy them, and trying to work out how you achieved effects before you tell us!
seeing how the geometry is created/textured/placed in the engine would be cool. seems like there are some nice foliage effects and stuff. would also be cool to see that stuff.
I really am interested in the technical side and the programming behind this. Thousands of particles on the PS2 without slowdown, modern game programmers really could learn a thing or two from how you (and presumably your team aswell) handled things back in the day
What an absolutely fantastic tool for the artists. In situ editing of the level, along with running natively on the hardware, so they'd immediately get feedback on performance. As a programmer, I'd be very interested in a more in-depth video on your instancing technique to prevent such a large number of particles from slowing down such (by today's standards) sluggish hardware. I have a high-level understanding of it, but a lower level explanation would be amazing.
What happened to the Wrath of Cortex builds are they lost? It be interesting to see the builds of Wrath of Cortex and Twinsanity as those game are full of development mystery which people would love to know/
Please do both follow up videos. Using particles effectively always confused me as a designer, and it would be really nice to see how professionals use them.
Considering that this system isn't too far off from modern particle systems, I'd honestly enjoy more videos on how specific particles were done. This would be really helpful for a lot of people, and anyone with their own copy of Unity or Unreal could even follow along.
That particle editor is so satisfying! I see you already did a video explaining how it was programmed, but I would really like another video showing some possibilities implemented though the editor. :)
As someone who recently got into assembly programming, I'd love to see the code behind programming the VPUs. It's fun seeing how much someone can do with so little.
The rays and literal way that you used the VPUs are particularly interesting to me. They seem like they might work similarly to modern GPU paricles at first glance. If I were to guess, I'd assume that the crepuscular rays were handled by having stacks and stacks of low alpha additive particles emitting aligned to the window and moving down in the direction of the sunbeam (and probably scaling up). This would be a pretty overdraw-heavy way of doing the effect, but that's my best guess looking at the featureset you have here. Also the technique is pretty similar to the concentric shell way of modelling volumetric fur, which seems a similar concept.
I love how you just happen to have an old build of a canceled Madagascar game lying around. Someday you’re just gonna nonchalantly turn up with an alpha build of Half-Life 3 or something. lol
Traveller's Tales didn't make Half-Life bruh. And... you were probably aware of that.
Newgame+ LD Maybe he knows some people in Bellevue, Washington. 😉
@@@newgameld2512
That's the joke.
wooosh
@@Nikku4211 there was no joke
*Basically "So, to show you more about these effects, I'll show you a almost never before seen prototype from a cancelled madagascar game I have here"*
*That's why I love your channel so much, Jon! keep up the astonishing work!*
Você por aqui Joe? hehe
*Actually I bold my comments because I'm kind of addicted in doing that*
I would love to see more of that prototype actually. Looks pretty cool.
Joeveno you almost make it sound like showing off a never before shown game beta just to show off a particle effect is a big deal~ xD
Well then please stop, it makes the letters look awful on many mobile devices and it just *sucks.*
Apart from the coding behind this, I'd also be interested in how you achieved the rays through the windows.
The coding is the best part, are you mad?
Most likely the rays were done by having a single tall beam texture per particle. The particles would then be given a reasonably long lifespan so they would shimmer instead of flicker. The emitter was then placed on an angle to simulate the light direction. There is probably an option on the emitter to use a texture to determine the colour of each particle in a UV coordinate space, so by using the same stained glass texture for that, you get the illusion of multi-coloured light rays.
Yep. I'd like to see these things too.
I want to know that, as well.
think of them as partially textured transparent objects with fullbright turned on so lighting and shading doesnt affect them and there you have it. they are objects not particles.
I'd like to understand how the VPU was used to produce this particles, please!
yes!
Me too. I'd love more technical videos!
what is a VPU ?
@gNightrow
Vector Processing Unit. They execute instructions on groups of numbers at once. Good for 3D math and other kinds of parallel processing tasks.
Seconded
So interesting!!! Channel never disappoints sir
I would have appreciated a bit more of a technical explanation, like you do in your other Coding Secrets. This was more of a demonstration of the particle editor.
ano1nymus1 since 2000 until today, there wasn't need to code everything, except for the gameplay itself and the in-game cutcene sequences, however that doesn't mean that it's really easy to make a good enviroment for the level design, the video shows how complex could be making the "indicated" effects for a level enviroment.
erm, every single one of those features in the editor, including the editor itself, was coded. it doesn't just pop into existence.
this was just an artist-level demonstration. yeah, it's a great system, but people want to know how it works.
This video may not be heavy on source code, but it's a neat look behind the curtain on how effects are added to a scene, and how versatile those effects systems can be.
That is pretty satisfying and all, but I agree with anon1ymous1 here. I also want him to kind of touch upon how [t]he[y] programmed the whole system
Suddenly, Madagascar prototype!
How did that one come to be, and why was it scrapped?
Ryan Silberman Probably made to show what they can do‚ and got denied. Like the Wallace and Gromit animation.
I played Vicarious Visions' GBA game, back in the day. It was pretty average, I recall.
@OneoftheCancor the final game we got from Toys for Bob does look suspiciously similar.
I never played the home consoles version of the Madagascar game, however I saw a walkthrough of the PS2 version, and let me tell you, the Toys for Bob version looks piss poor compared to Traveller's Tales' prototype. Heck, the latter looks like a seventh gen game in comparison, crude lighting aside.
Looks like some of their assets made it into that game media.playstation.com/is/image/SCEA/slus-21015-game-ss-4?$MediaCarousel_LargeImage$
Wow, the PS2 was a monster to handle all of that. That, or TT's programming was legendary and under-appreciated on the system.
From what i remember the PS2 was actually the weakest console of its generation, possibly besides the Dreamcast. But it was certainly far from impossible to make fantastic looking games on, as its library can attest to.
What makes you think it was "under appreciated"? Most of their games were very successful and got good reviews.
@@RFC3514 actually yeah, the PS2 was technically weaker than the rest of it's generation, but that didn't stop us from playing these amazing games they've thrown at us. (Just look at Black, with little to no difference between XBOX and PS2 tbh.)
that madagascar prototype looks beautiful
I've always found particle effects to be very fascinating imo. This might be a stupid idea, but I've love to see a game that uses solely particle effects to create a fully 3D world that's able to scale and morph dynamically without having to worry about the polygon count or draw distance.
That Madagascar cancelled game looks really interesting, please do a video about it
I'd be really interested to see the programming behind all this!
We want to see both, obviously! Personally, I'd like to know more about the VPU. Cheers!
I will say that I think just a video on the lighting system and how it interacts with Crash and Coco might be nice due to being able to see certain effects on my damaged PS2 copy.
I am honestly really interested in seeing both topics next! Thank you for sharing this!
"I could do follow-up videos to show how specific effects such as stained glass windows were achieved, or a video to explain just how we programmed the VPUs to give us such a fast system."
I actually want BOTH. :D Your Coding Secrets videos never fail to always absolutely FASCINATE me.
I would be interested in seeing EVERYTHING. i especially want to see the coding tricks used to achieve the system. Personally, my favourite videos of yours are the behind the scenes optimisations for these classic consoles. Having an industry professional's perspective is incredibly interesting and useful. Great work man.
thumbs up to the idea of a more technical video on the system, just hearing anything in-depth about the PS2 sounds fun due to how weird of a console it was. Definitely curious as to how the stained glass rays were achieved as well.
10:04 ok, that's fricking amazing. I don't think I'v ever seen an effect with that many particles moving around without the least bit of slowdown.
I really wanna know about the engineering behind it!
Absolutely astounding. I was amazed by the use of the scaling transform to give the leaves the look of a 3D particle! Not to mention the surprise Madagascar prototype!
I’ve always loved watching videos explaining old game development but it’s so cool seeing it from someone who actually worked on those games
5:54 Reminds me of the ice particle effects a lot of fantasy RPGs nowadays use, particularly the spreading of growing blocks over a small radius
That's a blast from the past, I didn't expect to see the Madagascar game again. Nice to see the in game editors in action too after all of this time, that was such a great way to build and tweak level effects and objects.
The PS2's fill rate performance is truly remarkable, all those dang particles and it's not breaking a sweat. Amazing.
Man I kinda want to see both follow up videos! Seeing how you made the system so fast would be awesome, and seeing its other capabilities would be even greater! Dude as a person really into older games this whole channel is a gold mine! Thanks for this and I hope for more!
This really is amazing. There is SOOOOOOOOOOOO much talk online about how powerful the PS2 was, how great and misunderstood the VUs were, but no real examples. Thank you, and any and all further examples would be greatly appreciated.
Tools like these never fail to fascinate me... or to remind me how fortunate I am to be doing similar work with 2020s tools, complete with all their niceties.
The light rays and VPUs are both of interest to me, as I've never seen so many particles render on the PS2 without any slowdown. I'm genuinely impressed by that.
I'm happy to hear all the stuff you've got to say about this! In honesty I kind of stopped noticing large development in 3D effects around the PS2 era (compared to the 32bit) so it's great to see and learn all the neat tricks that were going on.
This is the most robust in-engine editor interface I've ever seen on a console. Those gradient stops and the scaling in the texture viewer!
Seeing you mess around with that flame reminded me of messing with the adjustable particle systems in the Insomniac Museum in Ratchet and Clank 2 and 3.
Specifically 2. Those ones were just so cool!
Outstanding! I was always amazed how Crash games was always technically advanced. Engines of most crash games are just masterpieces in graphical quality and performance.
That's pretty cool, shame you never got to do the Madagascar game
It's essentially a very simple yet incredibly powerful and robust particle builder and setter akin to something like UE's Particle Editors. This is brilliant. Fantastic work, dude!
Excellent channel! Nowadays, few such precious content can be found on youtube. Thank you very much! I'm 21 now and when I learned that you were working on iconic video games like Lego Star Wars or Crash Bandico, then I just needed to thank you for making my childhood more beautiful. Thanks!
This is the COOLEST THING! I've worked with the Source Engine's particle editor for several years. Seeing other game engines' editors is such a treat, especially seeing how similar they all sorta are!
That's got to be one helluva kick in the pills. You work with a team creating a game from nothing. You built with your on hands a fully realized 3d environment filled with things a player can interact with. You spend countless hours coding, fixing, and creating this complex thing...then a bunch of bean counters slam the door shut. I can't even begin to imagine how frustrating that would be. Especially for those people like you who pour your heart into a project no matter what it is. That's pretty amazing.
wrath of cortex was one of my ABSOLUTE favorite childhood games .. i love your videos we need more developers to open up like you have because you guys have some insane amazing stories to tell .. that knowone will know or think anything of until they are told.. absolutely incredible !! ... have a nice Saturday evening and enjoy the rest of your weekend !:)
I'm impressed how the ps2 doesn't slow down with thousands of particles on the screen at once. Keep up the good vids they're fascinating
How about Twinsanity's Gone a bit coco level?
god i'd love to play around with this particle editor
That particle editor has more thought and effort put into it than every piece of code I've ever written in my life put together.
Yes yes yes yes yes, I want to see all of it Jon :)
So Ingenious and interesting. I'd love some extended versions of your videos. I could watch them for hours. You sir are an unsung legend of your industry.
"It was a flame, and now five minutes later, it's a storm of leaves."
How does it feel to *play god?*
Seriously though, that's a ridiculously good editor! And I wanna see how you did the window beams. Many thanks.
TELL US EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS MAGIC! These videos are incredible! It's so inspiring to see these incredible creative tools being explained!
I would love to see how the rays were created, how collision works with the emitter, and also how you achieved the ridiculously low performance impact! This is incredible to me!!! Thank you for sharing this.
I actually really love this channel. All the games you show off, I played when I was a child.
Both the stained-glass effect and the underlying programming sound fascinating. I'd love to see videos about both of those.
VPU programming pretty please!!
This!
I love to see more of this - anything you feel like showing and telling. :)
Funny that you mention particle effects, Metroid Prime 2 Echoes also has particle effects. One example is when the character of that game: U-Mos’ idle animations attracts moths to his beam of light he shines from his hand. Particle effects are very intriguing to me. Seeing this on Crash & Madagascar Party is really cool!
Thanks for sharing this. So much knowledge must just get filed away and forgotten when people eventually retire.
I am not a developer in any capacity, but this is incredibly interesting to me. I like seeing how things work in the background that most people don't think about.
I'd love to hear both about how specific effects work and about how the programming behind this works! Both sound like such extremely interesting topics!
Reminds me of Ratchet and Clank Up your Arsenal, in the Insomniac Museum they had a few particle effects you were free to edit with a debugging menu that popped up when you stood on a pad near the particle effect.
This is a cool tool, I'd love to see how you produced the particles, rather than simply what particles you produced
Yes, more in-depth please! I had no idea the PS2 was capable of pushing out thousands of particles without slowdown.
That was a really interesting behind-the-scenes look at game development.
Oh goodness, with something like this, rain and snow would be so simple and look so good!!
I really like the trick where you changed the height to make it look like it was rotating.
I've only just found your channel and absolutely loving it, I was coding games around the dx7 era of pc programming and the particle system I wrote was remarkably similar (although I only had start and end colours rather than many points throughout it's life). I also didn't make such a nice editor for it! But particle systems are definitely the thing that makes games stand out. Well, shortly after particle systems came foliage systems which were the thing that made games stand out! Awesome videos, I really enjoy them, and trying to work out how you achieved effects before you tell us!
Amazing what the PS2 could do! Really cool to see how good developers can master static hardware. Would love to hear more about everything else!
Great video showing some of the tools used to enhance the games
seeing how the geometry is created/textured/placed in the engine would be cool. seems like there are some nice foliage effects and stuff. would also be cool to see that stuff.
I'd definitely be interested in seeing more detailed videos about how certain effects and the system as a whole was implemented.
Looks like the bandicoot in the thumbnail, needs to go on a crash diet!
^ stop this
Nope, Mr.Orange just got THICC
Looks like Aaron Greenfield needs to learn when to use a comma!
Schwallex. We all make mistakes, it seems like you did too!
Very interesting video! I didn't expect the particle editor to be capable of producing such a wide variety of results live. Good insight as always. :)
I really am interested in the technical side and the programming behind this. Thousands of particles on the PS2 without slowdown, modern game programmers really could learn a thing or two from how you (and presumably your team aswell) handled things back in the day
Amazing. I'd like to see these interacting with collisions!
I’d love to see a video on how you coded this! It’s fascinating how it doesn’t slow down much when you add several thousands of particles!
Super interesting. Always nice to see how games were / are made.
Please do follow-up videos, especially on how it's programmed, this looks super interesting on how this all was achieved on older consoles!
I'd love to see a video on how you programmed the VPU to do this.
Whoaaaaaa.... Gave me some good ideas for generalizing a particle engine. Thanks!
This was super cool! I love seeing all these inner workings! Anything you'd like to show us; I'm sure that we'd love seeing it :3
What an absolutely fantastic tool for the artists. In situ editing of the level, along with running natively on the hardware, so they'd immediately get feedback on performance.
As a programmer, I'd be very interested in a more in-depth video on your instancing technique to prevent such a large number of particles from slowing down such (by today's standards) sluggish hardware. I have a high-level understanding of it, but a lower level explanation would be amazing.
What happened to the Wrath of Cortex builds are they lost? It be interesting to see the builds of Wrath of Cortex and Twinsanity as those game are full of development mystery which people would love to know/
I would love videos where you go into detail how you did those effects each and then maybe a longer video on how the system itself works
Please do both follow up videos.
Using particles effectively always confused me as a designer, and it would be really nice to see how professionals use them.
love to see some of the VPU's programming :D, great videos!! keep'em coming
Another great video. I find this channel so fascinating. Would love to see the coding behind the particle system and tools
Considering that this system isn't too far off from modern particle systems, I'd honestly enjoy more videos on how specific particles were done.
This would be really helpful for a lot of people, and anyone with their own copy of Unity or Unreal could even follow along.
This is fascinating, I'd love to see more
That particle editor is so satisfying!
I see you already did a video explaining how it was programmed, but I would really like another video showing some possibilities implemented though the editor. :)
This is incredible. I love seeing this kind of stuff. Please keep up the awesome content!
Both! I'd love to see the actual code behind this, as well as some more details on the light rays
I love this channel , thanks so much for sharing and demonstrating everything you do .
As someone who recently got into assembly programming, I'd love to see the code behind programming the VPUs. It's fun seeing how much someone can do with so little.
The rays and literal way that you used the VPUs are particularly interesting to me. They seem like they might work similarly to modern GPU paricles at first glance. If I were to guess, I'd assume that the crepuscular rays were handled by having stacks and stacks of low alpha additive particles emitting aligned to the window and moving down in the direction of the sunbeam (and probably scaling up). This would be a pretty overdraw-heavy way of doing the effect, but that's my best guess looking at the featureset you have here. Also the technique is pretty similar to the concentric shell way of modelling volumetric fur, which seems a similar concept.
OMG, the Madagascar game was one of my all time favorite GameCube games! I didn't know you guys made a prototype for it!
Pretty sure he's talking about a different game. He even said "cancelled" multiple times.
Reminds me of the particle effect customizer hidden in Ratchet and Clank 2: Going Commando, but this seems so much more robust.
This channel is the best. I could listen to these for hours
10:00 RIP UA-cam Bitrate!
This was ridiculously fascinating!
I'd love to see any and all videos you produce on the particle system.
These old editors used to build the game are fascinating!
I would love to see both these video ideas! :)
Great stuff. I would love to see more of this prototype in the future.