Sonic R's "Impossible" Fading - CODING SECRETS 

I'm a big Saturn fan myself, but don't let your fandom blind you. There is nothing wrong with the way developers thought of the Saturn. The console was just notoriously difficult to develop for, and I would imagine that few developers were probably both smart and talented enough to utilize the Saturn to it's full potential. Just so nobody misunderstands what I just said, I'm *not* saying that they weren't smart and talented, I'm simply saying that you would have had to be *exceptionally* smart and talented to get the most out of the console. A lot of patience was probably required as well. The fact is that the PS1 was just so easy to develop for and that's why most developers didn't even bother with the Saturn. Can you really blame them? The N64 is also said to have been difficult to develop for, but it was more worth developing for because the console was far more successful then the Saturn. Unfortunately, the Saturn was really only a big hit in Japan. On a side note, I've always thought that the Saturn was by FAR the best console of it's generation when it comes to the transition from 2D to 3D. It was the ultimate 2D gaming console, yet it was perfectly capable of 3D games as well. While both the PS1 and N64 were capable of 2D games, they were definitely made with 3D games in mind and not 2D games at all. From what I've heard, the Saturn could also apparently do some cool effects in 2D games that the PS1 could not (although the PS1 could apparently do effects in 3D games that Saturn couldn't.) Also, while the PS1 did have a handful of 2D games on it (Edit: after posting and thinking about it a little, I realized that there are far more then just a handful), Sony did not like seeing 2D games on the PS1 at all. I'm pretty sure Nintendo had no problem with it, but again, the N64 was not made with 2D gaming in mind either and actually had even fewer 2D games on it then the PS1 did.

+elPatrixF Yep, much better without them. I definitely agree with you! : - )

I think his click-baity sensational thumbnails kinda cheapen his amazing content honestly... but if he likes them, I won't complain :)

That’s something I noticed too. The videos are great, but the titles are so clickbaity..

How is that clickbait

I saw no clickbait in this video's title. He even cared to put the right quotes around 'impossible' so to say that accomplishment was never indeed impossible but still hard to do, hence deemed impossible by some people not knowledgeable enough to pull that out. So no clickbait here, just informations about something hard to accomplish by programming Saturn's hardware, it just happened that he was the talented programmer to do that, right?

The work they're doing today is far more amazing than anything that was done in the 90s. The brainpower that goes into a modern bleeding edge game engine today is humbling. Game dev used to be completely hacky dog shit. Games weren't even designed to run at variable refresh rates, resolutions or aspect ratios. It was nothing but global variables, hacks, special cases, and glitchy ass looking workarounds like the one described in this video (whose end result didn't even look that good when the game originally shipped, IMO).

Big Blue Frontend Is that why all the major engines (Unreal, idTech, CryEngine) had their roots in the 1990s and were all expanded upon by people for years down the line? That's right, nothing today is special. Making games now all requires that you use someone else's tools refined through the decades and add some scripts here and there to make a new game out of an existing framework. If anything, being a lazy hack is the current norm.

Banzeken there can still be amazing games out there

Game sack!?!? Looks likes Joe's in the house, Sega fans rejoice. How about a TT feature some day, or something hardware orientated with John ? Hardware pushers don't even start to describe this teams talents. PS. Long time viewer, thanks for all the good videos you and Dave have done over the years. :)

I say the same! I have also always find TT games way impressive! Such a great opportunity to finally see how those classics were coded by the creators themselves. BTW, I love Game Sack!

2 great videos from my 2 fave channels on same day, Although... I think I used the wrong grit sandpaper on my MegaDrive cart. Greendog still plays like shit.

Sup Game Sack!

i knew if i looked down in the comments id see this goofy ass

exceptional mad language skillz people can teach anything language related.

nothing is real, existence is impossible

Do we even exist?!

Half life is possible on Saturn! Nothing is impossible !

When two youtubers with excellent thematics works together,this always lead to an unexpected but great result.

From my understanding of old PC and console games, it's a miracle if you got the game to display anything other than error text.

After sonic and knuckles sega lost a few brain cells.

the same happened with Naughty Dog when they developed Crash Bandicoot. ND completely destroyed Sony's internal team when they attempted to challenge the Bandicoot by making their own shitty in-house platformer, failing to get anything even close to looking as good. This is nothing compared to the lengths that Andy Gavin and the other folks went to make Crash Bandicoot possible, completely hacking the PSX in the process and crossing lots of boundaries they weren't supposed to. Just storing the levels required they write their own tool which had a sort of adaptive compression, meaning it would compress completely differently if they moved even just one polygon. Some time, they got the level to compress under the size limit, but then they could never get a compression as good after making changes, meaning they had to alter the level over and over again until the algorithm finally managed to get it down again. You can read Gavin's blog posts about the development of Crash Bandicoot to learn more. Pure intellectual brilliance in every department over at Naughty Dog during these years, whether it be programmers or artists.

Sega did manage transparencies in the likes of burning rangers and panzer dragoon Saga. Still, Sonic R is on another level with how impressive it is.

Maybe just because they created the console doesn't mean they were imaginative enough to exploit all its capabilities. I don't know what led Sega to include all those tools and functions on the console that made the fading effect of this game possible, but I really doubt it was specifically to accomplish said effect given how complicated the whole process is and that it seems like only TT Games managed to pull it off, and that was after taking a very deep look into what the console was capable of. Maybe Sega of Japan (or any of their internal divisions) also looked at these functions and didn't think much of them, but TT Games not only took them into consideration, but combined them together (sprite color calculation ratio and the Saturn's shading effects) to accomplish something apparently the console wasn't designed to be capable of.

@@bigblue344 be quiet

The Saturn wasn't even designed to be a 3D machine. It was just so good at manipulating sprites Sega was able to cobble together something after seeing the Playstation and filling their trousers in horror.

Big Blue Frontend that’s amazing

@@youtubesuresuckscock This is an urban legend that has been plenty busted.

I Dunno... Burning rangers was quite the technical feat

Mike Contra with graphics that wouldnt be a problem for Playstation at all.

beaten to the punch

"That's Iwata-san, you rude rodent!"

That pfp is a mood

Larry Bundy Jr why do I always see you on these videos?

Larry Bundy Jr not in burning rangers.

Blank Blank: because Larry watches these videos about retro stuff, and likes to comment on them. And you likely subscribe to Larry or at least watch his videos. So the RU-vid algorithm shows you his posts.

It's weird, because I don't nor do I know anyone that watches his videos yet I still see him everywhere

panzer dragoon 2 did had transparent enemy bullets tough, one that i remenber of the top of my head are the last boss green round bullets

It's important to remember that VDP1 ships its data to VDP2 regardless, but I agree, the approach was novel, if somewhat flawed - the fires had to be rendered in half-resolution to keep performance up, and there was a ton of glitching. NiGHTS may not have been as adventurous but the results were better.

DMA does not cause much more bottlenecks than memory controller itself, (if CPU shares same bus to DMA and Memory Controller). Bottleneck would be copying insane ammounts of memory between CPU/RAM directly on timing critical events (such as horizontal blank or graphics engine bus access), not to mention the graphic corruption it would cause. This is where I see Nintendo virtuosity by enabling OAM access during hblank so you can do neat special effects without copying back the same line. But that requires a different hardware engineering approach. Well, programmers back then learnt the hard way and knew porting code would be "you either prove it or you suck"

BlueSatoshi I believe the Saturn was originally developed with the aim of creating the ultimate 2D graphics machine and its 3D rendering capability was a bit of an afterthought.

My guess is that until the PlayStation was revealed, Sega expected the typical 32-bit home console game to use an engine similar to Outrun or Space Harrier rather than Daytona USA; the Saturn approach would be more performative for this.

No cancer please.

Infinity war??? hahahaha

@@flynnjohn476 uuuh... Mr. tails? why did cream dissapeard...

PS1 scan converted polygons instead of building them using lines, so the PS1 could do some basic transparency without overdrawing and messing it up. I heard from people that worked on the Saturn that it was hard, no internet 2nd hand stories here.

Sally, Bunny, Rotor! No Come Back... "Hi I'm Shadow" "and I'm Big the Cat.. FROGGEH!!" NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

"Half" the animals? OH SNAP!

@@mrcyberpunk I see you were more a fan of the more serious animated series. The "Scratch & Grounder" series was good for a laid back laugh, but I preferred the other version in the 90s. Loved the opening theme song too.

@@Mastermind8908 Satam was always the superior. But everyone can agree Undreground was the weakest series.

@@mrcyberpunk Yeah, I tried but just couldn't get into Underground. Three Sonics saving music? This isn't Footloose people.

The whole track was drawn using one mix mode of 50%. Same technique as the video explains

Sometimes i think people just follow me around the Internet. It's like it's made of these inescapable paths, even though hypothetically, anyone can go anywhere anytime.

I call this former sega dev "old school programmer". ps: emu author here

Also, when a shield is drawn over a far-away, half faded polygon, the shield completely draws over it, with no transparency. Is that normal for an rgb pixel with semitransparency on, to overwrite a palette index pixel underneath it?

Transparent shield was RGB. Palette sprites for background fade. Two different draw routines.

Wow, that must've been hell to micromanage given that you have to upload all the palettes in advance to the VDP2.Also, you didn't mention it in the video, but you used transparent quads for the rainbow trail on the speed booster. Non-textured, single colour polygons with gouraud shading, to keep the speed up. You can actually see the transparent pixel overdraw bug on those, but only if you pause the game since it is so fast.

zyrobs yeah, the emulator I used to capture footage drew them as non-transparent so I didn’t bother explaining them, but in short, the transparent corruption is avoided due to the orientation they are drawn at to avoid the overdraw corruption (apart from the join)

Yep! I feel that if Sega had made it easier to program for, it would have seen better success. Maybe not enough to beat the Playstation, but still better than it ended up doing.

Player One Start I thought Sonic Xtreme not being released is what killed the Saturn

True dat!

Yeah, that definitely did not help.

Isn't it also true that part of it was because a lot of the Saturn's best games didn't get released in the US because that a-hole Bernie Stolar kept them from being so because they were 2d and "nobody wants 2d games anymore"?

yep!

I love so soo much what you are doing with your channel, any chances to have more details on an old interview you gave to Sega Saturn Magazine: What special effects and techniques are you most proud of in the Sonic R engine and why? You replied: The cross fading "misting" effect, the reflective water, and the compression technique used to calculate visible polygons. Can we have information about the compression used to calculate visible polygons ? Did the cross fading was a huge deal compared to what the Saturn offered in other games ? Can you explain why ? :D

According to Retro Gamer's "The Making of Sonic R" article, Burton said he was most pleased with the reflective surfaces, because the Saturn simply doesn't support them.

This very video explains why the cross fading was a huge deal...

GameHut oh sorry i didn’t understand it was the same stuff. Thanks again 😇

Yes, yes it was. To give you an idea how much, think that the Saturn's 3D capabilities were better than those of the PlayStation. But 3D games on the Saturn still looked like shit (most of them anyways) compared to those of Sony's console because programming anything 3D on it was that difficult. And well, you know, Sega killed the console before developers could get used to its hardware, and what was left gave the Saturn the reputation of being "that console that couldn't compete with the PlayStation because it had some shitty 3D". Sad, very sad...

Jorge Enrique Riera Saturn’s 3D capabilities were always worse than PS1. Bad transparency (usable only for special cases), slower drawing, being limited to quads even if you want triangles, wasteful redrawing of the same pixels, inefficient use of video memory due to framebuffers being fixed size, lack of uw-mapping (shown by Gamehut in another video). Only minor feature that saved it sometimes was support of 2D mode7-like effects that complemented real polygons on some games, typically used for drawing ground and/or sky.

If you look at theoretical specs and numbers, the Saturn has a HIGHER polygon per second count than the PlayStation. For example, check out this article www.racketboy.com/journal/ps1-strength-and-weaknesses-vs-n64-sega-saturn

"saturn had perspective corrected texture mapping" no it didn't...

N64 is also difficult to program, but the outcome is not as bad as Saturn. N64 uses triangle to draw polygons like PlayStation, so it also capable of 3D.

Right on. Like, spot on! ^^d

Ok, but look at the new more advanced techniques we use to push hardware further, like light prepass, indirect rendering, screenspace reflections, etc. Light prepass/deferred rendering alone is already really interesting to study. The concept is simple, but implementation details to get good performance are not as trivial. Such as accurately compressing the normals down to 2 values in screen space and reconstructing them later, or how to reconstruct both diffuse and specular lights from just 4 float values, rather than waste a whole 3 channels on specular highlights. It may not require as much low level coding expertise, but makes up for it in programming and mathematical technique.

And yet games like PUBG still look like ass.

Try making a beautiful game, by today's standards, that runs well. Trust me, it's not easy, and there is still magic being created every day in the industry.

Lassi Kinnunen you could not be more wrong! A huge portion of the budget is dedicated to graphics! It has become a sort of arms race. And engines constantly push graphics technology further. Have a look at unreal, they keep,adding new graphics features all the time. Most recently they added some very cool volumetric light probes, and distance field shadows. Very cool stuff. Speaking of elite, have you heard of elite dangerous? Its running on the cobra engine, a custom bespoke engine by frontier, which does still push technology further. Getting all these procedural assets to run smoothly is no small feat! To think that studios no longer squeeze as much performance as they can is incredibly naive. What sells games these days are graphics, (hence all the impossibly good looking demos at E3, and the push for 4k in the console space).

For the peasants: SS= Sega Saturn TT= Traveller's Tales GH= Game Hut

ty ty peasant her

My new secretary :)

I don't think comparing a late Saturn game with an N64 launch title (a legendary launch title but a launch title nonetheless) is a fair comparison but ok.

Jorge Enrique Riera u could also say he's comparing Sonic R to the best N64 had to offer graphically. None of the later N64 games progressed further than Super Mario 64 visually, so his point is still very valid 😊

"None of the later N64 games progesses futher than Super Mario 64 visually" Emmmm... no? If by "not progressing visually" you mean things like low-re textures, fog and other stuff like that that's more due to limitations of the system because of the cartridge format. And even with those limitations, visual progress can be noticed. Jet Force Gemini, Donkey Kong 64, the two Banjo games, the two Zelda games, and of course Conker's Bad Fur Day, you can't compare any of those games (and many others I'm not remembering right now) with SM64 and say there wasn't any visual progress at all. That's like saying Final Fantasy IX and Chrono Cross, which are some of the best looking games on the PS1, are visually on the same level as Final Fantasy VII.

Conker is ages ahead in the graphic aspect. There's no fog, a massive draw-distance, big textures, dinamic shadows, and there's the fact that the whole game has voice in the dialogues.

Yeah, but would you believe me if I told you that I once heard someone say that any average PS1 game already looks better than Conker? I also heard someone say that most N64 games have a framerate so low they're barely playable... What can I say? The internet sure is a weird place sometimes.

I think programming in general was the hardest thing ever. There was no GameMaker Studio or Unity. Just lots and lots of hard work.

And then Playstation 2 came along, which was more conventional, but not necessarily easier, lots and lots of quirks, just little bouts of weirdness and a high errata density.

With the Dreamcast giving up the ghost, and the Xbox and Gamecube a year away though, the PS2 had the console market to itself for a year, so it made sense for developers to focus on PS2 besides all the hype.

I really don't like the mentality that you have to be a "genius" to program. It's just something you get good at, like writing, drawing, composing, any regular skill.

Me saying "genius", is just a way to say that he was really clever with this. In all of their games, Traveller's Tales studyied the hardware they were working on to make the best out of it, and Sonic R is an awesome example of that.

IT'S IN MY EYES! IT'S IN MY EEEEEYES!

Yep, brother

Ahh! thanks for the reply!

What about Richard Burton? ;)

CodenameGamma I don't think he had any involvement in the PC version. Patches? How would patches not be compatible now if they were compatible before?

No one You know - Patches that are meant for a specific build (or range of builds) can fail if the internal code is significantly different in subsequent builds, especially if the patches are based on changing code in specific locations within the program's files, which was often the case. It was good for earlier systems that had a limited amount of storage space and/or network bandwidth for distributing the patches. Most newer patching techniques replace entire files, meaning the patches are going to be bigger, but not as reliant on what version is already in place.

Makes the code more efficient, and I don't think the algorithm actually just did quarters. I used that in the video for simplicity but I think the actual colour calculation algorithm was more complex in reality.

processing power was certainly a more valuable commodity than storage space. remember, we has just left the cartridge generation where 2mb was a lot to this new cd gen with as much as 650mb available to play with. storage wasn't a bottleneck.

But these systems don't exactly have an overabundance of RAM either for what they're trying to accomplish. Well, the hardware limitations play out differently for different projects, so if some RAM is left over, no reason not to spend it.

Eh, 2 MiB of RAM and 1.54 MiB of video RAM isn't all too shoddy for 1995.

Making games is hard. Helps having an understanding girlfriend

GameHut I'm just wondering what TT did for the SNES ports of its games, like Toy Story and Mickey Mania. How did you recreate the "3D" effects of the Genesis version on SNES, and if you even did?

The absolute chad.

being a hardware engineer feels like living in the 50's again (since reinventing everything). I think programmers back then had to adapt to non standard ways of achievements, so they had become hardware engineers in the process. lol

Harmonie Duquesne on the saturn*

Not sure if this is exactly how they did it, but Virtua Fighter used same quad-based technology to display first truly textured 3D graphics on arcade machines (and Saturn/32X). IIRC they had to rewrite code for PC port as it did not supported quads.

If you have triangle based hardware, you can just render two triangles with UV coordnates of 0/1 according to which quad corner, and it's done. If the hardware is affine, it will distort more than quad affine hardware, but it'll still work. If the hardware is perspective and you manage to retain Z/W through the pipeline, everything is going to look fine. If you have quad based hardware and are trying to render triangle based models which use UV coordinates for texture placement, give up, there's nothing you can do, you need to remodel all of your assets in quads and with exactly one texture spanning each quad corner to corner.

There were apparently two versions of PC Virtua Fighter. As the game was released before PC 3D had standardized, a company manufactured a quad-based PC card, and it came with Virtua Fighter. A quick Google search finds the NV1, apparently Nvidia's first graphics card, based on Saturn hardware (even including a Saturn controller port). A handful of Saturn games were ported for this PC hardware. Some years afterward, a friend of mind gave me his graphics card and the accompanying copy of VF, thinking I could use it as a passable upgrade for my old PC. Unfortunately, the card was effectively useless by that point. PC had quickly standardized to using triangles for 3D, and DirectX was created. Nvidia apparently tried releasing DirectX compatible drivers for the card, but it didn't really work.

BainesMkII, the NV1 is even more unusual than the Saturn; and it really has no Saturn compatible hardware except for the actually quite trivial game ports and the SEGA partnership to provide a batch of ported software. It's more unusual in the way that it doesn't render quadrilaterals like the Saturn, it renders quadratic surfaces, which are smooth, imagine each surface as being defined by 9 points in space, and imagine being able to represent a very close approximation of a sphere with just 6 surface primitives. However, no software except some tech demo that i have never seen in person and can no longer find, used the feature, the Saturn games used degenerated quadratics into 4-point quadrilaterals, effectively rendering same as Saturn.

Shouldn't be that much different if it's still possible to use all of the standard cool matrix operations we use with triangles.

I mean, yeah, but let's say a character is made with 500 polygons, or "sprites". You would have to write one line of code for each and every sprite on a model, rather than just being able to write one line of code for the model.

I'm assuming you mean for rendering? No you wouldn't, that's what loops are for and it's no different that tris.

That's not really how programming works. Even on older machines with hardware sprites, like the Mega Drive or the NES, you still have to draw the entire screen, including all the sprites, for every frame. So every frame there would be some code going through all the things to be drawn, and drawing all those things on the screen. That's not really any different from how we use modern GPUs, we've just invented more efficient ways of getting all of those polygons onto the screen. (and modifying what they look like) Whether you call them "sprites" or "polygons" doesn't really have any effect on how to draw them onto the screen.

NOW I understand, thanks.