Could Dreamcast et al handle this/that game/effect? *DC tech retrospective *spawn

davis.anthony said:
Speak to those reporting on it.



The game has a feature where you use a code system for loading when looking at a few YouTube videos about the game.



I suggest you look at my signature.



So your argument against it not being final (as John at DF said) is because you've played the game and you say so?
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Yes, it has sort of a password system, we actually used that playing the game, before YouTube.

But, game has more issues, the bigger one is the save file stuff. I know they had the password option to kinda bypass that but i don´t know. I don´t recall any game from that era of consoles using memery cards that has been released with a save file issue like that (dramatic different sizes depending on the saves), even ones which have both systems (password/codes and regular save game) like Doom 64 (which also is now on DC and improved). So, were they really planning launch the game like that? That´s something that could have been fixable, so it´s weird for a gold.

Please can you point out which part of the video John say it´s the final? I´ve watched the video and didnt find it. Maybe it was my mistake....english is not my mother language.

Or may be... https://tcrf.net/Half-Life_(Dreamcast)
 
Btw what is the endgame here really? Did DC fans find a wormhole or Time Machine or something? They are planning to take the CDR of HL and GTA3 back to Tokio september 2001 when the final Sega Dreamcast meeting is done where the fate is decided and show how well DC can run these games in order not to cancel the Dreamcast?

That will just cause a chain of events leading to everything changing and thus the wormhole never being discovered, nor the DC fans finding a motivation to create the port.

We are basically stuck in a time loop in that case. How many DC vs PS2 arguments have there been had in the past? Which cycle is this ???
 
xaeroxcore said:
Yes, so wouldnt that pretty much proves that the leaked version isnt final? i just ask :)
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"Final" doesn't mean finished and perfect. You put out the version you have when the publishing deadline hits. If it gets delayed or something, you might improve it. That's now status quo with patches, including Day 1 patches for 'final' released games on disc.
 
XboxKING said:
Btw what is the endgame here really? Did DC fans find a wormhole or Time Machine or something? They are planning to take the CDR of HL and GTA3 back to Tokio september 2001 when the final Sega Dreamcast meeting is done where the fate is decided and show how well DC can run these games in order not to cancel the Dreamcast?

That will just cause a chain of events leading to everything changing and thus the wormhole never being discovered, nor the DC fans finding a motivation to create the port.

We are basically stuck in a time loop in that case. How many DC vs PS2 arguments have there been had in the past? Which cycle is this ???
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Hahahahahahahaa

On my end, i just want to play on my DC what the market denied it unfairly: that means GTA 3, VF 4, a better version of Half Life, Max Payne, Soul Reaver 2 and some other 2001-02 gems. Nothing else. By the way, i actually have most of those games on PS2, but the point of all this is finally being able to play them on the actual Dreamcast. I don´t want an scenario in which DC won and PS2 flopped....In fact i love PS2, GCN and specially the OG Xbox, That 6th was the best!! Also i know PS2 is more powerful, any person with common sense knows that, but i don´t know why some people cant´stand that DC community is trying to push the system further. The other consoles were taken beyond their limits and it was OK, but suddenly DC, which spent just 2 years on the market, is the only console which cannot go further. Why? Just because!

In other news, actually related to the thread, on Neo Gaf the Lead Designer of Test Drive Le Mans gave us tremendous new data about the development of this game, which is technically the most advanced racer on the system. If you wanna go and give it a check, is near to the bottom: https://www.neogaf.com/threads/was-...beneficiary-of-no-competition.1539435/page-35
 
I remember TestDrive LeMans it had a bit of a strange history it was Originally a multi platform release called LeMans 24 Hour by Eutechnyx, it was then ported to the ps2 and renamed TestDrive LeMans then that version was then ported back to pc under the TestDrive brand
ps: imho the superior version is the original Eutechnyx version
 
davis.anthony said:
1. The leaked version of the game was the final version. So final in fact that reviews had already been published and strategy guide had already been printed for it
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Shifty Geezer said:
"Final" doesn't mean finished and perfect. You put out the version you have when the publishing deadline hits. If it gets delayed or something, you might improve it. That's now status quo with patches, including Day 1 patches for 'final' released games on disc.
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The version of DC half life that DF analysed was a month before shipping.
 
(Now with 100% less drunk and tired).

PS2 is definitely a better version of Half Life. There's a lot more to consider than just the hardware though.

The DC version missed it's last month of polish (most intensive in the final weeks), and the number of crashes I had was pretty high (Blue Shift seemed better). Not that I think this would have particularly fixed most of the frame rate issues.

The DC version also uses mip maps, which will eat up 33% more texture memory and result in some lower resolution texture maps than if it wasn't used. I think the game would actually have looked better with mip map transitions pushed further back, or perhaps dropping them entirely like the PS2.

Most versions of DC HL are running on CD-Rom, which is half the speed of GD-Rom. The loading would still have been annoying on GD-Rom, but it would have been been improved. Measuring the loading times of a CD-Rom version was a bit unfair in this regard.

Many things that make the PS2 version better - brighter, better menus (without loading between screens lol), 16:9 support, preloading areas to improve loading times, 24-bit colour, no colour banding on the skybox - are not inherently issues with the Dreamcast. They DC could have done all of these things. The PS2 version was just made better.

There's another issues which is resolution. DC version runs at 34% higher resolution than on PS2, and supports progressive scan. The frame rate of the DC version is worse for sure, and tanks to unpleasantly low levels, but I don't think this is down to the resolution or the GPU, I think it's limited on the CPU side. Source can be quite heavy on the CPU and seems to benefit a lot from Out of Order Execution processors like the Pentium 2.

The SH4 in the DC has to do both the T&L and the physics, animation, scripting etc. This is I think where the PS2's higher performance is coming from in HL - it can offload the T&L to VU1. It's a real advantage that you're never going to fully overcome however clever you are with the DC.

I still think it's the CPU that's going to be the biggest challenge for getting DC GTA3 to match the PS2 version.
 
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Mittens0407 said:
Jnmartin84 has been doing a fantastic job taking advantage of hardware bump mapping in his Dreamcast port of Doom 64:
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I know there's a CPU cost to doing the vertex calculations for bump mapping on the DC, but this is covering most of the screen with bump mapping at 60 fps. At 30 fps both bump mapping and the vertex calculations would have been very doable. Just as SimonF always said that bump mapping was perfectly doable in game on the DC.
 
function said:
(Now with 100% less drunk and tired).

PS2 is definitely a better version of Half Life. There's a lot more to consider than just the hardware though.

The DC version missed it's last month of polish (most intensive in the final weeks), and the number of crashes I had was pretty high (Blue Shift seemed better). Not that I think this would have particularly fixed most of the frame rate issues.

The DC version also uses mip maps, which will eat up 33% more texture memory and result in some lower resolution texture maps than if it wasn't used. I think the game would actually have looked better with mip map transitions pushed further back, or perhaps dropping them entirely like the PS2.

Most versions of DC HL are running on CD-Rom, which is half the speed of GD-Rom. The loading would still have been annoying on GD-Rom, but it would have been been improved. Measuring the loading times of a CD-Rom version was a bit unfair in this regard.

Many things that make the PS2 version better - brighter, better menus (without loading between screens lol), 16:9 support, preloading areas to improve loading times, 24-bit colour, no colour banding on the skybox - are not inherently issues with the Dreamcast. They DC could have done all of these things. The PS2 version was just made better.

There's another issues which is resolution. DC version runs at 34% higher resolution than on PS2, and supports progressive scan. The frame rate of the DC version is worse for sure, and tanks to unpleasantly low levels, but I don't think this is down to the resolution or the GPU, I think it's limited on the CPU side. Source can be quite heavy on the CPU and seems to benefit a lot from Out of Order Execution processors like the Pentium 2.

The SH4 in the DC has to do both the T&L and the physics, animation, scripting etc. This is I think where the PS2's higher performance is coming from in HL - it can offload the T&L to VU1. It's a real advantage that you're never going to fully overcome however clever you are with the DC.

I still think it's the CPU that's going to be the biggest challenge for getting DC GTA3 to match the PS2 version.
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The truth is even simpler. Since it wasn't finished the wince dll the game uses were put of date and the wads weren't optimized and despite to having added vq to the engine they didn't get around to actually using it on the textures. Even the fov was set to some high number like the pc version unlike the PS2 version apparently. A modder named Ian Michaels seems to have discovered this. Here's his statement below , he also posted videos with the built in fps counter but that's stuck in discord I think.

So basically Dreamcast version is crippled by old dlls that controls everything from controls to the drawing routines , yikes. Then they didn't optimize the textures or fix the wads for dc. He did all this and got it nearly frame locked at 30 fps.

Dc issues well of course is the slowest of the generation doesn't necessarily mean it isn't capable but it's definitely crippled by it's so called " easy to use" libraries that limited its performance.

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Cloofoofoo said:
The truth is even simpler. Since it wasn't finished the wince dll the game uses were put of date and the wads weren't optimized and despite to having added vq to the engine they didn't get around to actually using it on the textures. Even the fov was set to some high number like the pc version unlike the PS2 version apparently. A modder named Ian Michaels seems to have discovered this. Here's his statement below , he also posted videos with the built in fps counter but that's stuck in discord I think.

So basically Dreamcast version is crippled by old dlls that controls everything from controls to the drawing routines , yikes. Then they didn't optimize the textures or fix the wads for dc. He did all this and got it nearly frame locked at 30 fps.

Dc issues well of course is the slowest of the generation doesn't necessarily mean it isn't capable but it's definitely crippled by it's so called " easy to use" libraries that limited its performance.

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Just because newer libraries were available and assets weren't in the most optimal formats doesn't mean that the game wouldn't have shipped in the state that it was last leaked. NetherRealm and Rocksteady stuck with Unreal Engine 3 for much longer than most other developers, and Wukong just shipped on an outdated fork of UE5. It isn't all that uncommon. Maybe these things would have changed, but maybe not. We got a fair amount of PC to Dreamcast ports like Psycho Circus and Soldier of Fortune that clearly shipped in a less than optimal state.
 
What I find very interesting is that with current knowledge,understanding of the hardware and post-modern analysis, as in the case of the Dreamcast, often less than a handful of people on their leisure time can achieve and optimize what dev houses paying tenths or hundreds of staff were having difficulties in doing.

It just makes you wonder what would have happened with old hardware if today developers dedicated proper resources.

Especially on Saturn and Dreamcast homebrew efforts and optimizations have been exceptional and very interesting. None of that is seen on PS2 or PS1 and I would have been interested to see if modern efforts exploited the hardware closer to how it was originally designed for
 
Nesh said:
It just makes you wonder what would have happened with old hardware if today developers dedicated proper resources.
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I think that's a bit unfair. These consoles launched into a knowledge vacuum, on which games that have never thought of before had to be invented including how the heck do you even draw stuff. There's so much learn process across hundreds of titles that's feeding in to homebrew efforts. Even experienced developers, they go from title to title realising what they could have done differently and improve in the next game, and then, maybe, realise that improvement was a dead-end and actually trying a different way would be even better.

It's the nature of software that there's no one perfect solution. You have an idea how to solve the problem, write the code - across lots of different parts particularly in the case of these multicore consoles - and see what you get, and then learn from it. If someone finds a way to more from MathProcessor 2 then before, suddenly your TriangleDraw Strategy based on MathPro2's limited output becomes obsolete and now you need a new TriangleDraw Strategy, maybe this time not sorting and binning triangles.
Nesh said:
Especially on Saturn and Dreamcast homebrew efforts and optimizations have been exceptional and very interesting. None of that is seen on PS2 or PS1 and I would have been interested to see if modern efforts exploited the hardware closer to how it was originally designed for
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Absolutely. Look at any closed hardware like the 8bit console and computers. Homebrew has managed things beyond the imagining of the developers of the time. There's loads more PS2 could do with a highly activate enthusiast homebrew crowd. I wouldn't be surprised if IQ couldn't be improved by restoring mipmapping across a number of games, for one.

That's why these threads are presently the most fascinating console talk! Current consoles is all about Virtualised geometry, ray tracing, and a handful of algorithms. There's hardly anything interesting and little room for experimentation.

I reckon PS3 and XB360 probably represent the last generation where with another 20+ years of activity, they could produce results beyond what they were known for in their time.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
I think that's a bit unfair. These consoles launched into a knowledge vacuum, on which games that have never thought of before had to be invented including how the heck do you even draw stuff. There's so much learn process across hundreds of titles that's feeding in to homebrew efforts. Even experienced developers, they go from title to title realising what they could have done differently and improve in the next game, and then, maybe, realise that improvement was a dead-end and actually trying a different way would be even better.

It's the nature of software that there's no one perfect solution. You have an idea how to solve the problem, write the code - across lots of different parts particularly in the case of these multicore consoles - and see what you get, and then learn from it. If someone finds a way to more from MathProcessor 2 then before, suddenly your TriangleDraw Strategy based on MathPro2's limited output becomes obsolete and now you need a new TriangleDraw Strategy, maybe this time not sorting and binning triangles.
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I think I need to give better context. I didnt mean proper resources compared to what they were giving before. I meant proper resources compared to the limited resources the current homebrew scene has in their disposal.
 
see colon said:
Just because newer libraries were available and assets weren't in the most optimal formats doesn't mean that the game wouldn't have shipped in the state that it was last leaked. NetherRealm and Rocksteady stuck with Unreal Engine 3 for much longer than most other developers, and Wukong just shipped on an outdated fork of UE5. It isn't all that uncommon. Maybe these things would have changed, but maybe not. We got a fair amount of PC to Dreamcast ports like Psycho Circus and Soldier of Fortune that clearly shipped in a less than optimal state.
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Except for the fact the dlls he pulled them from were from already released Dreamcast wince games. Maybe even a 1 year or more older than half life was supposed to release at. Face it they were overall done but testing phase was no where near finished.

The versions released are known not to be the latest, it's been mentioned a few times there at least 1 more version with better performance that hasn't been released.
 
Cloofoofoo said:
Except for the fact the dlls he pulled them from were from already released Dreamcast wince games. Maybe even a 1 year or more older than half life was supposed to release at. Face it they were overall done but testing phase was no where near finished.

The versions released are known not to be the latest, it's been mentioned a few times there at least 1 more version with better performance that hasn't been released.
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Unreal Engine 4 was released to developers in 2012 and Mortal Kombat 11 shipped on UE3 in 2019. It's not uncommon to ship a game with outdated libraries.
 
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