Yup, sounded a lot like what we did in old demos.
But what I find confusing is that they made it "read" the information in triangles. Which I guess those triangles represented the texture coordinates that would "wrap" on the polygons. But the Saturn was using quads. How do you make triangles fit perfectly the quad surfaces?
They wrote a software triangle renderer and didn't use the quad hardware, just like you would on any CPU when you do not want to use GPU.
To reiterate what others are saying hopefully for clarity, they wrote a PC-type renderer (eg. Frontier Elite II) running on the CPU. It drew and shaded triangles. They then composited this over the Saturn's GPU output by drawing the render as a sprite over the top.
thanks for the explanation.
Maybe I had seen it before, but it was when I played Need for Speed Hot Pursuit III for the first time that I totally remember it and impressed me. Seeing reflections on the hood of the card thanks to the 3D accelerator card was such the experience.., I was in love with the hardware renderer because of it. NFS 3 was playable with a software renderer but some effects like environment mapping and coronas were amiss, iirc.Yeah but then there is this:
To me it sounds like the specific effect was rendered as a completely separate object by the CPU,composited over (as a sprite) and hence could not belong with the rest of the 3D rendered objects which were handled and rendered completely by the VDP1. It sounds like an overlayed "object" on top of the normal rendered scene.
There was no depth sorting, so you couldn't have the reflected elements be hidden if something got between them and the camera. I guess this is why the feature didn't appear on major in-game elements. As to whether there was too much going on for the CPU to compute anything else, texture-mapped 3D was running on PC in entire games (Elite Frontier) with a 386 or such, so I doubt this rendering saturated the processor. Bandwidth may have been a concern due to the shared bus.
Yeah, he talks about how it took large teams to make these games back then. While some AAA games were indeed created by half-a-dozen people teams back then, quite many were singlehandedly created by a sole coder-designer with maybe an artist and a sound designer. And few were as simplistic as his.
cant get indier than making a gb title in 2017
Yes, Ember/Halcyon.offtopic: wait.. you're from Halcyon?
Yes thats what I ment but didnt know how to put it into words.
The reason why I suspected as such is because they were using multiple processors to render different aspects of the scene so the CPU rendering discretely the reflected object, had to sync and calculate additional information based on what was going on with the rest in order to make it display properly (angle, scale, depth etc). I guess the bandwidth as you said might have been the bottleneck.
When I first saw Donkey Kong Country on a SNES I couldn't believe my eyes. It looked easily as good as anything you could play on more powerful systems that came out the next year. The impressive visuals and brilliant platforming gameplay made the game an icon, I think. I enjoyed the sense of humour, Cranky's Cabin and how amusing the old chap looked, and the simple fact of finding the letters of a word.... In the end it is a simple pick up and play 2d game which also had an awesome 2 player mode because as player 1 you can control Donkey Kong and player 2 takes control of Diddy Kong, and you can tag in and out when you are playing a level.
