Saturn Hexen...

[Tagrineth]

How the hell was this game made?!

It very easily looks many times better than the N64 version...

The textures are much higher res, the enemy, character, and object sprites are many times sharper...

The only problem is some frame rate issues, which aren't really a problem IMO as this is a very slow-paced FPS.

But in any case, how is this game possible? It doesn't even seem to have quad boundaries which are visible in nearly every other 3D Saturn game...

 

[zurich]

Any screens of this? Side by side comparisons w/N64 ver?

 

[Grall]

The Hexen N64 cart was probably rather small, and that's likely the reason for the crappy textures. Or the coders didn't bother to subdivide textures to fit into that silly small texture cache the RCP had.

This was an early title, and not done by one of the well-known coding houses either.

*G*

 

[Tagrineth]

I can't find any screenshots at all of Hexen for Saturn... meh... I'd look at GameSpot but I can never load any images at their site since about ~6 months ago.

 

[Blade]

Click here.

It doesn't look all that impressive. I haven't played the PC version in frickin' years, though.. so I can't compare. Here's the N64 version, and it looks like the Saturn version but with that crappy N64 texture filtering. (or blur as I like to call it..)

 

[Grall]

Hexen looks and plays fine in D3D jHexen format (though VERY blurry due to the super small texture sizes used)... Maybe a more recent version of the engine can supersample textures to avoid some of the blurring (though they'd start to look blocky instead of course, though that would really be the lesser of two evils).

http://www.doomsdayhq.com/ for more info.

*G*

 

[Crazyace]

Hexen , Doom and a few others ( I think Jedi Knight ) were based on raycast vertical and horizontal lines only, and originally specced for 486 class hardware with software renderers. It was possible to implement almost the complete software renderer on the consoles, just drawing textured lines and scaled sprites rather than polys.
Interestingly, because there weren't actually any 3D triangles being drawn, there was no shearing or distortion due to the lack of perspective correction. The big problem ( as with all PC to console conversions ) was just fitting the map and textures et all into the smaller memory pool.

 

[Grall]

I'm pretty sure Hexen for N64 runs on a fully polygonal engine since it uses bilinear filtering on all the textures.

It would have to be polygonal on PSX too since the machine uses polygon quads as sprites. For simplicity's and consistency's sake, I have to assume Saturn version also is polygonal.

*G*

 

[Fafalada]

I'm pretty sure Hexen for N64 runs on a fully polygonal engine since it uses bilinear filtering on all the textures.

Having access to perspective correction + nice filtering and mipmapping, it's rather obvious why you'd prefer a polygonal conversion on N64.

But the above wasn't the case for Saturn or PSX.
For those I'd imagine you'd use "almost" software approach like Ace said.Say, subdivide the perspective corrected edges fine enough to get rid of distortion and let hw rasterize the linear scanlines to keep the speed up.

 

[mech]

I can't find any screenshots at all of Hexen for Saturn... meh... I'd look at GameSpot but I can never load any images at their site since about ~6 months ago.

You haven't installed the hosts file that comes with Kazaalite or an add blocking program have you? I did and it stopped me getting images from images.com.com, which stopped me looking at any GameSpot images.

 

[Tagrineth]

It would have to be polygonal on PSX too since the machine uses polygon quads as sprites. For simplicity's and consistency's sake, I have to assume Saturn version also is polygonal.

BZZT! Wrong. PSX uses triangles.

And that's the anomaly I'm wondering about; the Saturn version doesn't use polygons from what I can tell. All Saturn 3D games I've played have, somewhere or another, visible quad boundaries - Hexen has none.

You haven't installed the hosts file that comes with Kazaalite or an add blocking program have you? I did and it stopped me getting images from images.com.com, which stopped me looking at any GameSpot images.

No ad blocking installed... and GameSpot has been FUBAR since long before I installed KaZaA-Lite.

 

[Crazyace]

On PC Hexen uses the Doom engine, and on the PSX the doom engine was implemented almost completely in software ( as I said earlier )
Effectively the innermost loop of the software rasteriser ( Horizontal or vertical textured line ) is eliminated on Saturn/PSX, everything else is pretty much vanilla PC code ( optimised of course.. )
I used to play Hexen on a pretty slow DX100 with 4MB ram, so the console versions ( especially for the Saturn, where the entire software rasteriser could be laid of onto the slave sh2 ) would not really be hit by performance issues.

 

[Tagrineth]

On PC Hexen uses the Doom engine, and on the PSX the doom engine was implemented almost completely in software ( as I said earlier )
Effectively the innermost loop of the software rasteriser ( Horizontal or vertical textured line ) is eliminated on Saturn/PSX, everything else is pretty much vanilla PC code ( optimised of course.. )
I used to play Hexen on a pretty slow DX100 with 4MB ram, so the console versions ( especially for the Saturn, where the entire software rasteriser could be laid of onto the slave sh2 ) would not really be hit by performance issues.

Intriguing... so why didn't Saturn's DOOM port do that?

 

[Crazyace]

dunno really

Never actually played doom on saturn - maybe it was a port ( or par. dev ) of the PS1 version ( ie - no real use of the second sh2.. )

 

[Clashman]

If you want to see something impressive you should check out the Atari Jaguar version of Doom. It beats the crap out of the PS, Saturn, and 3DO versions, and you can hook up multiple jaguars for network play. Of course, it actually had iD working on them, as opposed to the other ports, and so that probably helped a bit.

 

[Tagrineth]

If you want to see something impressive you should check out the Atari Jaguar version of Doom. It beats the crap out of the PS, Saturn, and 3DO versions, and you can hook up multiple jaguars for network play. Of course, it actually had iD working on them, as opposed to the other ports, and so that probably helped a bit.

Actually, Carmack was fairly impressed with the Jaguar and he actually liked the platform, though of course like everyone else he was disappointed with all the bugs.

Carmack himself did the Jag conversion. 8)

 

[Clashman]

Actually, I think the problems had less to do with "bugs", per se, than with "Atari management sticking their thumbs up their collective asses". Deliberatly denying developing tools for your platform so that you can show a big improvement when Saturn and PSX hit is, IMO, a bad business decision.

 

[Grall]

Tag:
Pretty sure PSX's 'sprite engine' used squares as a primitive, reading Sony's official specs that's what it implies anyway...

Of course that doesn't beecessarily have much to do with reality, but still...


*G*

 

[Thowllly]

Tag:
Pretty sure PSX's 'sprite engine' used squares as a primitive, reading Sony's official specs that's what it implies anyway...

Of course that doesn't beecessarily have much to do with reality, but still...


*G*

Yeah, the PS1 supports two primitive types, triangle and quad. (maybe it supports lines and points too, I don’t know…)

 

[Squeak]

There isn't any advantage in using quads on PSone though, because technically it's just to triangles "hooked" together as opposed to Saturns quads.