Why does Sony create such wacky architectures?

[Lazy8s]

Yeah, so implementation of bump mapping or mutiltexturing on Dreamcast has its requirements, but what effect doesn't? I'm sure it takes compromises and a balancing of the engine to account for it, but that's what programmers do... sometimes even surprising us with the ingenious feats they get hardware to do.

Accomplishments in programming, which at the time would've seemed far more impractical than something like bumpmapping on DC (which is actually hardware supported), have been pulled off.

EDIT:
Even on another straightforward system like PSX, we saw a jump from Toshinden and Warhawk to stuff like Vagrant Story and Metal Gear Solid given enough time and development.

 

[Crazyace]

Sega pushed the DC more than anyone else. I reckon there were teams there working on 4th generation projects, and even for the Naomi 2 there was the familiar programming environment in terms of libraries and processor. However there are limits that they seemed to reach - Shenmue 2 was an improvement over Shenmue 1, but the frame rate wasn't a fixed target. I never really saw any racing game look as good as F355, Daytona was poor graphically, SegaRally 2 dropped frames, and TestDriveLeMans was locked at 30.
I bought nearly a hundred DC games, ( ignoring the truly poor titles ) and there was a large difference between most games on the DC and the PS2. It seemed to be more animation and lighting, or a reduced frame rate. I did notice that a lot of games for DC ran at 30Hz, compared to many PS2 games running at 60HZ with more detail..
There is certainly an element of selective memory going on - maybe because there was such a visual leap from PSX and N64 to Dreamcast. Also maybe there is a point of diminishing returns, especially in fighting games where the polygon differences between VF3tb, DOA2 (DC), Soul Caliber, Tekken Tag PS2,VF4,Tekken 4, and DOA3 become more difficult to pick out.

 

[PC-Engine]

IIRC (though i'd expect simon to know better) the DC PVR was the first commercial-available piece of HW capable of DOT3 (i.e. dot product of R3 vectors). all prior HW was capable of EMBM at most. now, you can do your homework on those two keywords (DOT3 and EMBM)

Actually in the PC market the first consumer-level product capable of dot-product was the Permedia 3 Create! from 3d Labs. At least, that's what I remember. The Series 2 didn't get on the street until September 99.

True but NEC was concentrating on the PVRDC which was available commercially fall of 98.


And Crazy, most DC titles worth mentioning ran at 60Hz 480p. I wouldn't be surprised to find most of the mediocre games running at 30Hz though.

 

[Lazy8s]

Crazyace:

However there are limits that they seemed to reach - Shenmue 2 was an improvement over Shenmue 1, but the frame rate wasn't a fixed target. I never really saw any racing game look as good as F355, Daytona was poor graphically, SegaRally 2 dropped frames, and TestDriveLeMans was locked at 30.

You're right in that we probably wouldn't have continued to see jumps of Psychic Force 2012 to Dead or Alive 2 in successive DC software generations, but it's important to at least minimize some of the variables in the consideration of how things progressed. Jumping from different dev teams to different circumstances is enough to throw the example out of whack, and the fact that we couldn't chart too lengthy of a progression even if we wanted to is telling of DC's stinted dev life.

F355 may have been the best looking racer, but the Daytona port wasn't even by the F355 team (it was handled by AV, as one of their only DC projects). SEGA Rally 2 was redone with Windows CE overhead in 2 months before the Jan 1999 deadline (also not handled by AM2). Test Drive LeMans did come after F355 and accomplished some pretty nice things, but I don't think they knew the hardware as intimately as a first-party team like AM2 (certainly not on one of Melbourne House's first DC projects). The DC's active life was a couple years too short to allow any single team several go's at the hardware during different stages of its lifecycle. Was there even one developer we could chart through three original DC projects, end to end (yearly sports updates not included)?

Take Saturn for example. You can see how top-tier development for the platform progressed by studying the handiwork of one of its premiere developers, AM2:

Virtua Fighter -> Virtua Fighter 2 -> Virtua Cop 2 (still looks great even today) -> Shenmue Saturn

On Dreamcast, AM2 didn't handle early projects like Virtua Fighter 3tb. That was given to Genki. AM2's list might look like: F355 -> Outtriggers. Suzuki said they didn't much more than tweak the original Shenmue engine for the sequel, so that can't constitute a completely original dev effort. Sonic Team delivered Sonic Adventure, and then split into the Home Team and Away Team USA subdivisions to deliver 4 projects being worked on concurrently (Chu Chu Rocket, Samba de Amigo, Sonic Adventure 2, and Phantasy Star Online).

 

[marconelly!]

I wouldn't be surprised to find most of the mediocre games running at 30Hz though.

Well, if you consider games like Jet Set Radio, or Shenmue 1/2, RE:CV, MDK2, Sonic Adventure 1 (just on the top of my head) to be mediocre ...

 

[PC-Engine]

I wouldn't be surprised to find most of the mediocre games running at 30Hz though.

Well, if you consider games like Jet Set Radio, or Shenmue 1/2, RE:CV, MDK2, Sonic Adventure 1 (just on the top of my head) to be mediocre ...

I said most of the mediocre games

Or in simpler terms just for you, out of all the mediocre games, most of them run at 30 fps.

Of course there are a few exceptions though.

JSR runs at 60 fps IIRC not that it matters relative to my argument.

 

[zidane1strife]

Well, from what i remember most dc games achieved 60fps... at a cost(e.g. sa1 to sa2), some ran partially at 60fps, like doa2, which ran at 30fps during cutscenes(i think it was during cutscenes, not sure.)...

The thing that bothered me most about dc games was the limited draw distance and enclosed enviroments one would find in many games. There were some games that could truly be called nextgen, but many were of an inbetween gen. in nature... I mean some of them were not that far ahead of the psx/n64 era... maybe ports, or quick platform change cash-in... but what really p#ssed me off was the state of rpgs, I mean skies(good), and grandia 2(not good.) were not that far ahead of what I was used to in the psone era. IOW many games seemed like a cleaned up slightly beefed up version of previous gen. titles.. It needed POWDER/.

I felt the DC came too soon and too underpowered for its time. Yrs later... consoles later... or might i say super consoles later... I see many more titles worthy of the next gen. title... still the rpgs... the rpsgs

Rpgs shall rise again, and proud they shall stand.... for they are worthy... of thje akpowaer.

 

[Guest]

Test Drive: LM guys just released Grand Prix Challenge for PS2. Check that out. How does that compare to LM?

 

[Lazy8s]

zidane1strife:

but what really p#ssed me off was the state of rpgs, I mean skies(good), and grandia 2(not good.) were not that far ahead of what I was used to in the psone era.

Not far ahead in gameplay or graphics? Grandia 2 graphics on DC are very impressive from the perspective of both artistic direction and technical accomplishment (no mip lines at all with Sonic-Team-like texture res). The fly-bys each time you enter a new town, which are a hallmark of the series, show how remarkably distinct each town looks sporting its own theme and architectural style to the buildings. The towns of the Grandia series are nothing if not imaginative.

Gameplay-wise, how can you not at least appreciate the advancements Grandia brings? Being able to see your enemies, as opposed to random encounters, allows you to avoid or ambush them. The battles fuse real-time with turn-based strategy, challenging you to time your characters' actions to combine attacks or cancel enemy attacks. Load times during battles, spells, and exploring were also kept down pretty well, which is always a big plus for reducing tedium and keeping a healthy pace.

IOW many games seemed like a cleaned up slightly beefed up version of previous gen. titles.. It needed POWDER/.

I felt the DC came too soon and too underpowered for its time. Yrs later... consoles later... or might i say super consoles later... I see many more titles worthy of the next gen. title... still the rpgs... the rpsgs

Keep in mind N64 (either $249 or $199 equivalency, don't remember) came out in 1996, Dreamcast ($199 equivalency) came out in 1998, and PS2 ($299 equivalency) came out in 2000.

 

[marconelly!]

JSR runs at 60 fps IIRC not that it matters relative to my argument.

Nope, it's 30FPS. And my point is, there's probably as many (or even more) great DC games that run at 30 FPS than there are those that run at 60 (not that there's something wrong with it) I was just pointing the fact that indeed some of the best DC games were 30FPS, contrary to what I thought you were trying to say. If you weren't trying to say that, then I apologize.

 

[archie4oz]

Was there even one developer we could chart through three original DC projects, end to end (yearly sports updates not included)?

Take Saturn for example. You can see how top-tier development for the platform progressed by studying the handiwork of one of its premiere developers, AM2:

Even if you could I doubt you'd see the same levels of improvement you saw on the Saturn. The learning curve and the level of resource and system managment of the Dreamcast was nowhere near that of the Saturn.

 

[PC-Engine]

JSR runs at 60 fps IIRC not that it matters relative to my argument.

Nope. And my point is, there's probably as many (or even more) great DC games that run at 30 FPS than there are those that run at 60.

Wrong...again.

 

[Crazyace]

Laxy8s:

I guess Genki have a least 3 generations from VF3tb through Tokyo Highway Battle 1 and 2.
In a large developer like Sega for DC ( and EA for PS2... ) development techniques do move around, and sometimes individual programmers will as well. I'm quite willing to consider Daytona a 2nd or 3rd generation product even if it was the first labelled with the AV tag. What about the R&D library groups - they seemed to pull in improvements and offer them around.

As an interesting comparision compare the first generation soccer titles: VirtuaStriker against FIFA PS2( a japanese launch/near launch title ), ignore the arcade/sim and look at the technical aspects. Like night and day. Or Madden against the first VS NFL, Madden looks better and was a first gen EA canada title. Or SSX against Cool Boarders.

One of the DC's greatest strengths is the VQ texture compression - it allows the use of huge textures very easily, and was heavily used in DOA2 ( A R&D tourdeforce and showcase from Tecmo who were chasing the Arcade crown ) When it was converted to PS2 as a launch(ish - in the same manner as SR2 and SA ) title they would have had to cut corners - and the result is the minute texture difference and the flickering. They did improve the performance of the graphics engine, and add easy features such as extra lighting, but this wasn't too visible in the main game which already ran at 60hz.
Maybe if Tecmo had stayed with PS2 for DOA3 it would have been a big improvement over the DC/original PS2 DOA2, but they moved to Xbox and tuned the engine for that platform.
Technically Tekken Tag Tournement is way better than Soul Caliber ( Not as a game - just as an engine ) with the lack of flicker filter at the Japanese launch fixed for European and American versions.

( As a side - compare a franchise such as Army Men on PSX, DC, and PS2 - there are major differences in quality... )

 

[Simon F]

So, while bump mapping implies extra texturing passes, costing additional cycles on both systems, DC will avoid doing those extra passes whenever it can. DC can also perform texturing at very close to its theoretical fill rate - many immediate mode renderers do not.

Isn't the bigger problem for DC the geometry load though? If I remember right, the particular dot product method has even higher vertex setup cost then Dot3? (and dot3 already isn't cheap from perspective of a SH4 class cpu).

Indeed the dot product of DC needs a bit more set up (as the parameters are compressed into fewer dimensions) but the SH4 should be good at mapping lighting vectors into local space (i.e. it is has fast dot product instructions). There were some software tricks developed later to make the process faster, but whether the developers looked at the demo code is anyone's guess

IIRC (but it's been a while since I worked on the specs) Elan had extra facilities to completely offload all the bump map setup from the SH4.

 

[marconelly!]

Wrong...again.

Well, I certainly can't think of more 60FPS DC games that I considered to be great as I can think of 30FPS games. I'd like to see your list of examples.

 

[Guest]

Okay, here is what i think is happening with DC. The PVR may be a good hardware for its time with potential, but it is also limited by the technology at its time.

It is like a GF1 can do pixel ops but not to the point where its usage can be liberal without affecting performance. Another analogy is like when you pair up a GF-FX with a 500mhz CPU and 128mb, don't expect to run Doom 3 on that setup.

The mystery of DC lies somewhere between that 2 analogies.

 

[Ozymandis]

Well, I certainly can't think of more 60FPS DC games that I considered to be great as I can think of 30FPS games. I'd like to see your list of examples.

I think his "most" is a bit of an exaggeration. I can think of some though:

Virtual On: OT, Maken X, Sonic Adventure 2, DoA2, Soul Calibur, Samba de Amigo, Outrigger, F355 (?), Fighting Vipers 2

A lot of the arcade ports ran at 60 fps.

 

[Lazy8s]

marconelly!:

Well, I certainly can't think of as more 60FPS DC games that I considered to be great as I can think of 30FPS games. I'd like to see your list of examples.

While it won't be indicative of much, it'll be an interesting comparison to see. I'll start by adding a few to each list:

60hz:
Virtua Tennis
Tennis 2K2
NBA 2K
NBA 2K1
NBA 2K2
Virtual ON: OT
Outtrigger
NFL 2K
NFL 2K1
NFL 2K2
Daytona USA
NHL 2K
NHL 2K2
Ultimate Fighting Championship
World Series Baseball 2K1
World Series Baseball 2K2
Sonic Adventure 2
Grandia II (may be 30, not sure)
The House of the Dead 2
Virtua Fighter 3tb
Crazy Taxi
Crazy Taxi 2
NFL Blitz 2000
NFL Blitz 2001
Dead or Alive 2
Dead or Alive 2 Millenium Edition
Chu Chu Rocket
Samba de Amigo
Samba de Amigo ver 2001
F355 Challenge
Super Magnetic Neo
The Typing of the Dead
SEGA Bass Fishing
SEGA Marine Fishing
SEGA Bass Fishing 2
Power Stone
Power Stone 2
Rayman 2
NCAA Football 2K2
Alien Front Online
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2
Ready to Rumble Boxing
Ready to Rumble Boxing Round 2
Rippin' Riders
AeroDancing
AeroDancing F
Soul Calibur
Maken X
Sword of the Beserk
Soul Reaver
Seaman
**all the classic 2d fighters, shooters, etc.**

30hz:
Quake 3: Arena
Unreal Tournament
Sonic Adventure
Phantasy Star Online
Phantasy Star Online ver 2
Ecco the Doplhin
Metropolis Street Racer
Resident Evil:Code Veronica
Shenmue
Shenmue II
Test Drive LeMans
SEGA GT
HeadHunter (may be 60, not sure)
Rez
Jet Grind Radio
MDK2
SEGA Rally 2
Skies of Arcadia (may be 60, not sure)
Space Channel 5
Space Channel 5 pt 2

 

[PC-Engine]

I can add about 15 more to Lazy's 60Hz list hehe.

 

[clem64]

Jet grind radio is 30fps.