UNREAL homebrew demo on sega saturn
- Thread starter mansoor1980
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heroe_galego
Neo Member
Wooow awesome!!
I always think saturn is more powerfull than psx
I always think saturn is more powerfull than psx
AREYOUOKAY?
Member
It's too bad the Saturn and Lobotomy software had such short lives. If anyone could have done it for real it would have been them.
AeonGaidenRaiden
Member
You can always tell if its an Unreal game no matter what platform. It always had this blue and purple tint lighting over object while other shooters were just brow.
Torrent of Pork
Banned
It's generally accepted that the Saturn was more powerful than the PS1, but an unholy bitch to work with, and only Sega really knew how to get the most out of it.
Syphon Filter
Member
dam looks way worse than the pc version.
The Saturn's VDP 1 could make mode 7 style endless fields, but the terrain had to be flat.
Panzer Dragoon and it's sequel used it heavily.
MrTroubleMaker
Member
That's cool.
AeonGaidenRaiden
Member
I think your parents thought it looked even more real than you did.
Alexios
Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
Nice, it looks a lot like Quake Saturn with all that colored lighting and stuff but even more refined, plus the game content itself is more modern and less blocky than Quake (duh). I'm surprised it maintains that performance (even with the drops to ~10fps that wasn't uncommon back then anyway).
Lolno, it's better at 2D but PS is far superior in 3D, even if with expert use as seen here and in precious few official games it could hold its own way better than its "trashy 3D" reputation back then would have most believe, it was competent and competitive, no more. Its deficiences in transparencies etc. did make the gap obvious though, even here one can make out the individual square polygons of surfaces as they come into view through the fog or are lit up with different colors, on PlayStation pop in, fade in, lighting and other effects were far smoother, not by obvious big blocks like that.
Saturn also suffered less from polygon and texture warping so even for polygonal surfaces you could get away with using larger squares, saving the rest for other uses. But there's no way it could push more polygons than PlayStation, even with such tricks in account. Anything in the "Most impressive 3D-Games for the Sega Saturn" thread is technically topped by Terracon, Gran Turismo 2, Wipeout 3, RR Type 4, any Colony Wars, Omega Boost, Ace Combat 3, MGS, Soul Reaver, The Last Revelation, any Spyro, Breath of Fire IV, Vagrant Story and more. Still, Saturn had great and pretty games too.
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Team Andromeda
Member
That's not really fair. A lot of those games, came out after even SEGA gave up on the Saturn.
They were a few Saturn games that looked better than a PS 3D game. Radiant Silvergun being the prime example and I never saw a sports games looking better than Deathlete on the PS.
When you used the VDP2 and then the spite and polygon hardware of the Saturn to its fullest you could see stuff that even the PS would have issues with.
For out and out 3D mind the PS was better
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That's a nice demo but to me, it just looks like a more impressive version of Duke 3D and Quake on the Saturn. I don't go on what coders do today (no matter how impressive and it is some god like coding skills ) and go on what was done at the time, with the tools and knowledge base developers had to use in the 90's. I would have really loved to see Sonic Adv to have come on the Saturn, I bet that game was pushing the Saturn to its limits.
Alexios
Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
Many examples, not all, which were far from most anyway as these are just examples as said already and there are countless other PlayStation games that, even if not as good as some of those, still far surpass the Saturn's best, so it's more than fair, especially given this is a 2022 example anyway 
I was talking 3D and you brought up games with heavy use of 2D like Radiant Silvergun. Sure it's aesthetically pleasing and I love such games, hence I said "technically topped". You disagreed with what I said to then basically agree anyway by saying "for out and out 3D mind the PS was better". Yes.
R-Type Delta doesn't lack anything vs the same year's Radiant Silvergun and used 3D far more. 1997's RayStorm port is cool too (also on Saturn but not as nice, performs worse, transparencies). Also its later prequel RayCrisis of course, even if I prefer the first fully 2D game the Saturn got myself
DecAthlete is a very specific scenario that happened to favor Saturn, hence even its own sequel, Winter Heat, had to drop to 30 fps as with the added scenario variety they couldn't just have a flat plane for the stadium and the polygons only used on few characters and few other elements any more.
So yes, Saturn has some cool 3D games, many of which I posted in that impressive Saturn 3D games thread myself anyway, just as PlayStation had some great looking 2D games like Symphony of the Night and Saga Frontier 2 even if it's naturally accepted that it couldn't do 2D as well as Saturn
I was talking 3D and you brought up games with heavy use of 2D like Radiant Silvergun. Sure it's aesthetically pleasing and I love such games, hence I said "technically topped". You disagreed with what I said to then basically agree anyway by saying "for out and out 3D mind the PS was better". Yes.
R-Type Delta doesn't lack anything vs the same year's Radiant Silvergun and used 3D far more. 1997's RayStorm port is cool too (also on Saturn but not as nice, performs worse, transparencies). Also its later prequel RayCrisis of course, even if I prefer the first fully 2D game the Saturn got myself
DecAthlete is a very specific scenario that happened to favor Saturn, hence even its own sequel, Winter Heat, had to drop to 30 fps as with the added scenario variety they couldn't just have a flat plane for the stadium and the polygons only used on few characters and few other elements any more.
So yes, Saturn has some cool 3D games, many of which I posted in that impressive Saturn 3D games thread myself anyway, just as PlayStation had some great looking 2D games like Symphony of the Night and Saga Frontier 2 even if it's naturally accepted that it couldn't do 2D as well as Saturn
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cireza
Member
That's actually VDP2. It could handle infinite planes and transparent layers, which was put to great use in a lot games.
VDP1 was responsible for all 3D and 2D sprites. So in a game like Quake or Unreal, it means getting the most out of VDP1. VDP2 is used to display the clouds for example.
Saturn could not push as much polygons as PS1 (at least that's what I conclude from my experience with the console), and it was impractical using transparency on polygons as well, sadly (this is taken directly from the official developer documentation, by the way) because of how the textures are rendered. And it was more expensive to do this as well, obviously.
It was also complicated using transparency on 2D sprites for other reason, as you could only decide between showing either something drawn by VDP1 OR something drawn by VDP2 behind the transparent pixel, which makes it very difficult to use in any case where both situations are mixed and you cannot predict how pixels will overlap.
The fact that visuals were managed by two separate components + the fact that it rendered square polygons led to the transparency issues we know. The only very practical case is using VDP2 to push layers of transparent fog or water, for example.
However, as important as transparency can be in a 3D environment, this setup had other strengths and you could design games around them. Which is exactly what games like Panzer Dragoon or Radiant Silvergun do. Also, the console had two processors and a DSP, so it was capable of elaborated calculations and this is largely seen in games like Nights (Soft Museum for example, with real-time deforming of the 3D background) or Burning Rangers.
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Badlucktroll
Member
I want to see Halo Combat Evolved ported to Saturn, much like how it was made for atari 2600
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Nice summary, it was a console designed around destroying limits designers working on 2D platforms were accustomed to (background layers, no problems… tons of sprites with scaling and rotations no problem) and some new features trying to get the HW to also sing in 3D which BTW was similar to how the design style of the PS2 HW compared to the previous generation 3D HW like PS1 (it was designed to be a monster at the approaches PS1 game designers would have wanted to use or used and it added its own new programmable mesh and vertex shader dreams ante-litteram ) and to contemporaries like the GCN (PS1 was between Xbox and GCN of its times compared to the Saturn… see games like Soul Reaver and Quake II… if Saturn is PS2 in this comparison).
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AREYOUOKAY?
Member
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Badlucktroll
Member
Another game i would like to see leak is the 80% build of Resident Evil 1.5. I think its the one that has full voice acting.
Aside for potential memory advantages (which would definitely help a lot) - I don't think so.
I mean - that's literally what Unreal was to Quake on PC as well - so, yes?
But I wouldn't undersell what's on display here - it ticks a lot of the 'Unreal feature' boxes on a 1994 console, and the environments are big enough they had to implement things like software mip-mapping etc. to accommodate it all. Not saying this never happened in commercial run (I genuinely wouldn't know either way) but it's quite the departure from common uses of hardware that old.
While tools and knowledge certainly push innovations, commercial realities of 90ies were by far the bigger limiter. Games were developed on fraction of time and budgets that would be considered tiny by today's Indie standards. Compared to a modern hobbyist that can spend many years on just this one thing - a game-dev in 90ies could have shipped a dozen games in the same timeframe, and most of that time didn't go to 'pushing the tech'.
But still - in the end if hw-capabilities are the question - why wouldn't we look at what's achieved today if it eclipses the past? That just speaks to hardware being underutilized in the past, but yea - see above.
Team Andromeda
Member
Like Matt Furniss told RG. Today you can download a compression programme in less than 2 seconds and it would be better than anything he could have done at the time, even if he spent months working on it. Back inthe day getting Doom running on a console was seen as massive achievement, these days people can get Doom running on a calculator, even the mindset is different.
I just don't see it as a fair comparison. Overlooking how much compression has evolved or the massive userbase advantage of the knowledge base. These days you don't even need a development kit at all, emu is so good (in most cases) you can do all the debugging via emu. There are so many advantages in making games on old systems these day's that weren't around or available to developers working on the system at the time . Never mind how much better modern-day compilers are.
I like seeing how consoles are pushed but I don't look to compare it to what developers did back at the time. And to me it doesn't make much difference. Someone could port a perfect version of Daytona USA on the Saturn and it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference, now if it was done in 1995 it would have been a game changer
I'm having a hard time seeing why even make the comparison though? We're talking about exploiting the hardware, using software from more powerful contemporary platforms as benchmark. Is anyone saying teams in the 90ies lacked competencies for it?
Eh - calculators that are more powerful than 90ies consoles aren't exactly an achievement either. But then we have people who got Doom levels onto a stock Amiga 500 now - that is an achievement, no matter how you look at it.
Also - this is really going off topic, but compression (the type that's useable at runtime for Saturn class hw) hasn't evolved quite as much as you think. The main innovations happened in PS1 era which is still very much an overlap - the following decades were all very incremental and much smaller advances (talking about lossless codecs here - lossy is stuff that's arguably been a bigger deal in the 80ies and 90ies than later decades anyway - but more importantly it's really use-case specific. Eg. there's precious little use from codecs that have a bigger binary footprint than the entire machine has available memory/storage).
Yes and? I mean we're still talking about pushing the hardware. Technology progresses, better things become possible. The key is that it doesn't necessarily involve changing hardware, a topic that is frequently misrepresented (hw limitations make this/that 'impossible').
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fart town usa
Banned
mansoor1980
Member
facts
Team Andromeda
Member
If you have a problem today you go online and ask, that wasn't there in the mid 90's. Compare the free programmes you can download today, to what was around in the early 90's. Where you had the likes of 3D studio and that cost over 7,000 grand and you needed grands worth of PC to run it, never mind you also today have so much documentation up online to download. Look at sound, you can do on a laptop what it would have taken a fully kited out £120,000 sound studio back in the 90's
You just got such a big adv in making games today, even on old systems to what developers had back in the early 90's. I myself never look to use modern-day tech demos or games running on old systems as proof of their power. Sure I like them and admire the skill in making them, but I always just look to go on what was made back in the day for a fair comparison between systems
Even back in the mid 90's it was clear the Saturn had massive potential and if the system had the userbase of the PS, we could have seen some truly top results, but even now its hard to look past how amazing Quake and RSG were. There's still no better showcase for the Saturn IMO than Grandia or RSG
Trogdor1123
Member
Ok. When is the Saturn mini coming? Enough I'd enough lol
DragoonWalker
Member
Awesome. Dreamcast got a lot of homebrew/hobbyist support after its death, but you hear so little about the Saturn.
One game I've always wanted to play was Bulk Slash, which was never officially localized:
One game I've always wanted to play was Bulk Slash, which was never officially localized:
Sounds like the PS3 of its generation.
I mean yes, technology progresses and we get benefits. Still not sure why this is being discussed in a tech-demo thread. The demo in question isn't an example of game development in any actual sense.
How are they not though? Like we see under-used potential in these things. Eg. it took nearly 40 years, but we found out that CGA graphics cards could do 1024 colors on screen, in scenarios that are actually more practical than Amiga's 4096 color mode was. Noone's talking about changing history here - but hw had potential we didn't see during its commercial life, and sometimes the 'missing bits' are more jaw-dropping, than others.
Yes and we're seeing some of examples of that here and now - still don't get how is that 'invalid' (because it doesn't fit some arbitrarily chosen time frame that noone could agree on - I mean where's the cut off- 1997?98? 95? Does it change for each console? Do PS2 titles developed after 2006 also not count? I mean come on), or not a good thing?
Most importantly these types of things are demonstrating human creativity more than necessarily tech-exploits, and are we really gonna say 'creativity' isn't allowed/doesn't count if it isn't constrained to the 'correct' time-frame now? Eh...
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xpresstuning
Member
Bulk Slash was relatively recently slapped with a fantastic english fan translation patch.
The controls are weird, but they're learnable and once you're accustomed to them it's a blast to play. Very 90s Mecha vibe as well, so if you're into that you're in for a treat.
Team Andromeda
Member
Really who cares if a CGA gfx card could do 1024 colours now, back in the day it would have been massive, now?
The advantage modern-day developers have, even down to the art and modelling packages you can use them, in most cases for free. If developers had today's world back then, we could have seen most systems pushed to insane levels. So I never been one to buy ' Oh look this is what a system can do'. I rather compare what systems did when they were a going concern as I think that's fair (sorry)
I do enjoy some of the games mind and I would be lying if I didn't. Playing the Castlevania game rip-off game on the ZX Spectrum is a riot, the music is awesome and I still play and love Sturmwind on the DC
I do enjoy the homebrew community English patching games giving fans of the systems a chance to see the games they missed out on, which in the Saturn case is a ton of games. And it's nice to also see some unreleased games making it out too. Now if only someone would dump WaterWorld on Saturn, which some said made the best use of the VDP2 for the best water effects on any system at the time.
Esppiral
Member
Something no one seems to mention and is what is making this tech demo more impressive, is that it is showing things that the consoles isn't supposed to be able to do like, transparencies over 3D geometry, environment mapping and rendering to a texture, that is what makes this demo super impressing.
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