Hey remember when Shenmue was on Saturn!
- Thread starter SeGa4life
- Start date
Anyway, only to update the thread, in an interview the Shenmue staff releaved that the Saturn demo showed in that video was running on a stock Saturn, without *any* special addon. Two years were spent on the Saturn version.
I take it that the video looks so impressive due 5 things:
1) As VBT said, they prolly use the sound DSP as an added FP processor, and thus get some extra polygons per frame. Grandia and Burning Rangers use that trick.
2) The game uses NO shading/lighting, not even flat shading, nor gouraud shading. If they optimized their libraries in such way, the speed gains can be huge. All lighting effects in the video are faked by the textures themselves.
3) 8-bit and even 4-bit paletted textures all the way. With well-made set of palettes, the game can use a much wider variety of textures that looks very good. They are using this trick on the PS2. It's a shame that most Saturn games relyed on the 15-bit textures.
4) L O D: Level Of Detail. This playes a huge role in the DC Shenmue, but on the Saturn, it's the heart of the killer graphics. Each scene in a cutscenes has models with the proper amount of polygons depending on their distance to the camera. In some scenes it's possible to see fully modelled hands, noses, moving eyes... but those are only brought when needed. Models far from the camera are low-poly.
5) Pre-calculated display lists. Now this is a wild guess... this trick involves precalculating the polygon's transformations, and storing their vertices' 2D positions on the screen, for each animation frame, so the system only has to render them, but not calculate them. GameArts did this with Silpheed, and I guess a buncha other polygonal games from the past did the same. But I never saw someone use this with textured polygons.
Having the whole cutscenes pre-calculated would be kinda overdone... but it's quite possible AM2 pre-calculated some of the stuff on-screen, like backgrounds, or some character closeups. Some of those faces are far too detailed... somehting I didn't see even on the N64...
I take it that the video looks so impressive due 5 things:
1) As VBT said, they prolly use the sound DSP as an added FP processor, and thus get some extra polygons per frame. Grandia and Burning Rangers use that trick.
2) The game uses NO shading/lighting, not even flat shading, nor gouraud shading. If they optimized their libraries in such way, the speed gains can be huge. All lighting effects in the video are faked by the textures themselves.
3) 8-bit and even 4-bit paletted textures all the way. With well-made set of palettes, the game can use a much wider variety of textures that looks very good. They are using this trick on the PS2. It's a shame that most Saturn games relyed on the 15-bit textures.
4) L O D: Level Of Detail. This playes a huge role in the DC Shenmue, but on the Saturn, it's the heart of the killer graphics. Each scene in a cutscenes has models with the proper amount of polygons depending on their distance to the camera. In some scenes it's possible to see fully modelled hands, noses, moving eyes... but those are only brought when needed. Models far from the camera are low-poly.
5) Pre-calculated display lists. Now this is a wild guess... this trick involves precalculating the polygon's transformations, and storing their vertices' 2D positions on the screen, for each animation frame, so the system only has to render them, but not calculate them. GameArts did this with Silpheed, and I guess a buncha other polygonal games from the past did the same. But I never saw someone use this with textured polygons.
Having the whole cutscenes pre-calculated would be kinda overdone... but it's quite possible AM2 pre-calculated some of the stuff on-screen, like backgrounds, or some character closeups. Some of those faces are far too detailed... somehting I didn't see even on the N64...
here is some more proof that Shenmue didn't use any special hardware:
http://www.the-nextlevel.com/features/interviews/am2/
http://www.the-nextlevel.com/features/interviews/am2/
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