MSR1701 wrote:ThePixelatedGenocide wrote:BlasteroidAli wrote: An interesting story is that Rage Software who were doing the conversion wrote their own custom engine which would have produced a higher frame rate than that of the Playstation version but John Carmac stepped in again to say no to the idea. He has since agreed it was a bad decision. After all Exhumed on the Saturn another 3d shooter runs better than the playstation version. So the Saturn owners of Doom got a raw deal from the programmer of Doom, Carmac who did not want a new custom engine. Wow.
To be fair to him, there would have been some texture warping. And he had no idea of how difficult the Saturn is to work with. According to one of Lobotomy's coders, the Saturn's quads are terrible for large geometry, because they cause dramatic slowdown.
He said the Quake engine would have been a lot smoother on PS1, if anyone had bothered to publish the port.
Later Saturn games like Sonic R and Sonic Jam somehow found a solution to the issue, but I've never seen anyone explain what changed. Was it just mind melting levels of optimization, as implied by Youtube's Game Hut? Using the sound hardware for an extra performance boost ala Shining Force III?
Whatever the answer was, you wouldn't find it in early 3rd party support documentation for the Saturn.
As I understand, the Saturn is a 2D machine that processes 3D from Quads instead of Polys, which messes up the 3D maths.
The Saturn was near impossible to make 3d games for. They purposely waited for PS1 to make 3d games then ported it. A game like Die Hard Trilogy for the part where you control the car in an open world they I mentioned a while ago that I didn't think the Saturn was powerful enough to have a 3d game where you can control a plane or a car in an open environment Then I was shown Saturn games like Die Hard Trilogy where I was supposedly wrong. But the only games for the Saturn where you can control a car or plane in an open world are ported and I've heard they suck.
I honestly don't think the Saturn could've drawn up from scratch a fully polygonal car game as advanced as Club Drive for the Jaguar. That's how weak the Saturn is for making original 3d games that aren't ports. I stand by that. Anything with cars or airplanes they had to port basically. I don't care what anyone says, that's how weak the Saturn was.