Thread 725232454

Replaying Adventure for the first time since I was a kid and man does this game have some weird dark energy to it. It just feels demonic, I can't put my finger on it. Especially Lost World, it almost sucks the life out of you when you play that level, even though I enjoy it in many ways. This game has a dark atmosphere not unlike Mario 64. Also, Perfect Chaos looked WAY too real for the time too, in the opening cutscene in particular which is already a really trippy and disorienting sequence, perfect Chaos emerging from the side of the building was just such a scary thing to see in a sonic game. Its just so dark, apocalyptic and dreary. All the levels have strange energy. Tell me your experiences. Have any of you had sonic adventure nightmares?

>>725232454 (OP)
Have you considered not being an absolute fucking pussy?

Old games used to have proper ancient ruins with an air of mystery and mystique
Sadly it's a lost art.

>>725232454 (OP)
It was weird because I thought parts looked photorealistic

>>725235297
But others looked like shit even back then

Sonic Adventure was top-tier kino

>>725235382
>back then

That's the DX port. Only play the original Dreamcast GDI.

Dreamcast goes all out on transparency and lighting, supports 8-bit destination alpha blending with 24-bit sourcing 32-bit z-buffer, Saturn and Dreamcast diffuse+specular lightning based on palette indices, Dreamcast used tile layered deferred rendering which supported order independent transparency.

Technically SA1 does have dynamic lighting effects, but you can't see them because they almost always get overridden with palette lighting. the Chaos underlight, which was in some early screenshots, is only visible with Ninja Lights but it still technically in the game. Oddly enough it's nulled out in the Autodemo. Knuckles has a custom Ninja light configured in the cutscene where he has collected all the Master Emerald shards.

Sonic Adventure 1 was highly downgraded in terms of lighting on on the GC. SA2 lacked a bunch of shadowing effects which used the DC's modifier volumes. SA2 DC abused the Dreamcast's volumetric fog features for some interesting effects, like security alarms (Iron Gate, Flying Dog, Egg Quarters) and approximated "rain waves" (White Jungle). These effects are gone in SA2B, replaced with full-screen overlays (Flying Dog, Egg Quarters) or with a rotating vertex light (Iron Gate)

Sega changed SA1's palette based lighting to specular lighting in SADX GC port and they barely even used it. SA2 CnkMultiDraw does support Vertex color + Lighting though used in Events

The SA1 DC to SADX GC porting team likely ran into problems implementing palette lighting, so they figured it would be easier to just update everything that didn't work immediately after they were brought over to SADX. Even SA2B doesn't use specular in the same way the DC version uses it.

>>725235587
that isn't gonna change the 16x16 sky texture

>>725235587
It's crazy how good SA1 looks on PC with the fan fixes that just turn it into the Dreamcast version.

>>725235743
>It's crazy how good SA1 looks on PC with the fan fixes that just turn it into the Dreamcast version.

SA1 & SA2 always looked good bro

The Dreamcast had the ability to perform what was called Order Independent Transparency which SA2 used extensively for things such as item balloons and artificial chaos. When SA2 and SA1 was ported to Gamecube, many of the transparency features that the Dreamcast had couldn't be replicated and they were never fixed for the PC port.

Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 were extremely ambitious. Sonic Adventure 2 is a much, much, much more robust game internally than SA1. I cannot stress that enough. It is much more flexible in every conceivable way, and it is really impressive how much Sonic Team improved on in such a short time frame. But it is still obviously based on SA1 and shares a lot of infrastructure, albeit greatly improved

>>725236304
I mean yeah.
That's the point of what I said.

>>725236438
I know the N64 had some blending and transparency features that are a fucking bitch to recreate on modern GPUs.

Reminder that Sega threw away the Sonic Adventure 1/2 engine made in Sega Katana, an SDK for the Dreamcast and gave us Renderware garbage for Heroes and Shadow because Sony demanded that Sonic has to run on PS2's emotion engine

Lantern palettes are applied to all models rendered with palette lighting, and they all share a global light direction. All vertices pick colors from a pre-determined palette by their brightness index, so it's impossible to create dynamic lights that would affect the characters and the environment around them.

With Ninja lights, Sega could create multiple lights and dynamic lights, including spot and point lights. This system also uses backface culling, which can be seen in Tokyo International Forum footage. Red Mountain, for example, got a lot of use out of spot and point lights, seen here. In the final, those are removed:
https://files.catbox.moe/qst0rw.png
In TIF footage, you can see Gamma walk under a spotlight, which creates a dynamic shadow.
https://files.catbox.moe/e71cgm.mp4
The final game uses Ninja Lights as well (alongside palette lights) for objects like the Hint Monitor or red switch. The final ended up removing a lot of point and spot lights due to it being costly on performance.
Chaos had a ninja light called "Chaos Underlight" that illuminates the environment and characters, which is only visible with Ninja Lights. Its color was dynamic, too.
https://files.catbox.moe/089a56.jpg
It's still left over unused in the code in all release builds, including DX releases. Strangely, it's null'd out in the AutoDemo, but the release builds added it back for whatever reason.

sonic fanbase acting as fragile as ever

>>725236659
wew it was either that or lose a chunk of sales

>>725238412
You make it sound like it was their own decision rather than a veiled threat from Sony.

Just a reminder.

>1991 - Naka and Ohshima create Sonic 1
>1992 - Sonic 2, the Japanese Sonic Team flew over to America to work with the American team, hoping that the Americans would learn a thing or two on game development. But it didn't work out and there was a culture clash
>Sonic 2 had around half and half Japanese and American developers, Yuji Naka often saying "baka gaijin"
>Tom Kalinske made Sega go from 0,3% of market share to 40% in less than 5 years, made Sega compete with Nintendo with the Genesis, managed to make loads of special deals with the gaming industry
>Kalinske's plan for a console price drop, and to include Sonic as pack-in
>1993 - Sonic 3, Yuji Naka refused to work with the Americans at all. In fact, he demanded security cards so that the Americans couldn't get into their office. So the American team made Sonic Spinball while the Japs made Sonic 3 & Knuckles
>Sonic 3 was planned with SVP, the special calculation chip used in the Mega Drive version of Virtua Racing, for Sonic 3D
>They were working on a 3D isometric version of Sonic 3 for Sega's SVP chip, a competitor to Nintendo's Super FX, but Sega of Japan cut costs on the chip and Sonic Team had to walk away from the project.
>Right as they did that, Sega America revealed they had sealed a deal with McDonalds for Sonic 3 toys in Feb of 1994 and the game had to be out in less than 9 months. So Sonic Team had to really mega-crunch to make the biggest game of their careers in a very short amount of time
>1994 - 32X is created as a quick response to the Atari Jaguar, two 32-bit SuperH-2 processors, the same as those that would be used in the Saturn but with a lower clock speed
>Genesis owners that invested in the Sega CD and 32X add-on were sorely disappointed
>1995 - Saturn releases, was designed around a new Hitachi CPU, but it's bad for 3D
>Sega lost so much money on the Saturn years that the company just couldn't afford to remain in the console wars.
>1997 - One last hope. Dreamcast

>>725232454 (OP)
>open thread in new tab
>oh fuck yeah a sonic adventure thread
>"this game has some weird dark energy to it"
>"it's LE DEMONIC"

>>725238746
>1995 - Saturn releases, was designed around a new Hitachi CPU, SH-2
>1996 - Bernie Stolar gave STI the NiGHTS engine to mess around with for a few weeks while they were making X-treme, but Yuji Naka threw a temper tantrum and threatened to quit Sega in response, so they had to let go of it
>1997 - Dreamcast with SH-4 as a joint venture between Sega and Hitachi
>Sonic Jam is released for the Saturn, containing Sonic 1-3 ported by Naka himself to SH-2 and elements from the then-forthcoming Adventure

>Sonic Adventure begins development as a showcase for Dreamcast hardware. Adventure fields, 10 Sonic stages, transparencies, lighting, FMVs, voice acting, etc
>Chaos according to Iizuka the director was made to shock, surprise people, something you would say "this is only posible on the Dreamcast"
>Genesis can't do transparency, Saturn can't do transparency, Dreamcast goes all out on transparency and lighting, supports 8-bit destination alpha blending with 24-bit sourcing 32-bit z-buffer
>SA1-2 used diffuse+specular lightning based on palette indices like some Saturn games
>SA1 was a game made by a maximum of 100 people, and only 11 people went to the US. Then, it was no longer possible to make 2 on that scale. I was hoping to make a small-scale game in the U.S., but at the time, Naka told me, “You can take our Japanese members with you and just make 2.” So when it came time to make 2, the starting point of the project was “How can we make 2 with this (small) number of people?”
>1999 - Iizuka goes to USA to patch up SA1 and begin SA2
>Iizuka: I had these ideas in my mind from when I was making Sonic Adventure 1 that if I were to make a second game, I wanted to have a “rival character who looked exactly like Sonic” and to be able to play two scenarios, one with Sonic and the other with the rival character
>2000 - Dreamcast was flopping hard. Iizuka was determined to sell it on the Dreamcast at any cost

>>725232454 (OP)
Looks like a temple for a water god of destruction.

>>725236785
Interesting stuff

>>725238746
>a jap calls Americans who are in America gaijin
Dumb fuck

>>725235297
they specifically used real life photos to make the textures.

>>725235656
moving the goalpost

>>725238741
around 3/5th of the game's sales were from the PS2.

>>725238746
>>725238830
Why couldn't Sega Japan and Sega America just get along?