Very impressive considering the Genesis is much earlier hardware with no specific acceleration for such tasks. Whether it was done 30 years later or not has nothing to do with whether it's possible on the raw hardware.
But this road-like effect isn't the only thing mode 7 was used for, it was used to scale and rotate objects such as characters in the game like in Mario World. In the other games I pointed out you see the Genesis pulling this off smoothly on multiple objects at a time, something the SNES could not do.
If you look at Gunstar Heroes you'll see multiple full screen backgrounds and objects rotating simultaneously, in Mega Turrican multiple enemies will be rotating and scaling at the same time.
Yes, F-Zero does not use any additional hardware, just the built-in VDP acceleration of the SNES. From what I understand Mario Kart might have been done without the DSP but they were using it to track the various sprites on the tracks, such as roadside objects as well as the other characters racing around. F-Zero only had four cars on the track, MK had 8 as well as other objects.
Personally I'd think if they could cut a piece of hardware in favor of software optimization they'd do that. This was the company that was paying engineers for each component they were able to omit from hardware designs in order to optimize and save money in production.
With clever programming, the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive does not need extra processing power to pull off these effects. Here is someone pulling off the same effects as F-Zero on the Genesis.
The road on the SNES uses mode 7 to add perspective to a bitmap plane and shift/rotate it to simulate a road. The effect is replicated on the Genesis/Mega Drive in software.
Other games like Mega Turrican, Gunstar Heroes, and Red Zone demonstrate these effects in actual gameplay.
The Sega CD's added hardware allowed the system to go far beyond what the SNES could acheive. In the game AH3 Thunderstrike, the Segs CD can use the same effects to scale and rotate multiple objects, but the SNES is limited to using this effect on a single bitmap plane at a time.
However some developers did great things with the SNES hardware. Rare's Donkey Kong Country 2 is a great example, where multiple parallax levels and clever raster effects as well as transparencies are used copiously and beyond what I've seen in other games around the time.
I still have my original launch PS4 and games run fine on them. Do you recall how games were at the end of previous generations? Developers really start pushing the envelope in terms of visual fidelity and you see that take a priority over frame rate.
For example Shadow of the Colossus ran at a low frame rate on the PS2 but it was trying to do things like simulate physics, draw crepuscular rays, use motion blur and bloom lighting, and present a sprawling landscape with giant beasts.
Exactly. Other GUIs keep trying to reinvent themselves every time they discover a 'better' way of doing things, but there is no best way. There are many different ways that suit different workflows and different tasks and different mindsets.
This is where the "do one thing and do it right" approach helps too. We have many different applications and tools, and people can tie them together in whatever way they want to suit them.
Different distros help package things together to suit particular tastes, and you can pick whatever starting point is best for you.
So no modding for these games too? People can't seem to mod Windows Store games without hacks, and mods are very limited even with the hacks. MS created some infrastructure allowing game creators to allow limited modding through those games but developers ignore that and still don't allow modding. I don't think things will get any better with straight up Xbox games running on Windows. It will probably also limit any useful hacks that help people adjust things like FOV, resolution, frame rate, vsync and other things when there is no menu option in the game.
It seems like all the flexibility and customization that people love from PC games is being stripped out. Luckily we still have GoG and Steam and others for now, but I wonder how long until every type of game and app gets forced into some container that prevents any of this.
An email is often a request that is all too easily fired off. Typing and sending an email is incredibly fast but the action required on the other end is considerable. And often the email is sent off without due diligence on the end of the sender, which is incredibly rude, not valuing the receiver's time. Often the sender will not even check their own email for the answer which has been sent time and again, but sender can't remember in short term memory so they fire off another email about "how do I do this again? What's the phone number again? Where can I find this again?"
There are many resources available but sender just thinks it's easier to send an email. It's like googling the human world to them. We've sometimes been so fed up we've even made detailed documents with the steps you need to follow and all of the possible contingencies but you can't find that either or be bothered to read can you?
So naturally the recipient would rather ignore the many requests and wait to be contacted through another medium, whether it be a voice call or in person, to follow through, as a form of vetting.
How about they work on a 'never slow typing' mode for Android. How does everyone get this so wrong? Doesn't matter the phone, there's always a point where the text stops popping up as you're typing and then a ton of random characters barf out at once, cursor position getting switched around as you type, it's maddening.
There are many games that rely on the joycons as a pointer, being able to shake or manipulate them independently, or some games where you can only play holding them sideways. It wouldn't work if you can't remove them. Games like Mario Party, 1-2 Switch, Snipperclips, Just Dance, and more.
Hopefully if it is a more portable Switch they will add things like StreetPass, like they did on 3DS, to make it a fun portable experience.
As others have mentioned a lot of newer versions of apps remove features or rearrange the UI just to seem fresh but that's annoying to the user.
Besides that, on Windows a lot of apps seem to install a companion app just to check for updates, a lot of the time this gets disabled because it adds clutter to the taskbar and adds to startup time, not to mention triggering annoying popups if it can't reach the internet or if they need you to agree to new terms.
During Windows installers people see a checkbox for that and disable it automatically because they're usually trying to shoehorn some adware or promotional app, or take over file associations or sign you up for something you don't want. So people just disable these.
I moved away from Windows because of these hassles and now I have a central updating service for everything on my system. I understand Windows Store can do this, but not all apps are on the Windows Store because of certain restrictions and other criteria that leaves out the app you may want, or because the third party has their own storefront service/launcher they want you to use, and some people want to avoid it altogether because of the experience.
It seems like a hassle to deal with all of this when you just want to accomplish things in a straightforward way, especially if you are an end user who gets anxious when they are presented with a dialog box with options like many non-techies who will just see that and immediately call the local nerd.
I just talk to people directly and ask to be reached directly and then deal with things in real time. I get emails as appointment reminders, receipts, if a file needs to be sent to me, but otherwise I am just contacted directly by voice or text.
I wanted a clear flat colorful non-interlaced display with as little space between pixels as possible, with individually lit pixels and as little delay as possible when outputting a frame. We now have 4k freesync OLED and microLED displays.
Powerful game consoles and PCs, cheap computing devices, very powerful portable devices, large HDDs and portable storage, SSDs, wireless internet, even things I didn't know I wanted but can't live without, like high tech washlets. VR is coming along and is quite cool.
And you rely on the snap package author to update each and every single included component in a snap package. A snap contains not only the app but every dependency required to run. Any time a library or other component gets updated, the snap is out of date and the user is at risk. Many snaps are given permission to work with your files anyway.
Snaps should only be used to test bleeding edge software releases and never for actual end users or production.
I hate when I see juddering every time there is a pan, or now that our TVs are bigger, many types of motion. Yes motion blur exists, but that doesn't stop the abrupt shifts between frames instead of smooth actions. After watching with it turned on for a week, it was impossible to go back.
It's fine if Tom Cruise doesn't like it but it's an option, you can turn it on or off. Being able to adjust things to your preferences is good.
Why would he want to placate people in such a transparent way and taunt people and take sides instead of taking a diligent role in objectively looking into the issues of concern, or why he would refuse to help investigate the comments.
This truly shows how out of touch and ineffective he is.
Begin the transition now so that you will have enough time to be made aware of any snags and find potential solutions. If you wait until the last minute you may end up frustrated and feel forced to either have a rough transition and be frustrated, or to upgrade and deal with the hassles you wish to avoid.
Try running Windows 7 and something else side by side, and see how well you get along in your alternative, booting to Windows 7 when you feel forced to and taking note of the circumstances to try and find a potential solution and path forward.
When they make a huge budget game that tries to please a mass audience, few succeed and it is a make or break endeavor for the studio/publisher.
Those who focus on their niche and try to please their core audience will foster loyalty and have guaranteed repeat sales that sustain them for the long term.
"[W]hen you're downloading and consuming over 15 gigabytes of data a month, you're likely streaming Spotify. You're likely streaming YouTube. You're likely streaming Netflix"
So what... Are they not collecting royalties from Spotify, YouTube, and Netflix? If not, why is that the problem of consumers? Contact Spotify, YouTube, and Netflix and sort it out there.
Just more games would be nice. Having played a lot of the stuff on Wii U already and many of the third party games on PS4 months or even years before they show up on Switch, I just want more original content.
Slashdot Mirror
Very impressive considering the Genesis is much earlier hardware with no specific acceleration for such tasks. Whether it was done 30 years later or not has nothing to do with whether it's possible on the raw hardware.
But this road-like effect isn't the only thing mode 7 was used for, it was used to scale and rotate objects such as characters in the game like in Mario World. In the other games I pointed out you see the Genesis pulling this off smoothly on multiple objects at a time, something the SNES could not do.
If you look at Gunstar Heroes you'll see multiple full screen backgrounds and objects rotating simultaneously, in Mega Turrican multiple enemies will be rotating and scaling at the same time.
Yes, F-Zero does not use any additional hardware, just the built-in VDP acceleration of the SNES. From what I understand Mario Kart might have been done without the DSP but they were using it to track the various sprites on the tracks, such as roadside objects as well as the other characters racing around. F-Zero only had four cars on the track, MK had 8 as well as other objects.
Personally I'd think if they could cut a piece of hardware in favor of software optimization they'd do that. This was the company that was paying engineers for each component they were able to omit from hardware designs in order to optimize and save money in production.
With clever programming, the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive does not need extra processing power to pull off these effects. Here is someone pulling off the same effects as F-Zero on the Genesis.
G-Zero: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=...
The road on the SNES uses mode 7 to add perspective to a bitmap plane and shift/rotate it to simulate a road. The effect is replicated on the Genesis/Mega Drive in software.
Other games like Mega Turrican, Gunstar Heroes, and Red Zone demonstrate these effects in actual gameplay.
The Sega CD's added hardware allowed the system to go far beyond what the SNES could acheive. In the game AH3 Thunderstrike, the Segs CD can use the same effects to scale and rotate multiple objects, but the SNES is limited to using this effect on a single bitmap plane at a time.
Thunderstrike: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=...
However some developers did great things with the SNES hardware. Rare's Donkey Kong Country 2 is a great example, where multiple parallax levels and clever raster effects as well as transparencies are used copiously and beyond what I've seen in other games around the time.
ZSNES was one of the first good SNES emulators along with snes9x. ZSNES had a high resolution mode 7 setting as well nearly 20 years ago in v0.915
https://zsnes.zophar.net/shrin...
I still have my original launch PS4 and games run fine on them. Do you recall how games were at the end of previous generations? Developers really start pushing the envelope in terms of visual fidelity and you see that take a priority over frame rate.
For example Shadow of the Colossus ran at a low frame rate on the PS2 but it was trying to do things like simulate physics, draw crepuscular rays, use motion blur and bloom lighting, and present a sprawling landscape with giant beasts.
It's the same story with any console generation.
Exactly. Other GUIs keep trying to reinvent themselves every time they discover a 'better' way of doing things, but there is no best way. There are many different ways that suit different workflows and different tasks and different mindsets.
This is where the "do one thing and do it right" approach helps too. We have many different applications and tools, and people can tie them together in whatever way they want to suit them.
Different distros help package things together to suit particular tastes, and you can pick whatever starting point is best for you.
That's the strength of the Linux desktop.
Everything missing from streaming is on disc. You can get entire series or seasons at once. No streaming artifacts.
So no modding for these games too? People can't seem to mod Windows Store games without hacks, and mods are very limited even with the hacks. MS created some infrastructure allowing game creators to allow limited modding through those games but developers ignore that and still don't allow modding. I don't think things will get any better with straight up Xbox games running on Windows. It will probably also limit any useful hacks that help people adjust things like FOV, resolution, frame rate, vsync and other things when there is no menu option in the game.
It seems like all the flexibility and customization that people love from PC games is being stripped out. Luckily we still have GoG and Steam and others for now, but I wonder how long until every type of game and app gets forced into some container that prevents any of this.
An email is often a request that is all too easily fired off. Typing and sending an email is incredibly fast but the action required on the other end is considerable. And often the email is sent off without due diligence on the end of the sender, which is incredibly rude, not valuing the receiver's time. Often the sender will not even check their own email for the answer which has been sent time and again, but sender can't remember in short term memory so they fire off another email about "how do I do this again? What's the phone number again? Where can I find this again?"
There are many resources available but sender just thinks it's easier to send an email. It's like googling the human world to them. We've sometimes been so fed up we've even made detailed documents with the steps you need to follow and all of the possible contingencies but you can't find that either or be bothered to read can you?
So naturally the recipient would rather ignore the many requests and wait to be contacted through another medium, whether it be a voice call or in person, to follow through, as a form of vetting.
Fuck off with your shaming.
How about they work on a 'never slow typing' mode for Android. How does everyone get this so wrong? Doesn't matter the phone, there's always a point where the text stops popping up as you're typing and then a ton of random characters barf out at once, cursor position getting switched around as you type, it's maddening.
There are many games that rely on the joycons as a pointer, being able to shake or manipulate them independently, or some games where you can only play holding them sideways. It wouldn't work if you can't remove them. Games like Mario Party, 1-2 Switch, Snipperclips, Just Dance, and more.
Hopefully if it is a more portable Switch they will add things like StreetPass, like they did on 3DS, to make it a fun portable experience.
As others have mentioned a lot of newer versions of apps remove features or rearrange the UI just to seem fresh but that's annoying to the user.
Besides that, on Windows a lot of apps seem to install a companion app just to check for updates, a lot of the time this gets disabled because it adds clutter to the taskbar and adds to startup time, not to mention triggering annoying popups if it can't reach the internet or if they need you to agree to new terms.
During Windows installers people see a checkbox for that and disable it automatically because they're usually trying to shoehorn some adware or promotional app, or take over file associations or sign you up for something you don't want. So people just disable these.
I moved away from Windows because of these hassles and now I have a central updating service for everything on my system. I understand Windows Store can do this, but not all apps are on the Windows Store because of certain restrictions and other criteria that leaves out the app you may want, or because the third party has their own storefront service/launcher they want you to use, and some people want to avoid it altogether because of the experience.
It seems like a hassle to deal with all of this when you just want to accomplish things in a straightforward way, especially if you are an end user who gets anxious when they are presented with a dialog box with options like many non-techies who will just see that and immediately call the local nerd.
I just talk to people directly and ask to be reached directly and then deal with things in real time. I get emails as appointment reminders, receipts, if a file needs to be sent to me, but otherwise I am just contacted directly by voice or text.
I wanted a clear flat colorful non-interlaced display with as little space between pixels as possible, with individually lit pixels and as little delay as possible when outputting a frame. We now have 4k freesync OLED and microLED displays.
Powerful game consoles and PCs, cheap computing devices, very powerful portable devices, large HDDs and portable storage, SSDs, wireless internet, even things I didn't know I wanted but can't live without, like high tech washlets. VR is coming along and is quite cool.
And you rely on the snap package author to update each and every single included component in a snap package. A snap contains not only the app but every dependency required to run. Any time a library or other component gets updated, the snap is out of date and the user is at risk. Many snaps are given permission to work with your files anyway.
Snaps should only be used to test bleeding edge software releases and never for actual end users or production.
I hate when I see juddering every time there is a pan, or now that our TVs are bigger, many types of motion. Yes motion blur exists, but that doesn't stop the abrupt shifts between frames instead of smooth actions. After watching with it turned on for a week, it was impossible to go back.
It's fine if Tom Cruise doesn't like it but it's an option, you can turn it on or off. Being able to adjust things to your preferences is good.
What I don't get is why he was featured in propaganda: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=...
Why would he want to placate people in such a transparent way and taunt people and take sides instead of taking a diligent role in objectively looking into the issues of concern, or why he would refuse to help investigate the comments.
This truly shows how out of touch and ineffective he is.
Begin the transition now so that you will have enough time to be made aware of any snags and find potential solutions. If you wait until the last minute you may end up frustrated and feel forced to either have a rough transition and be frustrated, or to upgrade and deal with the hassles you wish to avoid.
Try running Windows 7 and something else side by side, and see how well you get along in your alternative, booting to Windows 7 when you feel forced to and taking note of the circumstances to try and find a potential solution and path forward.
The people who create the AIs would be the artists in that case.
Even a DC movie, he was in Teen Titans Go to the Movies, it was a cheeky but cute way to honor him
When they make a huge budget game that tries to please a mass audience, few succeed and it is a make or break endeavor for the studio/publisher.
Those who focus on their niche and try to please their core audience will foster loyalty and have guaranteed repeat sales that sustain them for the long term.
"[W]hen you're downloading and consuming over 15 gigabytes of data a month, you're likely streaming Spotify. You're likely streaming YouTube. You're likely streaming Netflix"
So what... Are they not collecting royalties from Spotify, YouTube, and Netflix? If not, why is that the problem of consumers? Contact Spotify, YouTube, and Netflix and sort it out there.
Perhaps we need a font that can dynamically change as words are rendered, looking slightly different every time.
Just more games would be nice. Having played a lot of the stuff on Wii U already and many of the third party games on PS4 months or even years before they show up on Switch, I just want more original content.
However the humans who certify them, and authorize their use and scope, do.
To have a tested, hassle free, and officially licensed product that does one thing and does it well, with authentic look and authentic controllers