Kypetzl

Willy

@Kypetzl

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one more cute disaster… it’s hard here in paradise

last.fm listening

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Kypetzl
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lunasorcery
@lunasorcery
lifning
@lifning

Ever suspect the particle effects and shader-like visuals used in the attract mode intro of Sonic Adventure 2: Battle were a bit much for the GameCube's 2000-era Flipper GPU1? You might be right. While it was certainly capable of some very impressive visuals with enough effort, Sonic Team had a different, more straightforward idea: Click 'read more' below to see an embed of the pre-rendered software-decoded MPEG color overlay they 'cheated'2 with, combined with the audio track for your viewing pleasure.

  1. ATi bought ArtX while they were working with Nintendo on the GameCube and used their tech to inform the design of the Radeon 9700 (and by extension, its successors up to but not including the r600/RadeonHD series, where they switched to the more heavily shader-oriented design we're more familiar with today). That's why the GameCube has an ATi sticker on it!

  2. I could probably be a little more clear than cheeky about this: All computer graphics is cheating, it's just a question of how much and how clever you are about it. I'm posting this because I think this is pretty darn clever :P

(edit: a few corrections, thanks @tomforsyth!)

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in reply to @lifning's post:

lifning
@lifning

yeah!! i'll DM you my discor--(puts hand to earpiece) okay, i'm being told cohost doesn't have DMs. maybe i can shoot you one on mastod--(puts hand to earpiece) okay, it sounds like maybe holenet dot services isn't speaking HTTPS any more. i'll uh.. well if you've got line of sight to the sky above the pacific northwest, maybe i can smoke sign--(puts hand to earpiece) okay, i'm being told there's an Air Quality Burn Ban in place. 🤔 edit: aha, i have used the tried and true method of "looking through the sea of my otherwise-unmonitored guilds i figured you'd probably also be in"

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techokami
@techokami

yeah my Mastodon instance kept falling over so much that I went "sod this" and unplugged that VPS node :/ It really left a bad taste in my mouth for the platform as a whole that, despite following the crudely-written official instructions, it was an incredibly tempermental thing that kept murdering itself every time Let's Encrypt generated a new HTTPS cert, and not even a cron script could fix it. That and I couldn't connect it to the rest of the federation so it was very isolated

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tomforsyth
@tomforsyth

Soooo... I'm not going to deny they cheated. Because it's games. Go ahead - cheat like fuck! It's all part of the art. But as someone who developed on and really liked both the GameCube and the 9700, there's a lot of corrections to make here.

Flipper was absolutely not "fixed function" in its pixel pipeline - it was a glorious up-to-8-stage shading pipe that could do significantly more than the abysmal PS2 and had pretty much the same functionality as the NV2A in the first Xbox (though at a lower perf) - though they were pretty different internally so you had to use some cunning converting between the two.

In fact the closest thing to Flipper was the DirectX Pixel Shader 1.4 spec, which was very specifically the ATi 8500 series. Those are very close in capabilities, though as far as I know they were developed in parallel and they are quite different implementations - I'm not suggesting there was any intrigue there.

From what I know of the 9700 (which was very close to the PS2.0 spec), it was not related to the GameCube/ArtX pipeline. Of course the ArtX folks contributed to it with their brains, and they're very smart people, but from what I know of the internals of both, I really don't see much similarity. "Inspired by" would be as close as I would call it.

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tomforsyth
@tomforsyth

Yeah, sorry about being a "reply guy" but that was one of my favourite eras of game dev, so I still remember a fair bit of it pretty well. In particular the GameCube's GPU was an astonishing bit of kit the way it did so much with so few gates. The problem was it was so quirky and unlike anything else that people found it hard to unlock that power. There's a reason it got replaced by the more (now) conventional designs!

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lifning
@lifning

yeah! the little "dodger" and "Peach's Castel" (sic) demos that came with the SDK and showed off its potential were super cool, and i guess the design was good enough for them to get away with using it for a whole 'nother console generation afterward. so i guess the non-backwardscompat half of the Wii U's GPU is probably a lot closer to its contemporary RadeonHD than the Flipper was to the 9700, huh

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tomforsyth
@tomforsyth

The Wii was famously "two GameCubes duct-taped together". The actual official devkit manual had a front page that said "this is the GameCube manual with the following changes" and basically just bumped up clock speed and memory, and then the rest of the pages were literally the GameCube manual. Hey - it wasn't broke, so they didn't try to fix it.

I don't know anything about the Wii U, sorry!

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