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Cool. Don't be afraid to ring us if you're confused about something.
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Sint32 pt_col_plane(Sint16 planept[XYZ], Sint16 ptoffset[XYZ], Sint16 normal[XYZ], Sint16 offset[XYZ])
{
//Using a NORMAL OF A PLANE which is also a POINT ON THE PLANE and checking IF A POINT IS ON THAT PLANE
//the REAL POSITION of the normal, which is also a POINT ON THE PLANE, needs an actual position. WE FIND IT HERE.
Sint16 realNormal[XYZ] = {normal[X] - offset[X], normal[Y] - offset[Y], normal[Z] - offset[Z]};
Sint16 realpt[XYZ] = {planept[X] + ptoffset[X], planept[Y] + ptoffset[Y], planept[Z] + ptoffset[Z]};
//the DIFFERENCE between a POSSIBLE POINT ON THE PLANE, and a KNOWN POINT ON THE PLANE, must use the REAL POSITION of the NORMAL POINT.
Sint16 pNn[XYZ] = {realNormal[X] - realpt[X], realNormal[Y] - realpt[Y], realNormal[Z] - realpt[Z]};
//The NORMAL of the plane has NO REAL POSITION. it is FROM ORIGIN. We use the normal here.
//If the dot product here is zero, the point lies on the plane.
//The dot product being negative or positive can be used to determine whether the point has passed the plane.
Sint32 dot;
dot = vectori_dot(pNn, normal);
return dot;
}
The mesh effect looked ok on crt with composite, which is what people used back then, so it just made sense to use that instead of decreasing your framerate.That depends on the region , here in Europe we all used RGB since the scart cable came with the console.
You mentioned the fm towns marty 3D sphere which gave me an idea but then I looked it up on youtube and it was nothing like my idea.
The idea is to use a normal VDP2 layer with small premade tiles and a CPU can decide how to composite the tiles to recreate what looks like any shadows.
The VDP1 draws arbitrary lines from the left line to the right using a greedy algorithm which causes pixels to be overdrawn. This avoids PS1-like gaps but causes the moire pattern with transparency. The other thing that causes the moire pattern was demonstrated well in one of Jon Burton's Sonic R videos. So unless each line is perfectly vertical or horizontal it'll overdraw causing transparency to be bollocks. This applies to skewed and rotated quads, not just perspective corrected quads.
One of the things you might have heard is that CRTs and composite video blurs the dithering enough to be a convincing shadow just drawing a dithered black oval over the ground. I didn't understand just how effective this was until I saw this composite capture of Z-treme on youtube: https://youtu.be/x7cW9wgIW00?t=50
Anyways you can tell how, back in the day, a team on a deadline scraping for ounces of power on a not quite adequate for 3D system would just draw an oval and be done with it.
I think one of the major issues with performance is that we're using an incredibly old jack-of-all-trades graphics library instead of tightly focused custom routines. Unlike a more straightforward graphics system, the saturn's really hard to write efficient graphic routines or even wrap your head around especially the memory scheduling. If two chips try to access the same memory chip in the same cycle, one of them will be halted until it gets access. This can basically throw away many cycles of work the saturn would otherwise be able to accomplish.
Anyways we got some interesting ideas floating around.
Well, how do other systems like the Jaguar pull this off at a better framerate? Is it because it has a higher bandwidth, or...? This is more of asking if we can remake Supercross 3d on the Sega Saturn.