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by laumars
1629 days ago
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My point wasn’t that 3D is hard. It was that doing 3D on the Saturn was uniquely much harder because the hardware was designed for 2D sprite manipulation rather than polygons. Thus to create polygons on the Saturn you had to transform 2D square sprites into triangles (in a way that’s not to far from mode 7 on the SNES except you have to do it for every bloody sprite and not just an entire layer) and then place them on a 2D canvas at just the right points to make it looks like a connected three dimensional shape. It was nothing like software rendering 3D in DOS nor anything like how the N64 and PS handled 3D (and they had their own problems too). I’m fact it was nothing like how anyone did 3D maths apart from Segas own engineers and that’s only because they’d already been using those same graphics chipsets in arcade cabinets. Hence where there are so many ports of Sega arcade games on the Saturn. Segas approach created all kinds of problems when working in 3D that was technically possible in 2D on the same hardware: like the lack of understanding about depth/z-index (since you’re not actually working with polygons), broken alpha blending (which was supported by the hardware but didn’t work properly with transformed sprites because the act of transforming them meant pixels overlapped and thus the alpha blending became uneven) and so on and so forth. And this is without even touching the usual problems that developers have with SMP. It wasn’t that uncommon for developers to only utilise one processor, effectively halving the capabilities of the machine, just to do away with the concerns of parallel processing. Then to top all that off, you had to figure it all out in assembly. You couldn’t abstract some of those problems away in C (at least not initially). While it’s true a lot of developers were still wrestling with how to do 3D in the mid to late 90s, the Saturn was uniquely awkward for 3D. It was a fantastic 2D system but it sucked for writing any 3D games on it. |
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