/vr/ - Retro Games

>>7729369
SOTN relies on all graphics being in the framebuffer so it can freely add shading and transparency on top of anything to achieve special effects like limited motion blur, a light effect that pulsates in a circular motion or in waves, etc (see pic). It also includes bigass sprites (or however you feel like defining them) as either large objects or the background itself. The lava cave comes to mind, but also the bell tower or the clouds scrolling past the moon.

Saturn version omits or simplifies most of that because it has a clusterfuck of a hardware design that prevents you from using all of its effects AT THE SAME TIME. Such as: sprite transparency, sprite to background transparency, drawing sprites behind and over backgrounds at the same time, using shading based effects on anything, and using high colour count effects. It can do only about half of either at the same time. Unless you go to extreme lengths and design your game in a way to hide said limitations. SOTN could not do that because it was designed for a hardware that can do all of that at the same time.

For that reason, even if they used extra VDP2 layers for graphics, the game would still look like ass. What they would've needed was to rebuild every effect and a lot of backgrounds from ground up around the native abilities of the console. Then it would've looked as good as, say, Silhouette Mirage, at best.

>PS1 actually can draw rectangular 2D sprites
It actually can't. What it can do is do a memory transfer from one point of the vram to another, such as texture to framebuffer. This is something like twice as fast because it omits the entire GPU pipeline, but in return you can't add transparency or shading, you don't get dithering, and I'm not even sure if you can resize the sprite.

>>7746048
>anyone try this with Duke Nukem and the alternate control scheme?

Most of us who played DN3D and Quake on the Saturn did. It controls great, basically like a modern console FPS.

>>7336730
>The textures are the same, what are you talking about?
Saturn version looks worse on any of the 3d backgrounds especially when shading is involved. Right at the start in the Dracula fight, the vortex looks much worse on Saturn.
https://youtu.be/yFNRlEVrTx4?t=325

>Show us an example of reduced lighting effects.
Lightning effects = gouraud shading = basically a color overlay over the texture. PSX version uses this a ton of times to make Alucard flash some colour. A lot of this is missing or reduced on the Saturn, usually to a single color pulse, while on the Playstation you have waves of shades moving smoothly.

>>6656345
>graphics and illustration

Surely an expert such as you can do a decent doodle in one minute

>>6093130
>>6093140
Every shield in the game has a unique sprite and effect when you pair it with the Shield Rod. Most of them are pretty useless though and don't make up for having both a crappy weapon and crappy shield. Some are neat looking or funny though.

The other we all know about.

>>5966303
It's not a question of laziness. The Saturn simply has no rendering mode that can do sprite transparency, gouraud shading, background transparency, have a high colour cant, and is also fast. You can pick like 2 out of 5 normally, 3 out of 5 if you build the entire game from the ground up with the Saturn limitations in mind.

SOTN uses an extreme amount of transparent effects, gouraud shading (you see how Alucard shines in different ways in this gif? that's all gouraud shading on the sprite), and like half the backgrounds have some polygonal effect you'd have to ditch in favour of VDP2 ones, if you wanted to retain transparency effects on the Saturn.

It's why the extra dungeons have more transparent effects than anything else, they were built ground up for the hardware.

Also the small problem that the hardware can't do 256px resolution like the PSX, so everything gets stretched and also uses more VRAM.

This game has so many damn easter eggs it's not even funny. Why did they stop doing that in modern games?

How beatable is this game if the level system was removed leaving you with the base stats and you had to rely on items and magic for upgrades?

Is there any hack that does exactly this?