AFAIK at that point Blender was still close-source and you'd have to pay for it. If it existed at all, that is! Actually I just looked it up, and it was made in '95 (and open-sourced in 2002). They could have been using Traces, the ancestor of Blender Internal raytracing renderer, but they still would have needed Sculpt3D for the modeling - and owning one of those SGI powerhouses, I guess they had very decent rendering options available!
Blender wasn't available in 1994. Paying for a license isn't of much concern to a studio. It pays for itself. Also, you want that sweet priority support as a studio when things go belly up, something the Blender Foundation can''t provide to this day.
@@houstonhelicoptertours1006 @The Cheaterman He was just trying to show how far the industry has moved since this game was released. It's pretty amazing that we can get professional quality software for free, but only a couple decades ago it would cost the same price as a car.
@@gljames24 Totally! :-) I didn't miss the point, I'm just saying Blender was either also commercial around that time, or more specifically just a raytracer back then! The industry made progress as a whole, but Blender made a lot of progress itself too! Been loving it since 2.47 when I started, but 2.5 was a game-changer and 2.8x makes it pretty much commercial-grade if not lead!
@@houstonhelicoptertours1006 I'm fairly sure an ecosystem already emerged providing support and consultancy as required :-) it's the same thing with most FOSS!
You and your team are beyond inspiring. Seriously. You all did ridiculously clever things with such limited hardware, as a aspiring developer right now in university, you make me think how the most basic struggles are quite simple if I just sit there and think about it. This channel is beyond fascinating, I hope you continue it.
If you look at a rotating tower and think its 'beyond inspiring' you need to open up some new horizons. Also, no-one cares about your university or respects you for it - it just doesn't matter in a field where all tutorials you could need are free and online.
@@furqueue9590 “no-one cares about your university...it just doesn’t matter in a field where all tutorials you could need are free and online” Did you miss the memo, buddy? That’s literally every field of study that has ever been created if you know where to look. If you think the point of university degrees is to learn, you’re obviously a dumb teen or a 20-something who saw self-taught programmers on reddit talking about how easy it is to go it without a degree. Maybe it works if you want to work at an IT shop or a random company as a code monkey, but some people have bigger aspirations than that. It’s technically possible to get a job anywhere without a degree, but hell if I’m ever going to go through that process.
I like that Jon doesn't delete the outdated incorrect videos when he makes the corrected video. It's completely understandable why other content creators do so, but it is deleting history in some little respect, and deleting any discussion that occurred in the comments. So keeping the videos up and just amending the title preserves history, and I appreciate that.
For those wondering about the error; In the original video he mentioned that flipping the left half of the tower created a perfect match, while in this version, he stated that it was close, but not a perfect match, so they didn't use the flipped image. Also, the rest of the video talks about the correct resolution of the animation, as well as the correct number of bytes. The change is at 1:27
I like how GameHut say "I hope this made sense for some of you" after presenting a very visual and digestible video. But when he was speaking about how the DSP in Sega Saturn worked, after 8 minutes of an absolute brain-loading horror he said "OK, pretty straight-forward up until now"
I see the striking resemblance of this and the DOS game Tower Toppler, which was either a port or a clone of the game you mentioned. It was really cool for the time. And as usual, awesome episode.
Exactly and this goes back to the 8-bits as well. Albeit much simpler, you basically had the same effect on a C64, Amstrad CPC and alike years before that with Tower Toppler or Nebulus (as it was called in Europe). The Tower game mechanic and idea behind the visuals had been invented so much earlier.
This reminds me of the rotating tower effect from Battletoads and Kirby's Adventure, but this looks like a PERFECT upgrade from those two. Fitting seeing how BT and KA were on the NES. Not only is the tower 3D, but EVERYTHING is 3D as well, and they're much more fluid as well! This is how you upgrade these kind of visuals from 8-bit to 16-bit. Well done!
I actually guessed this was how you did it! Rendering 3D models and then converting them into smoothly animated 2D graphics! But even though it's pre-rendered, that doesn't make it less impressive, the fact that you still managed to make it rotate so smoothly is still SUPER impressive, and getting everything to move accordingly with each other must've been hard. Plus the effect is just so freaking nice to watch! Anyway, thank you a lot for this video, this is honestly one of my favorite graphical effects of all time.
I'm in my 30's yet remember being a nipper when this came out on the SEGA Genesis/Mega Drive. I was really impressed back then at the 3D effects. You did a great job of fooling me! Thought they were indeed polygon based. Great game too, one of the best on the console.
Stumbled across one of your video by pure luck. Your content is stunning. And the format of those small lenght video (that and the fact that you are talking slowly) make them totally accessible even for non native speaker. Ty for your work.
Were the original SGI-rendered graphics kept? Have they been shown anywhere? Might be neat to see them before super compression. I realize they wouldn't have been super high res back then, but still might be neat
Thanks so much for shedding light on this amazing visual trick. I had a lot of fond memories of playing this game as a kid and I was always really wowed by its many effects.
remember how back in the day when game makers had to pull out all the stops and be mega creative to make impressive graphics and not grab a kid out of university and slap him infront of a workstation?
@@cheaterman49 What does that have to do with VRAM? It doesn't matter if there is 8mb of read only memory on the cartrige the GBC can only hold 16kb of data TOTAL in VRAM and base is 32kb RAM.
@@Chron0ClocK Well, you can hold what you can display :-) isn't that all that matters? Hahaha! But more seriously, 8MB of ROM is generous, my comment was mainly referring to the fact that GBC isn't that constrained when you squint very hard :-)
@@alexanderhugestrand But that Demo used DirectX, which contains massive amounts of code already. You could fill a lot of cartridges of Mickey Mania with that supporting code. It is still a very impressive demo!
I was really curious about this! Great to see it explained. Not too long ago I saw Nebulus and pondered how they did that great effect. So I opened Blender, made a cylinder and put the camera directly at its side in orthographic view. Squished the cylinder so the faces are square and placed a seamless texture with bump map on every face. After rotating the cylinder and fiddling around, I finally got that cross-section frames (19 frames). I looped the cross section up and finally got the exact effect and the memory usage wouldn't have been that high in a game. Thank goodness I didn't need a SGI Indigo workstation and desktop PC's progressed so far. My wallet simply wouldn't have made it.
Loving these videos. Would also love an SGI machine still but they :) I need to give MM another whirl, tried beating it last year but the water part of the ghost house was driving me to insanity!
Thanks to all your other videos, this made perfect sense! What will you do when you've finished talking about Mickey and Sonic? I hope you discuss other games new and old. Love this channel!
Is this a channel of an ex Traveller's Tales developer?! If so,I sincerely want to thank you for one of my best memories from my childhood!Traveller's Tales made the most advanced 16 bit games of the era!They really made things never before seen and considered impossible on this hardware. Toy Story,Sonic 3D Blast,Mickey Mania,Legend of Galahad and so on.
i remember playing mickey mania on the ps1 and i thought the 3d was nothing special but now knowing how it works and it being like this on the sega genesis as well suddenly makes it quite special!
Fascinating work. I admit I went to that tower in the Playstation version and thought it's just a 3D model. Well, to hell with that, now that I know 3D models were simply impossible back then, it would be a marvel for me to see such technique.
Like I mentioned in the original upload, the sole fact that TT had an Indigo machine at their disposal shows that Mickey Mania must've been one of the most expensive games at that time.
Yeah, that bit about the reversing the animation in the previous version of this video had me really confused, seeing as the bricks weren't symmetrical.
Really cool. I remember this game from when I was a kid, and how impressive it looked then. And even now, it's neat how it all stems from so simple building blocks. The music in the videos are really loud and resonant though. Maybe turn that down a tad.
Am I right in thinking that the bit where the rotating strip was has changed to now be the entire strip (196px), rather than the first half (92px) mirrored then reversed? Is that what the re-upload is for?
the ammount of effort put into making this game look absolutely stunning makes me believe disney was gonna cut his fingers off if it looked slightly below average
I would like some more info (maybe an entire video) about the SGI box and SoftImage, and the process of transferring graphics to the Mega Drive. I had an SGI box at around that time so it would be nostalgic for me :)
Road Stuff I love the SGI stuff, ever since seeing some animations in the late 80s, then on films like Terminator 2 (1991), and Jurassic Park (1993). I dabbled in 3D Studio MAX, Maya, Lightwave, and Softimage for a number of years, and owned and SGI O2 and Octane for a while (with Maya installed). I was never very good at the 3D stuff, but it was a lot of fun. lol Would be great to see a vid on more of the process, yep. I recently started making a basic Mega Drive game with two friends, and I know how hard it is to reduce the colours of the tiles down to only 15 colours (as a base level, with no extra tricks atm). I'm wondering if Mr GameHut had some controls on the software tools which could adjust the colours in realtime, to see what looked best?
Road Stuff I'm thinking of maybe getting another Octane, Indigo, or Onyx machine, but then sometimes the novelty can wear off quite quickly, and the nostalgia itself is enough. hehe The SGI machines are very well built, but need a lot of power, and weigh a ton. I had the Octane sat next to my PC at the time, and quickly realised how much faster the PC really was for rendering etc. (like a factor of 20 or more, but then the Octane only had a Solid Impact gfx card, and I think an R5000.) I'd love to find a relatively "cheap" Onyx or Indigo though. Seeing the Onyx being showed off on "Bad Influence" is such a vivid memory for me.
Was hoping to hear about how the barrels and Mickey interacted with the platforms and how the game knows where to spawn new platforms. I assume that the Left and Right buttons on the controller don't actually move Mickey but instead animate the other objects on the screen. The barrels have a 3D effect as they roll from one side to the other and they interact with all frames of the platform (mickey only interacts with the centermost platform frame). I suppose the animation frame on the barrels is based on their X coordinate on the screen? Are all the platforms placed out of the screen in the very beginning and only appear in their corresponding frame when their x position matches a space on the tower? The most impressive part to me is how the barrels interact with the tower. Interacting with odd platform frames, actually moving against the tower (Mickey merely stays still), and all while displaying the proper frame which gives it the illusion of 3D. Big fan of this type of game design. 3D game design is so boring in comparison. Any chance you can convince Disney to get back into its Golden Age of video games? Disney games used to be among the highest quality games on the market. There's a demand for Disney in gaming (like everywhere) and a resurgence of 2D platform style games (Shantae, Shovelknight, Sonic Mania, other games that start with 'S').
Stuff like this makes me wonder if it would still be possible on modern systems to save on resources used. I suspect modern engines aren't very efficient and moreso rely on raw power to get things done (but I'm no programmer, so it's just speculation). Most of the time in modern games I see them cutting down on effects, lower framerate for stuff in the distance or the use of a dynamic resolution. Would it be possible to still significantly save on resources with little tricks like these that made games on older systems look far beyond their capability?
it's possible in theory, but much harder now. The complexity of modern hardware us many orders of magnitude higher than it is for 16 bit hardware. Plus, you'd have to target low level stuff which is rarely all that well documented (if at all), and any code optimised to that level would break if there was even a moderate hardware change. Thus on PC you can forget about it. On console... It's possible as long as it doesn't have to be multiplatform, or you're willing to rewrite large amounts of code for every single port. It's generally just not worth the time and effort anymore. Any gains are likely to be relatively unimpressive too. But can it still be done? Sure. Technically, yes. You probably wouldn't want to, but you could. Just don't go expecting it to have results as impressive as on old systems like this.
I'm not expert either, but I think you still see some resource-saving with current first party games. Horizon Zero Dawn's Decima engine seems to have a bunch of tricks it can do to get a pretty amazing performance out of the PS4.
Modern hardware is specifically designed to do the kinds of tasks that modern games want to do, so these kinds of coding tricks are much more complicated to pull off. Here, TT used tricks to make hardware designed to render sprites and backgrounds render something that looks like 3D instead. But nowadays our gaming hardware is specifically designed to render polygons that are projected onto the screen by dedicated math hardware.
@@eliacools1340 There are some that are, but the majority aren't. That's why some games can have excellent graphics, a large scale environment with a lot of interactive stuff and run at a stable framerate, while other games with average or subpar graphics, a much smaller scale, barely any interactivity, etc can struggle even hitting its framerate target the moment it gets a little busy. There's a lot of tricks to use to obtain better graphics too with a low cost on resource. I suppose DLSS 2.0 is a good example of a cheap technique that can make 1080p graphics look on par with 4K graphics.
I remember this as Mickey's Wild Adventure on PS1. Loved the game but by god was it challenging, the last level makes me scream like James Rolfe, even as an adult.
I didn’t know this game existed, but when I first saw it on your video, I said aloud - “Nebula!” Love me some genius C-64 games. It was actually called “Tower Toppler” on the version I downloaded as a kid.
This question might be asked regarding the Mega Drive demo "Overdrive 2". It's easily the most impressive things I've ever seen out of this generation (Amiga, PC Engine, Mega Drive and SNES) but now I wonder if something even more impressive can be done.
I think this is the first one of these videos where I've fully understood the trick after watching the video. Probably because I studied design and I suck at programming.
probably because the snes one had load times and may not of been able to store the whole animation in ram as opposed to streaming from the cartridge (maybe? someone confirm me on this)
Thank you for these amazing videos! I remember only three games that really blew me away with visuals and sound on the Genesis back then. Two of them are yours - Toy Story and Mickey Mania. The third one - Adventures of Batman & Robin. Would you be able to give us an educated guess as to how the Mad Hatter boss was done in that game? that's one of the most visually stunning things the Genesis has ever seen. Thank you!
Yeah, it's a simpler version of this: ruclips.net/video/nt-AxAqlrOo/видео.html to move the checkerboard towards you and then using horizontal interrupts to shift the image left and right per scanline (like this: ruclips.net/video/zEBDwP9DRds/видео.html ) and then either skip lines or fetch lines more than once per scanline to make it move up and down
I find it amazing that the tools cost $30,000 per copy, but nowadays we have things like Blender, completely free and open source. Awesome how the scene has changed over the years, even if I've only been here for a bit of it...
Fun story: I got this game for either Christmas or my birthday one year. Later that night, I was having trouble getting to sleep, so I crept down to the living room at 4 AM to play my new game for a while. My parents came down and caught me. Just when I thought they were about to send me back to bed, they starting giving me gameplay advice. "Watch out! Jump over that."
I'm thinking of getting this game on the PS1 again sometime, is it any good? The copy I had as a kid was scratched to the point where rarely the first level would even load.
I had a feeling that you were going to do a video on this part of the game. Thinking about your video on how you developed the floor in the Moose Chase level, I was guessing you had used the same technique for the rotating tower - Apparently, I was mistaken. Considering the heavy cost of the SGI hardware you used to develop the graphics, you and your team must have had a very large budget to work from.
By "budget", I was talking about the amount of money the developers had with which to cover the costs of developing the game, not the available system resources.
Ver. 1.01 changelog
- Fixed tower sprite being accidentaly mirrored
- Stability improvements
- Adjustments have been made to make for a more pleasant gaming experience...wait wrong dev.
Further improvements to overall system stability and other minor adjustments have been made to enhance the user experience
-Updated the localization files.
Ha, you beat me to it!
-No random critical hits.
Thanks RUclips algorithm, don't think I'd ever search for something like this but it's truly fascinating, watched the whole video
"The software itself cost $30,000" meanwhile today Blender is completely free.
AFAIK at that point Blender was still close-source and you'd have to pay for it. If it existed at all, that is! Actually I just looked it up, and it was made in '95 (and open-sourced in 2002). They could have been using Traces, the ancestor of Blender Internal raytracing renderer, but they still would have needed Sculpt3D for the modeling - and owning one of those SGI powerhouses, I guess they had very decent rendering options available!
Blender wasn't available in 1994.
Paying for a license isn't of much concern to a studio. It pays for itself. Also, you want that sweet priority support as a studio when things go belly up, something the Blender Foundation can''t provide to this day.
@@houstonhelicoptertours1006 @The Cheaterman
He was just trying to show how far the industry has moved since this game was released. It's pretty amazing that we can get professional quality software for free, but only a couple decades ago it would cost the same price as a car.
@@gljames24 Totally! :-) I didn't miss the point, I'm just saying Blender was either also commercial around that time, or more specifically just a raytracer back then! The industry made progress as a whole, but Blender made a lot of progress itself too! Been loving it since 2.47 when I started, but 2.5 was a game-changer and 2.8x makes it pretty much commercial-grade if not lead!
@@houstonhelicoptertours1006 I'm fairly sure an ecosystem already emerged providing support and consultancy as required :-) it's the same thing with most FOSS!
You and your team are beyond inspiring. Seriously. You all did ridiculously clever things with such limited hardware, as a aspiring developer right now in university, you make me think how the most basic struggles are quite simple if I just sit there and think about it.
This channel is beyond fascinating, I hope you continue it.
If you look at a rotating tower and think its 'beyond inspiring' you need to open up some new horizons.
Also, no-one cares about your university or respects you for it - it just doesn't matter in a field where all tutorials you could need are free and online.
@@furqueue9590 wow toxic much?
Yea same here, those guys had lots of fascinating ideas.
@Fur Queue's comment is just retarded and useless
@@furqueue9590 Why am I Toxic? -DSP
@@furqueue9590 “no-one cares about your university...it just doesn’t matter in a field where all tutorials you could need are free and online”
Did you miss the memo, buddy? That’s literally every field of study that has ever been created if you know where to look.
If you think the point of university degrees is to learn, you’re obviously a dumb teen or a 20-something who saw self-taught programmers on reddit talking about how easy it is to go it without a degree.
Maybe it works if you want to work at an IT shop or a random company as a code monkey, but some people have bigger aspirations than that. It’s technically possible to get a job anywhere without a degree, but hell if I’m ever going to go through that process.
Mickey Mania was a visually marvelous game. It still holds up today.
I like that Jon doesn't delete the outdated incorrect videos when he makes the corrected video. It's completely understandable why other content creators do so, but it is deleting history in some little respect, and deleting any discussion that occurred in the comments. So keeping the videos up and just amending the title preserves history, and I appreciate that.
Should probably make it unlisted though.
I'm 7 months late but it is still there, just unlisted.
@@Kippykip What is this unlisted video you speak of? I would like to watch it.
Edit: Oh the link is in the video description. Nevermind!
As a coder myself I just love how simple these tricks are when it comes down to it. It's inspiring.
*programmer
@@TheALPHA1550 shut
For those wondering about the error; In the original video he mentioned that flipping the left half of the tower created a perfect match, while in this version, he stated that it was close, but not a perfect match, so they didn't use the flipped image. Also, the rest of the video talks about the correct resolution of the animation, as well as the correct number of bytes.
The change is at 1:27
Thanks.
I like how GameHut say "I hope this made sense for some of you" after presenting a very visual and digestible video. But when he was speaking about how the DSP in Sega Saturn worked, after 8 minutes of an absolute brain-loading horror he said "OK, pretty straight-forward up until now"
I see the striking resemblance of this and the DOS game Tower Toppler, which was either a port or a clone of the game you mentioned. It was really cool for the time. And as usual, awesome episode.
Exactly and this goes back to the 8-bits as well. Albeit much simpler, you basically had the same effect on a C64, Amstrad CPC and alike years before that with Tower Toppler or Nebulus (as it was called in Europe). The Tower game mechanic and idea behind the visuals had been invented so much earlier.
This reminds me of the rotating tower effect from Battletoads and Kirby's Adventure, but this looks like a PERFECT upgrade from those two. Fitting seeing how BT and KA were on the NES. Not only is the tower 3D, but EVERYTHING is 3D as well, and they're much more fluid as well! This is how you upgrade these kind of visuals from 8-bit to 16-bit. Well done!
And Super Ghouls N Ghosts
And Castelian
I actually guessed this was how you did it! Rendering 3D models and then converting them into smoothly animated 2D graphics! But even though it's pre-rendered, that doesn't make it less impressive, the fact that you still managed to make it rotate so smoothly is still SUPER impressive, and getting everything to move accordingly with each other must've been hard. Plus the effect is just so freaking nice to watch!
Anyway, thank you a lot for this video, this is honestly one of my favorite graphical effects of all time.
Wohohow, quick correcting, there!
Well, still impressive as always!
Yes, the C64 game Nebula I had in mind as well, seeing this for the first time.
Man, that game impressed me back them with the smooth scrolling
I'm in my 30's yet remember being a nipper when this came out on the SEGA Genesis/Mega Drive.
I was really impressed back then at the 3D effects.
You did a great job of fooling me! Thought they were indeed polygon based.
Great game too, one of the best on the console.
Stumbled across one of your video by pure luck. Your content is stunning.
And the format of those small lenght video (that and the fact that you are talking slowly) make them totally accessible even for non native speaker.
Ty for your work.
I'm neither a gamer nor a programmer, but I still find these videos fascinating!
Their content is very well made and they explain every topic very clear!
Were the original SGI-rendered graphics kept? Have they been shown anywhere? Might be neat to see them before super compression. I realize they wouldn't have been super high res back then, but still might be neat
@Random Cow🗸 no he didn't
I'm stinkin addicted to these awesome videos.
This is my new favorite chanel, I love to know people made special effect on older games. Thank you.
Your visualizations are awesome! As is the information provided. Thank you so much for this series.
Fantastic as always. This is one of the best series on RUclips.
The amount of work you put into these videos is astounding! Kudos to you!
Thanks so much for shedding light on this amazing visual trick. I had a lot of fond memories of playing this game as a kid and I was always really wowed by its many effects.
remember how back in the day when game makers had to pull out all the stops and be mega creative to make impressive graphics and not grab a kid out of university and slap him infront of a workstation?
I always loved the tower part. It looks amazing for a 16-bit game.
Fascinating... Mickey Mania was one of the best looking games ever and still is. Just beautiful.
"just 24K" dude, you're talking to a GBC developer here, stop mocking me :P
You have 8MB of ROM on a Game Pak, what are you complaining about? :-D
@@cheaterman49 What does that have to do with VRAM? It doesn't matter if there is 8mb of read only memory on the cartrige the GBC can only hold 16kb of data TOTAL in VRAM and base is 32kb RAM.
@@Chron0ClocK Well, you can hold what you can display :-) isn't that all that matters? Hahaha! But more seriously, 8MB of ROM is generous, my comment was mainly referring to the fact that GBC isn't that constrained when you squint very hard :-)
24K for that simple effect is a lot. Here is a 4k intro to compare with.
ruclips.net/video/jB0vBmiTr6o/видео.html
@@alexanderhugestrand But that Demo used DirectX, which contains massive amounts of code already. You could fill a lot of cartridges of Mickey Mania with that supporting code. It is still a very impressive demo!
I was really curious about this! Great to see it explained. Not too long ago I saw Nebulus and pondered how they did that great effect. So I opened Blender, made a cylinder and put the camera directly at its side in orthographic view. Squished the cylinder so the faces are square and placed a seamless texture with bump map on every face. After rotating the cylinder and fiddling around, I finally got that cross-section frames (19 frames). I looped the cross section up and finally got the exact effect and the memory usage wouldn't have been that high in a game.
Thank goodness I didn't need a SGI Indigo workstation and desktop PC's progressed so far. My wallet simply wouldn't have made it.
I remember being in awe, seeing this run on a demo station in Toys'R'us as a child. So cool to hear the creator talk about it!
Always interesting to see how this stuff was done. Thanks.
Seems like a pretty straightforward set of animating tricks to conserve memory - but it all blends together very nicely for the full effect.
Incredibly well executed. I love this channel.
This is such a good game and a work of art. Thank you for creating it. I worked in Softimage and migrated to MAYA.
That was amazing!!!
And I also recall being in awe of Nebulous on the C64
Thank you, I appreciate the brevity of these videos
Mr. Burton, you are amazing! Thank you for sharing your knowledge with all of us.
This is really helpful from an animation point of view for all the people who work with 2.5 d or fake 3d
That is so cool. I didn't know there was another rotating tower besides the one we see in Battletoads.
Loving these videos. Would also love an SGI machine still but they :) I need to give MM another whirl, tried beating it last year but the water part of the ghost house was driving me to insanity!
A glorious, 3D rotating reupload.
this music makes me wanna jump off a skyscraper
in a good way though
thank you again for these videos
Thanks to all your other videos, this made perfect sense! What will you do when you've finished talking about Mickey and Sonic? I hope you discuss other games new and old. Love this channel!
AAAAH! That makes A LOT more sense! I LOVE these vids!
Is this a channel of an ex Traveller's Tales developer?!
If so,I sincerely want to thank you for one of my best memories from my childhood!Traveller's Tales made the most advanced 16 bit games of the era!They really made things never before seen and considered impossible on this hardware.
Toy Story,Sonic 3D Blast,Mickey Mania,Legend of Galahad and so on.
I had a hunch that the mirroring strategy didn't work.
i remember playing mickey mania on the ps1 and i thought the 3d was nothing special but now knowing how it works and it being like this on the sega genesis as well suddenly makes it quite special!
Fascinating work. I admit I went to that tower in the Playstation version and thought it's just a 3D model.
Well, to hell with that, now that I know 3D models were simply impossible back then, it would be a marvel for me to see such technique.
Like I mentioned in the original upload, the sole fact that TT had an Indigo machine at their disposal shows that Mickey Mania must've been one of the most expensive games at that time.
I'm not the only one who was reminded of the rotating tower(s) in Kirby's Adventure when I saw this in my feed, right?
Porkey Pig's Haunted Adventure for the SNES did a similar effect!
It's incredible that in some point in history a Mickey game was a Videogame tech innovator
Well that just made 12 year old me very happy. Thanks for answering all my questions... Like.. 20 years later!
I'm glad that I'm not the only one who remembers the publicity videos calling it "soft imaaaage 3d" rather than "soft image 3d" :)
Jaymz Julian well it was a Canadian (French) software right? :)
Yeah, that bit about the reversing the animation in the previous version of this video had me really confused, seeing as the bricks weren't symmetrical.
It made sense to me, but even if the viewers can't make sense of it they can always watch your video again, giving you another view. :D
That was super awesome effect to see on Megadrive!
I enjoy your videos very much, and I have no coding experience what so ever.
Always impressive to see how they worked with the technical limitations of the day
Really cool. I remember this game from when I was a kid, and how impressive it looked then. And even now, it's neat how it all stems from so simple building blocks.
The music in the videos are really loud and resonant though. Maybe turn that down a tad.
Am I right in thinking that the bit where the rotating strip was has changed to now be the entire strip (196px), rather than the first half (92px) mirrored then reversed? Is that what the re-upload is for?
Thanks! I was confused when you talked about mirroring
Then again I'm confused by a lot of stuff in your videos. But I love them
I had nightmares of these levels when I was a kid! Cool to see how it works though!
C64 Nebulus was massively ahead of its time. Bastard hard as well.
the ammount of effort put into making this game look absolutely stunning makes me believe disney was gonna cut his fingers off if it looked slightly below average
I would like some more info (maybe an entire video) about the SGI box and SoftImage, and the process of transferring graphics to the Mega Drive. I had an SGI box at around that time so it would be nostalgic for me :)
Road Stuff
I love the SGI stuff, ever since seeing some animations in the late 80s, then on films like Terminator 2 (1991), and Jurassic Park (1993).
I dabbled in 3D Studio MAX, Maya, Lightwave, and Softimage for a number of years, and owned and SGI O2 and Octane for a while (with Maya installed).
I was never very good at the 3D stuff, but it was a lot of fun. lol
Would be great to see a vid on more of the process, yep.
I recently started making a basic Mega Drive game with two friends, and I know how hard it is to reduce the colours of the tiles down to only 15 colours (as a base level, with no extra tricks atm).
I'm wondering if Mr GameHut had some controls on the software tools which could adjust the colours in realtime, to see what looked best?
Road Stuff
I'm thinking of maybe getting another Octane, Indigo, or Onyx machine, but then sometimes the novelty can wear off quite quickly, and the nostalgia itself is enough. hehe
The SGI machines are very well built, but need a lot of power, and weigh a ton.
I had the Octane sat next to my PC at the time, and quickly realised how much faster the PC really was for rendering etc.
(like a factor of 20 or more, but then the Octane only had a Solid Impact gfx card, and I think an R5000.)
I'd love to find a relatively "cheap" Onyx or Indigo though.
Seeing the Onyx being showed off on "Bad Influence" is such a vivid memory for me.
ruclips.net/video/Z45nbzMLk98/видео.html
I came here, because the preview reminded me of Nebulus and was not disappointed! :)
As usual excellent explanations, thanks ;-)
Wow, this is really impressive!
Huh. Had no idea these effects were in the 16 bit versions as well. (I only played the PS1 version) Really impressive!
Was hoping to hear about how the barrels and Mickey interacted with the platforms and how the game knows where to spawn new platforms. I assume that the Left and Right buttons on the controller don't actually move Mickey but instead animate the other objects on the screen. The barrels have a 3D effect as they roll from one side to the other and they interact with all frames of the platform (mickey only interacts with the centermost platform frame). I suppose the animation frame on the barrels is based on their X coordinate on the screen? Are all the platforms placed out of the screen in the very beginning and only appear in their corresponding frame when their x position matches a space on the tower? The most impressive part to me is how the barrels interact with the tower. Interacting with odd platform frames, actually moving against the tower (Mickey merely stays still), and all while displaying the proper frame which gives it the illusion of 3D.
Big fan of this type of game design. 3D game design is so boring in comparison. Any chance you can convince Disney to get back into its Golden Age of video games? Disney games used to be among the highest quality games on the market. There's a demand for Disney in gaming (like everywhere) and a resurgence of 2D platform style games (Shantae, Shovelknight, Sonic Mania, other games that start with 'S').
This video: *explains in depth*
Me: ... 🤤 yes. Game good.
I played Nebulus as "Tower Toppler" on the Atari 7800...I remember how mind-blowing it was in a world of Pole Position.
Stuff like this makes me wonder if it would still be possible on modern systems to save on resources used. I suspect modern engines aren't very efficient and moreso rely on raw power to get things done (but I'm no programmer, so it's just speculation). Most of the time in modern games I see them cutting down on effects, lower framerate for stuff in the distance or the use of a dynamic resolution. Would it be possible to still significantly save on resources with little tricks like these that made games on older systems look far beyond their capability?
it's possible in theory, but much harder now.
The complexity of modern hardware us many orders of magnitude higher than it is for 16 bit hardware.
Plus, you'd have to target low level stuff which is rarely all that well documented (if at all), and any code optimised to that level would break if there was even a moderate hardware change.
Thus on PC you can forget about it.
On console... It's possible as long as it doesn't have to be multiplatform, or you're willing to rewrite large amounts of code for every single port.
It's generally just not worth the time and effort anymore.
Any gains are likely to be relatively unimpressive too.
But can it still be done? Sure. Technically, yes.
You probably wouldn't want to, but you could.
Just don't go expecting it to have results as impressive as on old systems like this.
I'm not expert either, but I think you still see some resource-saving with current first party games. Horizon Zero Dawn's Decima engine seems to have a bunch of tricks it can do to get a pretty amazing performance out of the PS4.
Modern hardware is specifically designed to do the kinds of tasks that modern games want to do, so these kinds of coding tricks are much more complicated to pull off.
Here, TT used tricks to make hardware designed to render sprites and backgrounds render something that looks like 3D instead. But nowadays our gaming hardware is specifically designed to render polygons that are projected onto the screen by dedicated math hardware.
I know nothing about game development, but I do not think that is true at all. I think developers spend alot of time on optimesing.
@@eliacools1340 There are some that are, but the majority aren't. That's why some games can have excellent graphics, a large scale environment with a lot of interactive stuff and run at a stable framerate, while other games with average or subpar graphics, a much smaller scale, barely any interactivity, etc can struggle even hitting its framerate target the moment it gets a little busy.
There's a lot of tricks to use to obtain better graphics too with a low cost on resource. I suppose DLSS 2.0 is a good example of a cheap technique that can make 1080p graphics look on par with 4K graphics.
Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.
I love how I know if you're going to commentate just by the song you start the video with :D
i wish i was old enough to have been a game dev in the 90's, limitations are so interesting to work with.
how did you do that impressive mode seven bonus level in sonic 3d blast?
Please go into more detail regarding Mickey Mania, this was an important game to me as a child.
RUclips recommendations???
Why are you sending me this now?
What’s wrong with it it’s good information
I think recreating this is kinda hard in Anime Studio. But I want to break some barriers here if I'm gonna get known for my animation.
Mmm, the classic pre-rendering strategy.
I remember this as Mickey's Wild Adventure on PS1. Loved the game but by god was it challenging, the last level makes me scream like James Rolfe, even as an adult.
I didn’t know this game existed, but when I first saw it on your video, I said aloud - “Nebula!” Love me some genius C-64 games. It was actually called “Tower Toppler” on the version I downloaded as a kid.
This game was WAY ahead of its time!
Great vid
In your opinion did the mega drive reach its potential ?
This question might be asked regarding the Mega Drive demo "Overdrive 2". It's easily the most impressive things I've ever seen out of this generation (Amiga, PC Engine, Mega Drive and SNES) but now I wonder if something even more impressive can be done.
No...mega drive has bandwidth to update 320X192 resolution at 16 frames
I think this is the first one of these videos where I've fully understood the trick after watching the video. Probably because I studied design and I suck at programming.
not a disney fan, but found myself loving this game back in the day
How come one of these sections were cut on the SNES version?
probably because the snes one had load times and may not of been able to store the whole animation in ram as opposed to streaming from the cartridge (maybe? someone confirm me on this)
I was gonna say, because SEGA made the game, but I realized it was Disney paying.
Great vid, I wished the Mega CD version made more use of the ASIC chip. Hope Jon will soon make a vid on how he made Sonic R track look transparent
Thank you for these amazing videos! I remember only three games that really blew me away with visuals and sound on the Genesis back then. Two of them are yours - Toy Story and Mickey Mania. The third one - Adventures of Batman & Robin. Would you be able to give us an educated guess as to how the Mad Hatter boss was done in that game? that's one of the most visually stunning things the Genesis has ever seen. Thank you!
Yeah, it's a simpler version of this: ruclips.net/video/nt-AxAqlrOo/видео.html to move the checkerboard towards you and then using horizontal interrupts to shift the image left and right per scanline (like this: ruclips.net/video/zEBDwP9DRds/видео.html ) and then either skip lines or fetch lines more than once per scanline to make it move up and down
I find it amazing that the tools cost $30,000 per copy, but nowadays we have things like Blender, completely free and open source. Awesome how the scene has changed over the years, even if I've only been here for a bit of it...
Fun story: I got this game for either Christmas or my birthday one year. Later that night, I was having trouble getting to sleep, so I crept down to the living room at 4 AM to play my new game for a while. My parents came down and caught me. Just when I thought they were about to send me back to bed, they starting giving me gameplay advice. "Watch out! Jump over that."
Battletoads last level has a rotating tower as well on the original nes which was pretty neat aswell
Really cool techniques, could still be really useful for keeping loading times down for flash/html5.
AHHHH YES I GET TO WATCH THIS VIDEO 2 TIMESS
I am not even mad..
Huh? o:
I'm thinking of getting this game on the PS1 again sometime, is it any good?
The copy I had as a kid was scratched to the point where rarely the first level would even load.
This stuff is SO interesting!!!!!!
I had a feeling that you were going to do a video on this part of the game. Thinking about your video on how you developed the floor in the Moose Chase level, I was guessing you had used the same technique for the rotating tower - Apparently, I was mistaken.
Considering the heavy cost of the SGI hardware you used to develop the graphics, you and your team must have had a very large budget to work from.
Well considering the tower is 192 pixels wide, it probably would've used the majority of the colour palette of the genesis.
By "budget", I was talking about the amount of money the developers had with which to cover the costs of developing the game, not the available system resources.
Is this process similar to the "On The Sky" boss fight in Dynamite Heady that had a similar effect? Its the one after the giant doll.