** Sega Genesis 3D engine update 8.5 ** A smaller update - Scrolling left or right of the sprite based background is implemented along with X camera shifting of the 3d plane. The Exodus emulator has been used with sprite boxing enabled so you can see the background sprites... making up the object ( their outlines ) and how they move to tilt the image . The background is made up of 112 sprites (51 are multiplexed in that number as the Genesis is limited to 80 without mulitplexing eg basically re-using sprite hardware as the screen is being drawn ) . In a 6 x 17 sprite grid of 16x32 pixel high sprites. If the tilt affect was not neccessary or only 1/2 the angle of tilt effect was needed, I could get away with 1/2 the number of sprites and just used 32x32 sprites instead. I think the tilt effect adds a bit to movement however. This is very similar to how a Neo Geo would build its backgrounds up - in 16 pixel strips however its sprites are tall as the screen or more but the concept of making backgrounds up in 16 pixel wide strips is similar. The NG uses sprites to build any background layers required. Here on the Genesis the reason is rendering is much faster using both the 3d planes and using a total sprite background for this engine. Initially i had a lot of things breaking when I tried to move the camera in the X dimension much , as i'd optimised the vertex transform path heavily and once beyond a certain camera offset the X value was wrapping around causing a lot of breakage in the rendering. Thankfully solved that issue without marginal impact to cpu . It still needs work , perspectives are a bit wrong etc but it won't be hard to fix. Also found some rendering speeds ups, about 8% by optimising fully onscreen quads and optimising the clearing of the frame buffers more efficiently. Toni Gálvez - Megastyle - BG. has been hard at work on HUD elements and more 3d models so will have something to show for that soon. #SGDK #SegaMegadrive #SegaGenesisshow more

Eita Carai

What are you going to do when you dont have background planes for backgrounds lol .. the only logical thing .. thats not logical at all lol..

Other than the perspective needing to be tweaked, the overall effect is quite profound on the feeling of three dimensional camera movement!

Thanks ! , i either need to slow the mountains or speedup foreground 3d in the x direction , ill see what looks best . Possibly a little of both, with sub pixel per frame increments.

I think you'll know the right balance when you see it! Oh, would it be possible to slow the shift down and/or match it (somewhat? completely?) to the angle of the ship? It might make it feel like a proper chase cam, even if it doesn't tilt quite as far as the ship itself. Might be worth experimenting with to see how it looks.

Yeah pretty soon it will be player controlled and ship tilt eill be much much faster and the bg tilt will follow the ship banking . This is sort of like updating the attract mode at this stage but soon real gameplay comes with some enemies and firing also.

Birtfox 16 coming to Kickstarter!

Thats the plan 😀

Awesome work as someone who did the genesis version of Xenon 2 back in the day, I appreciate the amount of work you have put in. Fantastic job.

Oh wow , great stuff - loved the power ups in that game 👏 Thanks a lot , its a real lets see if we can achieve it type project . The rendering speed has been paramount for me , so many optimisations were made along the way, as you know 7.6 mhz only goes so far !!

I did a few games back in the day as you can see on my site, still coding for the spectrum next these days, but I have fond memories of the Mega drive.

You can program anything if you have the *know how*. It’s turning it into a commercially viable product and selling it which is the tricky part.

Thats why I have help on all my projects , I'm fully aware great coders dont always make great games designers , thankfully I dont need to do everything 😉

What I was trying to say was…. Star Fox succeeded not because a 3D game specifically, but because it also had good character design and somewhat decent story/premise and killer music.

I'm a fan of Starfox and understand that . We will be inspired by it but make our own thing , the first hurdles are making sure its possible ( no small feat on the MD as we don't have added SFX chips to help out ) . We are in the early stages of that , what can we do - how fast can we do it . The next stage is make it fun to play with its own feeling / music / atmosphere. Engine needs to come first though as the gameplay is very reliant on frame rate .. if we don't hit a certain framerate then its just going to be a slide show / not fun to play .

You keep improving. Friend All this effort in programming, coding, and optimization It's the best!

Thanks Yael , no optimisation is too small for this effort haha . Ill keep pushing it .

I see some frame rate improvement, i'm right about?

Yeah a small amount , about 8 percent . We have some ideas for LODs for distant objects and also a more refined player model that will show less triangles but essentially it will look the same by culling better at angles so hoping for more speed with those adjustments . This is optimizing by 1000 cuts , fractions of percentages everywhere will help.

When most people would say "impossible" you keep pushing and pushing, you're really a singular guy, the best!

THAT is impressive. Congrats man !

Thanks a lot, it started out as a learning curve - wondering if i could get much speed at all with 3d on a machine with no 3d acceleration at all ( albiet one or two helpfull features ) , to present day where I think this is going to work quite well now.

Here is an adult from today but a kid from the 90s . Seeing this at that time would blow my mind. I remember playing the Kawasaki bike game thinking it was impressive for sega because of the 3d elements. This is always fun to follow. Really good work!

Megadrive can shift each pixel of the tile planes horizontally and each 16 pixels vertically, so you can build complete background planes instead of using sprites, although i don't know how feasible that is with your engine :)

@amaweks @laudelino7

That looks really nice. The floating camera movement is excellent!

Thanks 😀 , its just hardwired at present to follow the ship and the ship just bounces around the screen but its quite convincing for an attractive mode I think . Next we will get player control and faster banking in .

Is looking amazing!!

Thanks a lot :-) Everythings limited but its still a bit surprising !

@SEGAkatana This is sorcery at its best

Mas e na hora que colocar umas 6 naves inimigas, robôs andando lá atrás e tudo?

In those heavy object scenes if we drop a bit of frame rate it would be inline with Starfox dropping framerate in heavier action also . Theres still optimisations been made also so I'm hopefull that we can still have a good playable frame rate even in busy scenes. Ultimately if theres a lot of enemy action we will need to watch the buildling count / background detail and pull back on that to increase frame rate also. Aspects like building height have an effect on frame rate so possibly a mix of shorter buildings in heavier scenes also.

@TKthegame

Nice! Use sprites for away objects (you can have tilted also) too avoid some maths

Muito legal !!!, da pra fazer um star Fox no Mega agora

wow, with this engine, at what speed the game starfox could run on the megadrive? or what its your goal? looks amazing

Thanks :-) We aim to make a level to start with , Starfox inspired but our own thing. Frame rates will hopefully be a bit higher than starfox but will need to see once the load increases a bit .

@jesusdelma12365 In terms of graphics, effects, etc., you're aiming to be around the level of Star Fox?

Hoping for that level yes. Its going to be interesting to juggle the ground detail with enemy detail . We will be optimising the player ship a bit , and height of non important building is important as height affects render speed. Also some wire frame rendering will be done in places - like starfox did can look ok. Right now we run a bit faster than starfox but the real test will be intense scenes with more action . Still making optimisations so where its ends up will be interesting.

@Rudy32400689 @jesusdelma12365 Minus that cool HDMA explosion effects, i think that's impossible on Genesis. At least in the context where the VDP is being pushed to the limit.

@Rudy32400689 @jesusdelma12365 Yeah , we will need to think of something impressive 🤔

Shannon does what Nintendon’t.

MEGA Propeller Arena? , MEGA Sky target o MEGA Wing Arms? o sería algo mas futurista?

Some good suggestions thanks , love the MEGA wording , We had some fun with names like moon-wolf 🐺 haha , seriously nothing binding yet , it will have to coincide with the characters we come up with and plot etc .

This is superb , smooth and full screen too.

This immediately reminded me of Star Fox! 🦊