Lately, I've been slowly but surely working on a 3D game engine developed specifically for the original Sony PlayStation as part of a thesis project for school and I've been thinking of using it to make a furry-themed 3D platformer game starring my Natalie character as an experiment once it becomes fully functional. Of course the game isn't going to be as grandiose as other popular platformers since I don't have a team of developers backing me up at all.

What do you guys think of this little endeavor of mine? I imagine the game having a very cartoonish artstyle (since its my kind of thing) utilizing cel-shading on character models because I was able to achieve such a thing on PS1 hardware. However, don't get your hopes too high though since what I'm doing for this project is mostly just a hobby, though its likely that I would at least make a playable prototype of it.

I do like that it's on a old console. I have wondered in the past how it would be like if a big gaming company were to make a game for an older console today. With or without the old tools used.

Go for it. Have fun.

MT_r34 said:
though its likely that I would at least make a playable prototype of it.

I'd play it. The project sounds interesting.

Sounds great. Good luck.

what they said. but yeah, this does sound interesting and now i'm curious what the end result may be like. i just hope, whatever it ends up being, doesn't have those horrible "tank" controls (where you have to turn then move forward/backwards. deathtrap dungeon and early tomb raider being good examples though it wasn't TOO bad with tomb raider.). never liked those.

treos said:
what they said. but yeah, this does sound interesting and now i'm curious what the end result may be like. i just hope, whatever it ends up being, doesn't have those horrible "tank" controls (where you have to turn then move forward/backwards. deathtrap dungeon and early tomb raider being good examples though it wasn't TOO bad with tomb raider.). never liked those.

Speak for yourself. I like it. I had a friend who hated the control in Resident Evil Remake. Makes sense to me for a character to go the direction they're facing when you press up. However, with the fixed camera angles there are less issues. You eliminate turning 180 degrees whenever the camera angle changes.

Will you be putting it on disc, or making it for emulators?

treos said:
i just hope, whatever it ends up being, doesn't have those horrible "tank" controls

Of course I won't use "tank" controls otherwise, the game will end up playing like Bubsy 3D. Also, the "tank" control scheme for 3D games is horribly outdated in this day and age.

Lance_Armstrong said:
Will you be putting it on disc, or making it for emulators?

Flygon said:
I'm curious, are you going for a commercial release?

I plan to release the game as freeware in iso form which you may either play on an emulator or burn to a disc to play on a mod-chipped PS1 or PS2. There is the so-called PS-X Change boot disc when it comes to playing the game on a real console without a mod-chip but such discs may be difficult or impossible to find nowadays since they're long discontinued and auction sites like ebay will ridicule any listings of it.

So, Spyro style platformer or Crash Bandicoot?

Your game is already better than Bubsy 3D.

TheHuskyK9 said:
Your game is already better than Bubsy 3D.

For reference, here is AVGN's review.

Here's some progress so far , screenshot is a bit noisy as it was captured from my DTL-H2000's development system which currently doesn't have decent grounding yet.

I just got textured triangle subdivision working which is very important when it comes to PlayStation graphics programming since its GPU can only draw triangles in 2D which leads to affine distortion when rendering with textures (hence why textures in most PS1 games often looked skewed). What developers did to reduce distortion and clipping problems was to subdivide triangles into smaller triangles to make textures look perspective correct as shown in the screenshot.

It's still a long way before I can make a simple run-and-jump prototype but I'm slowly getting there, I still have to write more custom MIPS assembly before I can render 3D worlds.

Furrin_Gok said:
So, Spyro style platformer or Crash Bandicoot?

I'm going for a Spyro style open-world platformer since it's a more impressive feat to achieve and is somewhat easier to work with (when modelling/mapping levels at least).

MT_r34 said:
I'm going for a Spyro style open-world platformer since it's a more impressive feat to achieve and is somewhat easier to work with (when modelling/mapping levels at least).

Okay, so how about collectables? Gemstones like in Spyro might be a bit of a hassle, but boxes (Destructables) like Crash bandicoot or "Red coins" (Chain collectables) like Mario sound like they'd be easier.

Wow, long time no update! Reason for the lack of updates as of late was due to personal stuff (such as school) getting in the way and working on some other stuff that's irrelevant to this project.

Anyway, after a couple of weeks worth of work, I've now put together a 3D model rendering routine written entirely in MIPS assembly complete with flat or smooth shaded lighting of polygons: http://sta.sh/01sktaa1kiud

It can even do textured polygons as well: http://sta.sh/020kdvi26rnl (ignore the blue streak, that's actually a sort error due to the model not modeled to be fully suitable for rendering on the PSX)

Now I need to make a version of the routine that renders models with cel-shading as shown in the video I linked in my first post of this thread. The trick I'm using to achieve such an effect is similar to how cel-shading is done on the Nintendo Gamecube where light source calculated vertex colors are used as texture coordinates which then map to a texture that only has 3 shade levels. The technique works surprisingly well on the PSX when I experimented doing it a long time ago.

I think some thought this little project was just going to be vaporware due to this thread not being updated for over a month... I'm still keen on making a simple 3D platformer for the PSX still.

huh, that's some pretty nice progress you've made. even managed to have that picture (2nd pic) look like there was light reflecting off the glass.

shame i can't do anything like that...but i did grab a copy of the old Sword of Moonlight game maker program (the one From Software used to make the first 2 king's field games on psx) not long ago. and that thing is real easy to use. don't really have much in mind as far as what to make with it yet and the event system is a bit more complex than i first thought...

still, keep up the good work mr. (ms.?) game designer. :) your clearly taking a harder route than i am and doing good by the looks of it.

http://assemblergames.com/l/forums/sony-programming-and-development.36/

May help some. =^.^=

treos said:
huh, that's some pretty nice progress you've made. even managed to have that picture (2nd pic) look like there was light reflecting off the glass.

shame i can't do anything like that...but i did grab a copy of the old Sword of Moonlight game maker program (the one From Software used to make the first 2 king's field games on psx) not long ago. and that thing is real easy to use. don't really have much in mind as far as what to make with it yet and the event system is a bit more complex than i first thought...

still, keep up the good work mr. (ms.?) game designer. :) your clearly taking a harder route than i am and doing good by the looks of it.

Actually, there we're no fancy lighting calculations done on the picture frame model, the glass reflection is actually part of the drawing the model is textured with.

I never heard of that game maker program for the PSX before, let alone one from From Software. The only game maker program I knew for the PSX was a port of RPG Maker and considering such programs we're made to run on the PSX, I imagine they we're quite limited with what you can do with them mostly due to memory constraints (the PSX only has 2MB of RAM).

Yeah, writing your own games in C (and the occasional assembly) is usually the best way to create the game you wanted to make provided that you have the time and skill to code such a thing.

furballs_dc said:
http://assemblergames.com/l/forums/sony-programming-and-development.36/

May help some. =^.^=

That forum isn't particularly useful to me since it mostly contains stuff about development hardware and other things I'm already familiar with, I already got documentation and resources I need to develop whatever I want to make for the PSX.

Still, I found some of the threads there interesting to read though.

MT_r34 said:
I never heard of that game maker program for the PSX before, let alone one from From Software. The only game maker program I knew for the PSX was a port of RPG Maker and considering such programs we're made to run on the PSX, I imagine they we're quite limited with what you can do with them mostly due to memory constraints (the PSX only has 2MB of RAM).

well it's actually for the pc but the resulting gameplay is really no different than the psx games (and yes, it supports both keyboard AND gamepad controls though keyboard might be easier overall). more info can be found here. it also has a case of an incurable memory leak but i'm pretty sure that's only a valid concern if your using an old computer. 4GB of RAM on my laptop and the only time that causes trouble is when actually playing a SoM game (yes, any game made with it also has the memory leak) and even then it takes a good while for any bad side effects to start showing. thus adding multiple save points for frequent saves is necessary (especially in larger games). only known remedy is to save then reboot the program/game.

i think one issue with the memory leak in particular is when you switch areas (load a different map). it doesn't unload the data when that happens so it just keeps adding up until either you reboot it or it crashes.

um...don't expect much activity on the forums there. it's not exactly an "active" community...or large for that matter. heck, most fan sites for the KF games are long gone by now and the only maps and pics i have saved are from before said sites went and died off.

it IS possible to add custom content to the SoM program though and i think theres guides for that on the forums (old guides but it's not like the program was ever updated to begin with).

as for RPG Maker, i actually still have my copy of that for psx. man, that thing is SO not friendly with memory cards as it can really eat up the save space after a while. RAM ain't an issue with this one, just memory card space since anything you edit and change you have to save and that builds up quickly as one would expect. this one is mainly just limited in what resources you have available for making a game.

i would say this ones main limit (aside from memory cards) is the amount of resources you have available to work with. which is a good amount but it's nothing particularly fancy. if you've ever played many RPG Maker games before (on the pc) then you know what i'm talking about. RPG Maker in general has never been particularly impressive. but what is impressive is all the stuff people manage to do and make with what's available.

More progress folks! I've now written cel-shaded and environment-mapped model rendering routines also written in MIPS assembly. The screenshots don't seem to do justice with how awesome the results actually look especially the environment mapped one, it looks shiny and shimmery when it's in motion.

Now my next step is to either implement 3D model animations (will be going for per-vertex rather than bone/skeletal since it's simpler to process) or make a platforming prototype that tests important stuff such as platforming physics and collision detection.

treos said:
- stuff -

That's quite interesting, strange that Sword of Moonlight has a major memory leak associated with area loading and it's such a shame that it never got patched. As for the sites that are long gone, there's always archive.org to retrieve archived snapshots of sites long one.

And yeah, it's expected for a program like RPG Maker on the PSX to not be friendly with memory cards as those have a total capacity of 128KB divided into 16 8KB blocks, the reason only 15 of the 16 blocks is usable for save data is because the first block is reserved for the system as the file allocation table. Not sure if they implemented some degree of data compression to the save data as that would have helped at least.

MT_r34 said:
And yeah, it's expected for a program like RPG Maker on the PSX to not be friendly with memory cards as those have a total capacity of 128KB divided into 16 8KB blocks, the reason only 15 of the 16 blocks is usable for save data is because the first block is reserved for the system as the file allocation table. Not sure if they implemented some degree of data compression to the save data as that would have helped at least.

There were extended memory cards, but I believe those still split it up into 8KB blocks, as well. Was kind of a shame, some games didn't use nearly that much, though a few made up for it by having multiple saves in a single slot.

Furrin_Gok said:
There were extended memory cards, but I believe those still split it up into 8KB blocks, as well. Was kind of a shame, some games didn't use nearly that much, though a few made up for it by having multiple saves in a single slot.

yeah, think i still have 2-3 of those transparent green memory cards that had a good bit more space than the normal grey ones. those are pretty good for RPG Maker or just games with larger/more saves than usual.

MT_r34 said:
That's quite interesting, strange that Sword of Moonlight has a major memory leak associated with area loading and it's such a shame that it never got patched. As for the sites that are long gone, there's always archive.org to retrieve archived snapshots of sites long one.

yay, for more progress. :)

as for the archiving...i'm not entirely sure. i haven't really checked in quite some time and...let me see how much got archived before the site(s) went down...

side note (since i have to go to the wayback machine and thus the internet archive to check this stuff): don't bother emulating games on the archive site itself. tried it once, their servers and/or choice of emulator is so slow even a sega genesis game is barely playable. :/ or it was last time i tried.

http://ww1.kings-field.com/ saved 32 times between 9/25/2015 and 7/9/2016

o_O quit giving me blank white pages and load. shoot, well that fan site is gone. like, GONE gone. all these archived pages are just showing the domain has expired. but...if anyone wants (feel free to PM), i still happen to have a ton of maps, item/equipment/monster/etc. pics and other stuff still saved on my google drive from way back before the site died. so it's not a complete loss. i also have some maps (now lost i think, on the site i mean) for the Diadem of Monstraught fan game saved as well. (27.3MB of content total including pics of ALL monsters in the monster book of Shadow Tower for psx. like...250+ pics)

yep, all pages checked and theres nothing left even on the wayback machine. :(

edit: checked your new pics and yep, that's psx graphics alright. what with the warped looking reflections on some surfaces (capenv2 pic). pics, capcel, capcel2, and capenv3 all look good save for some minor visual glitchiness (a clipping issue perhaps?) here and there.

such a shame for me. always wanted to make video games but between laziness and lack of motivation my knowledge and skill is only about as far as...SoM and maybe RPGMaker if i ever bother to download a copy some day. and RPGMaker ain't exactly what i would call "fancy". but that's something at least, better than nothing.

Another long time no update due to spending a large chunk of my time working on an extensive thesis report of the engine part of this project for school last month and taking a very long break from working on the project afterwards. I've just recently started picking up from where I had left off optimizing and refining some assembly routines as well as working on code for rendering 3D environments.

I also had a major hardware upgrade on my DTL-H2000 development system transferring the boards to a Dell Optiplex GX110 tower as my old system was dying and it wouldn't display any video until I give it a minute or two to warm up. The only downside with the Dell tower is that I cannot replace its on-board Intel 810 graphics with a much better card without the system crashing in weird ways as I couldn't disable the on-board graphics at all. The faster Pentium III processor (933MHz while my old system was 550MHz) and the higher number of expansion slots available on the system was an acceptable compensation at least.