Spiral, a 3D Engine for Dreamcast with Shadow Volumes (Doom 3 style rendering)
- Thread starter K.N.W.
- Start date
CamHostage
Member
Well, they certainly achieved shadows?!
I keed, I keed. Once I cranked up the brightness, there was some very cool stuff in this engine demo.
...Makes me jealous sometimes to see all these cool Dreamcast or N64 aftermarket projects but PS2 homebrew is fairly hard to come by. The system is extremely difficult to access, but you'd think that it's uncommon features would attract enough extreme coders to crack it and try weird experiments with the Emotion Engine. It's been happening, over the years, but painfully slowly.
In the meantime, it's a great time to still be a Dreamcast owner!
I keed, I keed. Once I cranked up the brightness, there was some very cool stuff in this engine demo.
...Makes me jealous sometimes to see all these cool Dreamcast or N64 aftermarket projects but PS2 homebrew is fairly hard to come by. The system is extremely difficult to access, but you'd think that it's uncommon features would attract enough extreme coders to crack it and try weird experiments with the Emotion Engine. It's been happening, over the years, but painfully slowly.
In the meantime, it's a great time to still be a Dreamcast owner!
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KenaiPhoenix
Member
Wow, iot looks amazing!
Kind of wild how people keep pushing the DC console even today. Hopefully one day we will get better tools on those engines to make life a little more easier for devs.
Kind of wild how people keep pushing the DC console even today. Hopefully one day we will get better tools on those engines to make life a little more easier for devs.
Danny Dudekisser
I paid good money for this Dynex!
It performs better than UE5.
Hudo
Member
To be fair, that's a really low bar.
AeonGaidenRaiden
Member
I literally cant see shit even on max brightness lol.
CamHostage
Member
It's dim as hell, i assume that's partly due to the earlieness of the engine demo, but skip to 30 sec and 1:15 to see creatures under the lighting.
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CamHostage
Member
It should be clarified that this is NOT an attempt to port Doom 3 to Dreamcast...
Miguel is making a multipurpose Dreamcast engine called Spiral, designed to use more modern tools and approaches like Blender for DC projects. (He also has a different full-featured PC engine project coming along. And he made the Itch.IO game Nowhere - Dark Memories a few years back. )
So, do understand when looking at this that Doom-3-like lighting on Dreamcast is an experiment, not a goal. Adding Shadow Volumes to Spiral is a feature he has been able to implement; it is not the direction Spiral is necessarily going. This is just one more thing the engine can do now. (Spiral Engine can also play compressed MP3 sounds in-game on a Dreamcast, which may not impress you much but the engine couldn't do that a few weeks ago.) The feature is still limited and expensive to run, but what's in this demo is impressive nevertheless on DC. Don't get your expectations out of whack, the developer is not making or porting a game to Dreamcast (well, he ultimately will do something with Spiral once it's in good shape, but right now the engine is still an infant newly-capable of physics and audio.) This is simply cool tech possible on 25-year-old hardware, and maybe it'll ultimately be used in cool ways with working game projects. For now, it's a trick in the toolbox.
For reference, this is where Spiral Engine was at a year ago:
Miguel is making a multipurpose Dreamcast engine called Spiral, designed to use more modern tools and approaches like Blender for DC projects. (He also has a different full-featured PC engine project coming along. And he made the Itch.IO game Nowhere - Dark Memories a few years back. )
So, do understand when looking at this that Doom-3-like lighting on Dreamcast is an experiment, not a goal. Adding Shadow Volumes to Spiral is a feature he has been able to implement; it is not the direction Spiral is necessarily going. This is just one more thing the engine can do now. (Spiral Engine can also play compressed MP3 sounds in-game on a Dreamcast, which may not impress you much but the engine couldn't do that a few weeks ago.) The feature is still limited and expensive to run, but what's in this demo is impressive nevertheless on DC. Don't get your expectations out of whack, the developer is not making or porting a game to Dreamcast (well, he ultimately will do something with Spiral once it's in good shape, but right now the engine is still an infant newly-capable of physics and audio.) This is simply cool tech possible on 25-year-old hardware, and maybe it'll ultimately be used in cool ways with working game projects. For now, it's a trick in the toolbox.
For reference, this is where Spiral Engine was at a year ago:
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