CubicVR 3D Engine - Sega Dreamcast using vertex lighting pipeline

[kamilm122]

wait... i was on dcemu.co.uk forums few minutes before and some people said that ther isn't any 3d engine for homebrews on dreamcast. But i can see here something different and it works if it isn;t fake so.... so i'm confused and a bit interested in a dreamcast development. I'm thinking to buy one because i love that console and games of it. ^^

[cjcliffe]

@kamilm122 it's been working since about late 2008 and I've been maintaining the compatibility for DC but it needs some upgrades to fill out all the lighting features, unfortunately it's been hard to get serial cables and network cards for development but I'm looking into the new SD-Card based solution to help ease that. Right now it's only known to work with the DC-DEV ISO R4 toolchain and serial/network loader but I will be exploring all the options for toolchains in the near future.

[PANDEMONIUMDJ]

Is there any updates on this for the Dreamcast. Im egarly waiting for a 3D dreamcast engine to start work on a 3D game.

[nueprogs]

What is that song ?

[cjcliffe]

One of my favorites, it's from:

Title: I Wish

Artist: Infected Mushroom

Album: Converting Vegetarians, Disc 2, Track 8

[mayhemtv]

AWESOME! Keep it Up!!!! Really glad more DC stuff is coming out...

[baigos]

I think that a lot of people in the scene may be interested. Did you know what specs give in dreamcast (performance, polygons/sec).

Also: what of the different kglx are you using? the original one? or the chui improved? I know that kglx uses too much memory and you can get better performance and less memory use with the kallistios powervr api, but it's a little hard.

[cjcliffe]

I haven't taken a look at the chui improved version but I have downloaded a copy now (thanks for the suggestion) and will definately check it out as I was having serious memory and clipping issues with the standard kglx.

I've already gone to the extent of building the lighting engine from scratch so I will probably investigate what it would take to use the powervr api directly -- but I'm guessing we'll stick with OpenGL bindings as they're the most compatible between platforms.

[0V3RRiDE]

The speed of using the PVR directly would be necessary for full performance on the Dreamcast.

Its actually pretty easy to use the PVR instead of KGLX.

This looks great, by the way!

@cjcliffe

[baigos]

Awesome!!

Is it working over Kallistios?

Are you using Pvr Rendering or framebuffer?

[cjcliffe]

It's using the KGLX (PVR OpenGL) library from Kallistios coupled with the compiled normal & dynamic lighting arrays from CubicVR's SH4 Optimized lighting. Currently only point lights are supported but there is no limit on the number of lights. The PowerVR in the Dreamcast can only transform 3Million polys/sec but has no lighting engine .. However the SH4 can actually transform 5Million/sec which makes it ideal for lighting -- but it can only be utilized efficiently through SH4 Assembly code.

[accel99]

Wow this looks amazing,seems like the 1st real attempt at a more advanced 3d engine for the dreamcast.God damn it if i only knew how to program.Hey will you continue to support the DC version despite the lack of ppls interest?I bet it wuold be something to see if someone made use of this.

[cjcliffe]

We (myself and Ravenous Games) fully plan on keeping up and extending support for the Dreamcast build -- however we're currently making some major upgrades to the trunk so it may take some time to re-factor the parts that affect the Dreamcast port before it becomes a 'current' release (tested for all platforms).

Also I have some preliminary work on accelerating the Bullet Physics library using SH4 ASM (used in this video) but that will also take time to work out all the kinks.