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Sonic X-treme for SEGA Saturn by Point Of View

 
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ICEknight



Joined: 15 Dec 2003
Posts: 569

PostPosted: Wed May 06, 2015 10:31 pm    Post subject: Sonic X-treme for SEGA Saturn by Point Of View Reply with quote

So there was a Saturn version of Sonic X-Treme with fluid gameplay at one point. No fish-eye lens effect but hey.

From Sonic Retro:
Andrew75 wrote:
==== POINT OF VIEW BUILD OF SONIC X-TREME: ====
(Totally different engine from the STI Engine that we are all familiar with)
(Credits to Jollyroger for getting this build to run on real hardware and not just the dev hardware)

Release Trailer:

Credits to Andrew75.
http://youtu.be/c1U8jRWDBGU



Mini Documentary.

Credits to Borman.
http://youtu.be/bwRERyhP31A



Okay Guys ! So yeah, We have here the never before seen engine build of Sonic Xtreme by Point of View. (videos or pictures have never been released publicly until now.)
Little is known about this build of Sonic Xtreme outside of a FAQ put togeather By Chris Senn which mentions POV a few times.
The Faq can be found here: http://www.senntient.com/projects/xtreme/FAQ.html

From what I gather, sometime in the middle of Sonic X-treme's development, Sega outsourced the completion of Sonic X-treme to Point of View studios, without the knowledge of technical lead Ofer Alon or artist Chris Senn, who were working on the PC and Saturn engine and levels.
Point of View used assets from the original effort and developed a level converter to convert Sega Technical Institute's engine levels into the binary format used by POV's own engine, which had already been used before for several other games on a variety of
platforms, such as Saturn, Playstation, Nintendo 64, PC.

Fast forward to 2015
Jollyroger acquired the POV file assets from Tichua.
In its Initial state the POV build did not run on Standard Saturn hardware, It could however run on development Saturn hardware.
so Jolly had to massage the engine code so that it could run on the Saturn hardware.


Here are some Quotes taken from Chris Senn's FAQ (linked above) in regards to POV and Sonic X-treme.
Quote:

Q: Why didn't more people learn Ofer's editor?
A: By the end of the project, many had learned the fundamentals of the editors most basic functions. But, while the editor was being developed, only Richard Wheeler and myself really learned the editor backwards and forwards (myself moreso since I worked so closely with Ofer). The editor was changing all the time, with new features and functionality, new ways of doing things, etc. so it was difficult to teach it for awhile. Right about the time when POV got involved was when a great many more people got involved to use it. This was also the time when Ofer and I worked privately to continue development on our own, and his old editor was used by the POV group (which included most of the art staff at STI). The biggest innovation of the newer editor introduced dynamically animating paths (you only see a tiny bit of this in the PC videos). Meanwhile, POV could not replicate the fish-eye lens of the older version. Ofer and I worked with his new editor until the PC division declined funding our game. At that point, there was no point for anyone to learn it... and Project Condor worked away to cancellation as well.

Q: Why were there so many different groups of people making one game?
A: There were a lot of people who contributed to the game. However, many factors were responsible for a large amount of change to the project throughout its development. Technology changes, target platform changes, lead programmer changes, and our team leader leaving combined with mounting pressure and attention from Sega (both in the US and in Japan) caused quite a bit of shuffle and change amongst the structure of the team and its members.

Prior to POV involvement, there was (more or less) a single team with sub-teams working on different parts of the game (I.e. main game team, boss team, glue-screen team, etc.). However, once POV got involved and Ofer Alon was ousted as Lead Programmer, Ofer and Senn continued development for the Saturn on their own and POV continued development using most of STI's personnel. Eventually, Alon and Senn dedicated themselves to the PC version while Project Condor was formed to create a Saturn version.

Q: Was the company named 'POV' involved in development?
A: Somewhere between six and eight months prior to the project's cancellation, management had investigated outside options to help insure completion of the game and chose a company called 'POV'. The effort was led by the Technical Director Robert Morgan, one of the original founders of POV, without the knowledge of Ofer Alon (or Christian Senn). When ready, management brought both Ofer and Senn into an office and unveiled their new plan to finish the game. The plan included removing Ofer as technical lead of the project and shifting technical control over to Robert Morgan, who would lead POV. Management presented POV's early efforts on-screen which included primitive graphic displays but did not include gameplay. In stark contrast was Ofer's editor and engine with real-time world construction, moving sprites (Sonic, rings, enemies) with behavior, triggers and physics - with direct playability from the player. It astounded both Ofer and Senn that management would decide to move forward with this POV technology. Management explained that the plan was to use POV's technology to simply port Ofer's PC development to the Saturn.


Point Of View Sega Saturn July 14, 1996 Build Public Release 001:

Mega
Hugefiles
Mediafire

Notes:
I used ImgBurn for burning the iso.
If attempting the swap trick or installing a Mod chip , please be careful not to bust your Saturn, all parties involved with this release are not to be held accountable.
If I've made any mistakes here, please point them out and I'll correct them, thanks guys!


The board seems to have a problem with Mega's URLs, by the way...
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kap
Minister of Paranoia
Minister of Paranoia


Joined: 28 Aug 2003
Posts: 2103
Location: I hate you.

PostPosted: Thu May 07, 2015 12:18 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah, this shitty bbcode chokes on "!". changed it to html.
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