Vanishing Point has been surprisingly popular! I've seen people online just about every day since the online features were restored and we already have over 60 players on the leaderboard! Awesome stuff!
Brazil is doing great with new indie games on classic consoles. Here are my Master System, Mega Drive, Atari, DC, and one NES (famicom) gets from @retroconoficial developed in Brazil.
Daytona USA now has leaderboards! @Shuouma_DC found out exactly how the online ranking and points system worked back in the day and reproduced it for the new server.
Check it out here: https://t.co/WLjr4Z0g32
Watching @EliasDaler master the "bloom" or real-time "glow" look on the Sega Dreamcast is giving me flashbacks to one of the most surreal moments of working on our Grand Theft Auto 3 DC port...
There was a point in time when I was convinced that these effects in GTA3 were implemented via a post-processing Gaussian blur pass, as is done nowadays within shaders... because it looked so damn good.
I remember being horrified over how we'd be able to pull it off on Dreamcast, being extremely CPU-bound, lacking shaders. We didn't have enough VRAM left for RTT, and even if we did, transparent fillrate is a blatant weakness of our PVR GPU...
I remember thinking... OH GOD, WE'RE SCREWED! PS2 FANBOYS WILL HAVE A FIELD DAY!!!
So imagine my shock when, upon us implementing a seemingly trivial 2D billboard path in our custom Renderware driver back-end... SUDDENLY BLOOM LIGHTING ON DREAMCAST APPEARS??? W T F???
That moment forever changed the way I looked at GTA3 and Vice City, as well as at achieving peak graphical fidelity and dynamic lighting effects on 6th gen platforms.
Rain, smog, bloom, coronas, lens flares, ground reflections, and more... all just genius use of simple textures within these engines.
Combine these texture-based effects with juuuuust enough real-time dynamic lighting and fog effects, and you can really sell the overall aesthetic without killing a console that doesn't even have shaders and does all of its TnL on its main CPU.
VECTOR SOLDIER UPDATE ⚠️ We established the first successful ONLINE connection via BBA
- natively hosting from Dreamcast
- no server
- real hardware vs flycast
Canada ⚡ Ireland connection! 🌐
Pro Yakyu Team de Asobou NET! is back online thanks to @Shuouma_DC! This is an awesome Japan-exclusive baseball game that you absolutely need to try! https://t.co/DTfjKpAeRk
Did you know there was a Japan-exclusive Magic: The Gathering game for the Sega Dreamcast? Well, thanks to a new fan translation, you can finally play Wizards of the Coast's long-running TCG on Sega's final console in English. ✨🃏
Info here: https://t.co/66rFxIRiFY
To all of you out there who've begged me for years to develop an English translation patch for Dreamcast's "Magic: The Gathering", I'm happy to report that someone else finally did it... 🤣
Read more and download here: https://t.co/82EgQTMOwE
Big news!⚠️ ONLINE multiplayer has been added to Half Life for Dreamcast. Yes, this is the canceled retail version of Half Life, now online for the first time ever thanks to @craf7y24 we had 4 players connected!! 🌐 BBA and W5500 support 💪 Stay tuned!
@GlowHareStudio Thanks for the reply! The BBA support is excellent! As for the W5500, it’s not exactly in the early stages anymore ^^; it’s been in testing for a while and works perfectly. Given the scarcity of the BBA, it’s the current and future solution for Dreamcast gaming ^^.