Review of "Aydan's" Interview with Ezra Dreisbach
Several years ago, Sega Saturn Co. UK interviewed Ezra Dreisbach of Death Tank and Lobotomy fame. 1 When compared with one of Dreisbach's previous interviews2 and comments from other developers such as Pitbull's Steve Palmer,3 this interview has many points worth discussing.
When the average reader, or editorialist, sees excessively negative comments like Dreisbach's here they tend to jump to a conclusion. Another thing these statements actually point to is high level versus low level programming. In this case, that means games that were programmed to the hardware using Assembly language versus games that were coded using high level C language programming kits.
Comments like Dreisbach's persist in regard to the Saturn and Playstation 1 despite the relative performance of software on both systems. One developer can be found saying the Saturn was a challenge, but that developer expected their game code to easily port. They expected the Saturn to run exactly like a PC or PS1. Some expected to not have to learn much about the hardware. The programmer who looked at the hardware and then designed a game proved the Saturn was competitive at 3D even if it was difficult.
Based on his previous interview Dreisbach just didn't like quadrilaterals (quads), apparently triangles are *way* better than squares. Based on the latest interview, Dreisbach also thought the Saturn design for 3D games was "stupid". Yet looking solely at the production software, Dreisbach's comments seem to have more to do with the portability of code between the Saturn and other systems than they do with the system's limits at 3D rendering. Thanks to games Dreisbach coded himself, the Saturn's 3D capabilities were displayed at the same level or higher as contemporaneous machines.
Some questions remain on this topic even after all these years. Dreisbach makes comments in both interviews about the Saturn not being able to "stretch" its quads to create a long wall with only a few polygons. Apparently a flat sided object can effectively be stretched indefinitely on the PS1 and the Saturn needs to build it out of quads. This needs to be confirmed and explained. Also, the Saturn's quads needed to have one end pinched into another to make a triangle. It is still unclear whether or not a "pinched quad" on the Saturn was more or less hardware intensive. The texture art needed to be modified from a triangle based engine to a quad based engine however.
Perhaps the most significant of Dreisbach's comments are on how coding specifically to the Saturn affected porting software to other systems. The difficulty Dreisbach describes in porting Saturn code to the Playstation, when combined with comparing the production level software 4, creates many questions about how many other talented programmers worked on Saturn games. If most of the Saturn's games were made were ground up designed, would the Saturn still be just as poorly designed in our estimation?
- Printer-friendly version
- 3607 reads