Why did they remove crushers in Jaguar Doom?

[Blastfrog]

It doesn't seem like it would be too hard for the Jaguar to handle, and code doesn't take up too much space, so why did they remove it?

[geo]

Jaguar was a monstrosity of technology in a negative way. It was probably taken out due to limitations, but other than that who knows.

[printz]

Do perpetual movers otherwise appear in Jag Doom?

[Marnetmar]

Same reason for the music.

Laziness.

[Blastfrog]

But there was music in Jaguar Doom, but it only played during the intermission, oddly enough. And it takes effort (though not much) to remove something, so it was a definite decision to remove it, but why?

[mr fiat]

either it was limitations or the coders where to lazy to port the crushers along who knows.

[Varis Alpha]

Marnetmar said:

Same reason for the music.

Laziness.

Wasn't that cut out due to technical limitations? Would also be the same reason why there's no crushers in either, I'd reckon.

[esselfortium]

Probably the code to have the crushers continue running all the time (whereas a lift moves up and down only once when it's triggered) was eating up precious CPU cycles every gametic.

[Blastfrog]

They could've modified the levels to only run the crushers when the player is near them (like E2M2). Or would even that have slowed it down too much?

[natt]

Marnetmar said:

Same reason for the music.

Laziness.

From the Doom Wiki:

The Jaguar version is the only console port that does not feature any music during gameplay. This is because Jaguar's mathematics co-processor DSP chip also handles playing music. As Doom uses the DSP for most of the collision detection and other things, the DSP does not have enough free cycles to process music while running the other game functions.

Wikipedia's Jaguar entry suggests the same thing (that all sound processing is done by the general purpose DSP), as does this discussion:

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/179872-jag-sound-capabilities/

Finally, the Atari Doom source is freely available, and a quick survey reveals quite a bit of maths calculation code in assembly format for the DSP, not the main CPU.

So uhh... no.



As far as the original question goes: The crushers appear to be implemented in p_ceiling.c; you could always add one to a level and find out. My bet is on this though:

esselfortium said:

Probably the code to have the crushers continue running all the time (whereas a lift moves up and down only once when it's triggered) was eating up precious CPU cycles every gametic.

[DaniJ]

Wikipedia said:

Design specs for the console allude to the GPU or DSP being capable of acting as a CPU, leaving the Motorola 68000 to read controller inputs. In practice, however, many developers used the Motorola 68000 to drive gameplay logic.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Jaguar

For those unaware, the Motorola 68000 is the very same chip used as the primary CPU in the Sega Mega Drive and as a sound processor in the Sega Saturn. I think it was simply a case of the coders having a tight deadline to meet (I recall DOOM was one of the first releases?) and them choosing to use this chip for pretty much everything (a known quantity).

[Dutch Doomer]

Definitely not lazyness, same fate suffered PSX doom, which didn't had an Archvile.

[Graf Zahl]

That was for memory constraints. The Playstation only has 1 MB of video RAM and you can't do really much with that, especially when it comes to a monster with so many frames as the AV. For me it would also have been the first to sacrifice.

[natt]

Graf Zahl said:

That was for memory constraints. The Playstation only has 1 MB of video RAM and you can't do really much with that, especially when it comes to a monster with so many frames as the AV. For me it would also have been the first to sacrifice.

That reminds me: The Doom wiki lists under "limitations and bugs" for DsDoom that it doesn't use the Nintendo DS's hardware 3d rendering capabilities.

While the DS doesn't need to use any of its VRAM for a framebuffer, when you only have 512KB at most... I guess hardware rendering DsDoom would be "interesting" to see.

[Mattfrie1]

dutch devil said:

Definitely not lazyness, same fate suffered PSX doom, which didn't had an Archvile.

Most of the ports after the Jaguar version used the same engine as the Jaguar version (with the exception of SNES Doom, which the Doom engine was rebuilt from scratch for the SNES by Williams Entertainment), probably due to laziness and because the Jaguar port was handled by ID themselves, making it the "official" console port engine if you will.

As for the PSX version removing the Archvile, the PSX didn't handle 2D graphics to well. I remember reading somewhere that the Dev's for the PSX version actually had to reduce the size of sprites. Which is very noticeable when compared to the Saturn version, which has considerably bigger sprites than the PSX version even though the Saturn version was directly ported from the PSX version. Also, according to the Doom Wiki:

There is no Arch-vile (because he had twice as many animation frames as the other monsters, and the developers "just couldn't do him justice" on the PSX)

Also, the Doom wiki states that some animations had frames missing from them in the PSX version, which is something I never noticed. Anyone know what animations got cut?

[betabox]

Mattfrie1 said:

Also, the Doom wiki states that some animations had frames missing from them in the PSX version, which is something I never noticed. Anyone know what animations got cut?

I doubt that's true, but I could be wrong. If anything, it's all slower. The revenant is most noticeable for this.

[Clonehunter]

I actually believe that some of the pistol frames (Or just one of them) was cut out. The pistol seems to fire a lot faster on PSX Doom rather than the others, and I just guess a frae is missing, allowing it to jump right back to the beginning.

[Blastfrog]

I think by frames they meant sprite frames, not that any states were cut out. Graphics take much more space up than code.


But PSX Doom does run slower because it runs at 30 tics per second.

[Clonehunter]

I meant sprites... I think... The pistol pictures, how about that?

[Blastfrog]

Well, I know the PC version already had 2 unused pistol frames. Those obviously would've been cut, since they'd not even have been used.