Dactyl Joust [Jaguar – Cancelled]

Dactyl Joust [Jaguar – Cancelled]

ENG: This entry in the archive doesn’t have a description yet. If you want to add some info about the beta / cancelled stuff that you see in these images, just write a comment or send us an email! We’ll add your info in this page and your name in the contributors list. Thanks a lot for your help! :)

ITA: Questa pagina dell’archivio non ha ancora una descrizione. Se vuoi aggiungere delle informazioni riguardo le differenze della beta o la descrizione di un gioco cancellato, lasciaci un commento o mandaci una email! Inseriremo le tue informazioni nella pagina ed il tuo nome nella lista dei collaboratori. Grazie per il tuo aiuto! :)

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monokoma




13 thoughts on “Dactyl Joust [Jaguar – Cancelled]

  1. Federico

    Un’altra vittima della prematura morte del Jaguar.
    Svuluppato dalla High VOltage Software, Dactyl Joust era un gioco dove si potevano utilizzare creature volanti in un mondo 3D sorprendentemente dettagliato.
    Mancavano circa 6 mesi al lancio quando il titolo venne cancellato. Pare che esistano alcune beta ma per ora non sono state rilasciate.

    1. monokoma Post author

      Grazie come sempre per le info Federico :) Appena ho tempo farò tutte le descrizioni della sezione Jaguar in inglese. Immagino che questo Dactyl sia stato un seguito spirituale del vecchio Joust, serie che ha avuto parecchia sfiga nelle versione in 3D, ne stavano svilippando un’altro per Xbox / PS2, ma ovviamente è stato cancellato.

  2. Ross Sillifant

    Again, you now have the internal documents from Atari regarding this, but in advance…

    Atari made clear the original coder got in over his head, HVS were unable to implement the line of sight combat they wanted, nor put coder on project Atari wanted as he was busy with Jaguar NBA Jam, they promised more texture mapping and Atari were wondering if game could be salvaged or simply needed a total rewrite…

  3. Ross Sillifant

    Can posters please stick to making credible claims…

    Posts saying they know someone from somewhere who played the game,benefit no one let alone advance what is known on the game.

    If you have a source from the development team who can add further information on its status, but doesn’t want to be quoted or named..then sadly it can’t be used..

    But at least put him or her in touch with Indeed 64 to see if anything can be used to further the article.

  4. Ross Sillifant

    The information, direct from the coder, was posted up on Atari Age forum, years ago.

    Name was withheld at request back then..here is a copy of the post from Atari Age:

    “Email conversation with Jaguar programmer, name withheld by request)

    Sure enough, it existed. It was far from finished, however. You could fly about the arena and bop, lance and fireball things. There was some rather simple enemy AI, sound and a few keen special effects. One of the nicer things was that it was RGB based, not CRY, and therefore rather pretty. Very careful manipulation of the shading let me still do some depth cues and use the green channel for some pretty wacky field effects. The game was probably half a year of solid work from completion. But at that point, everyone who could’ve paid for continuing development felt it was time to move on to Playstation, so both Dactyl Joust and TRF (Mortal Kombat style fighting game – I didn’t know actual MK-II was in the works?) got shelved.
    For Dactyl Joust, we were using an automatic memory paging system which was started with Ruiner. This worked by augmenting function calls to load in each function in 256-byte chunks, as many as needed, and doing address fixups. Rarely called support routines remained in main store, specially tagged to avoid being loaded in. (See above re: running from main RAM and crossing page boundaries. The addresses had to be guaranteed by creating a million sections in the link file. Can you say link file nightmare?) In the end though, C and eventually C++ use became pretty invisible (read easy and efficient) even on the GPU RISC processor. Going back and looking at Jaguar code again when I did Tempest/X3 for Playstation was a total trip. Even just a couple years later, I’d forgotten how fun/weird/ugly that beastie was. I honestly miss it though. I really do. For all its quirks (especially because of its quirks!) It was a great little box.
    (Slashdot posting by the programmer)”

    So, it’s pretty clear where the source of information came from

  5. Ross Sillifant

    Just to clear up what Songbird were given..regarding this title…

    This from Carl..posted on Atari Age back in October 2003:

    Special thanks to Eric Nofsinger of High Voltage Software, who made the big trek to Vegas for JagFest @ CGE and gave me this clip (and a few others ) at the show. Note that this is the REAL game running on a REAL Jaguar. Very cool, and a shame it was never released..

    So he was given VIDEO FOOTAGE.

  6. Ross Sillifant

    High Voltage Software, along with Eclipse, were considered the A grade 3rd party developers and Atari exec’s seriously considered looking at possibly just having 1 or 2 Elite developers do late era games development and push the envelope on Jaguar.

    They wanted this released at a time they were advising many other projects scrapped.

  7. Ross Sillifant

    It hasn’t been decided what, if anything, the traditional Joust game will be included with.

    There will be a “Joust 2000” of sorts – it’s actually called “Dactyl Joust” and it’ll be insanely f/un/ique.  I’m just beginning to pound that through; I’ll be going at it full intensity once I get everything I need to completely finish the CD pack-in.  

    Brian V. McGroarty
    Programmer
    High Voltage Software, Inc.

  8. Ross Sillifant

    HVS explaining why the original wouldn’t be included with the game:

    we did a demo to show Atari could get up and running on the Jag. Atari was impressed by the speed at which we got up on the system and also
    our “fee” of the demo and helped us land a contract with Trimark Interactive. This is our current main Jaguar contract and Joust
    classic will not be a part of it as far as I know.
    Also, the classic joust demo is simply that. A demo. It is not the full game
    and probably would require two-weeks to a month of coding to get working as the full game (coding in assembly is not a quick process).

    However, it does have the same “physics” and much of the “feel” of the original game. To do a “perfect” port would require the orginal source code and even then some little things like sound, minor graphics, and hidden glitches might not be duplicated.

    adisak pochanayon – jag programmer at high voltage software

  9. Ross Sillifant

    Any truth to the claim the original designer of Joust, John Newcomer hated what he saw of Dactyl Joust on Jaguar and hoped it would never see the light of day?

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