WipEout reverse engineering


Klumpen

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Nice Browser fun, at least in Firefox.  :D
Never was into Wipeout but I like to see such stuff and how these games were done. Do the original tracks missing parts or was the geometry that reduced back then to show only what's just visible? There are still parts missing in the fly-through, how was this displayed in the actual game?
 
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I'm not sure exactly what you mean, as I've only browsed the links so far, but racers of that era used the fact you could only see one face of everything to the extreme.  In most 3D apps (like a space shooter, for example) you need to load in the object meshes, rotate them, identify the occluded faces on the reverse of them, place the unoccluded vertices, scale them, and render everything.  In a linear racer, every object is placed in the scene to begin with and immovable, and you don't have to eliminate any reversed faces, you just simply don't model them to begin with.  To draw a frame in a linear racer, you just load the most distance slice, place it, render it, then repeat all the way up to the camera and then draw the player's car/floaty wipeout ship.  No eliminated faces, no occustions, no z-sorting - the pre hardware PC 3D-graphics era was full of games like this because it was cheap to do when you have to crank everything on the CPU.  I don't know the PS1 architecture well, but I assume some of those cost avoidance measures worked there as well.
 
Neat project !
I really enjoyed PS1's WIpeout inertia. Hope to see an open source port one day.
 
I'm not sure exactly what you mean, as I've only browsed the links so far, but racers of that era used the fact you could only see one face of everything to the extreme.  In most 3D apps (like a space shooter, for example) you need to load in the object meshes, rotate them, identify the occluded faces on the reverse of them, place the unoccluded vertices, scale them, and render everything.  In a linear racer, every object is placed in the scene to begin with and immovable, and you don't have to eliminate any reversed faces, you just simply don't model them to begin with.  To draw a frame in a linear racer, you just load the most distance slice, place it, render it, then repeat all the way up to the camera and then draw the player's car/floaty wipeout ship.  No eliminated faces, no occustions, no z-sorting - the pre hardware PC 3D-graphics era was full of games like this because it was cheap to do when you have to crank everything on the CPU.  I don't know the PS1 architecture well, but I assume some of those cost avoidance measures worked there as well.

Indeed they seemed to used "one sided" surfaces as often as possible, plus simple Bitmaps of course (the two Buddah statues in one of the tracks, I first thought they were 3D) but the "composing" was done pretty nicely, no "wasted" surfaces and nothing was there what's not really needed. I also found out what's confused me at first: the 3D Editor draws the entire track at once (of course), so you see things in flyby mode you should not see in the distance like parts of the track from the wrong side etc. On the PSX, I'm sure the view distance was much shorter and the track was not drawn in one single piece.
 
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Certainly the draw distance in the first Wipeout game was quite short on the Playstation.  They got around that most of the time by making the tracks really tight and twisty.
 
Certainly the draw distance in the first Wipeout game was quite short on the Playstation.  They got around that most of the time by making the tracks really tight and twisty.

..which in turn made it so ridiculously difficult.

BTW: The original design document has been released after 20 years:
http://www.cremademono.com/WipeoutDesignDocument.pdf
 
 
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