Banjo-Pilot Voxel,Unreleased Rom.

[fumanchu]

Released today is a special unreleased version of banjo pilot.

thanks to rareware central for another great unreleased game.

 

This one is pretty interesting, it's what could have been Banjo-Pilot.

Developer information:

 

Quote content originally posted by: Paul

There's not much of a story behind the actual project, apart from the obvious "it was cancelled". Up until that point, I remember development happening fairly smoothly and quickly.

 

Unfortunately, I cannot take any credit for the voxel engine (that was the amazing talent of Rob and his scary self-modifying code). The bits I do remember working on clearly were the frontend, object handling & collisions, and the HUD system.

 

The frontend wasn't as ambitious as Diddy Kong Pilot's (with its FMV & rotating light beam), but what I tried all along was to make the menu system as slick and flowing as possible. I remember even cutting down the size of the save file, so that the "saving" message was only displayed for the minimum allowed time. This frontend was then shoehorned into DKP for the final Banjo Pilot, since we knew exactly how the progress through our own game worked.

 

The object collisions all used vertical cylinders, which are extremely cheap on non-floating point hardware. I also kept a multiplexed sorted list, where it would sort all the objects (I think by X position) forwards on 1 update, then backwards on the other, doing one-way compares & swaps as necessary. This meant each object would only check against the adjacent one or two in the list, and stop as soon as it reached one that it wasn't touching. Every cycle counted!

 

The HUD needed to display large sprites, for which we basically did not have the remaining VRAM. So at Trevor's suggestion, he & I came up with a solution that divided the screen into 3 regions: upper (position & time), middle (message/icon to turn around + map) and lower (current item + lap counter), and rotated the sprite data in memory on 3 specific scanlines. This effectively gave the full quota of sprite memory allocated for the HUD, to each of the 3 regions.

 

The feedback from people who tried the game was that it looked a lot prettier, but still wasn't an enjoyable game to play. Perhaps that influenced the cancellation? One of the reasons we heard when it was cancelled was the low framerate, especially with multiple racers. However, considering the framerates of some of the N64 (and later Xbox 360) games, there are likely to have been other reasons behind the decision.

 

 

link

http://www.mediafire.com/?srcr18c82g2pzuh

 

 

[darknior]

Thanks a lot for it