Roareye wrote:Man, good shout. Beats of Rage is junk. I just got an SD Reader today that was pre-loaded with many BoR ports and none of them played very well. That may be an issue with implementation or something else, but it was slow and unresponsive.
Please don't conflate all the mods, ports and adaptations with the original. Beats of Rage wasn't perfect, but it was far from junk. Also, the very fact that you were running it from an SD card may have been at the root of the problems you experienced, because the SD card interface blocks while reading, while a CD/GD can do non-blocking reads. This greatly impacts performance.
Anyway, I only mentioned it in regards to software rendering. The tutorial mentions that the given method isn't even fast enough to render a single tiny sprite at 60 fps, while Beats of Rage (both the original and Neill Corlett's DC port) easily renders full scenes with large sprites and blending effects (provided it doesn't have to stream music from SD).
Roareye wrote:I'm not suggesting it's as simple to do, I'm aware site coding is much simpler in every way than coding a game.
However simplification tools for this have existed for twenty years. The Sonic community (Especially from SAGE last decade) often utilised such tools as GameMaker etc to create fan games. These weren't usually great, but the term of the idea was there already. Add to that engines such as Unity exist to do much the same in a wider indie space, there's clearly a market for this sorta thing.
I'm also interested in the TitanIDE being made to do something similar specifically for DC, though I think it's too simplistic atm for it's own good. It's a bit limiting. But again, the idea is there.
But again, I can understand that even if a decent enough program were to exist, it wouldn't be as efficient as coding yourself. As you're marked as a Developer, I guess that's why simplifying the process by reducing the code efficiency doesn't appeal to you, and that's understandable.
I am well aware of the existence and the long history of GameMaker, Unity and other engines. I am in no way opposed to them, nor would I ever claim that every game should be programmed from scratch. In fact, given the amount of work involved in writing a modern-day game engine, it had long ago occurred to me that pre-built ones will in time become ubiquitous, and custom-made ones extremely rare. I wasn't denying the possibility of having a similar product for the Dreamcast either.
My only point was exactly what I said: that one part of your statement did not necessarily follow from the other. It's not about simplicity versus complexity - the considerations in game engine development are just completely different from those that apply to website builders. I should know, I've worked in both fields and have built several game engines and website builders from scratch.
I hope this clarifies my intentions. In any case, I wish you good luck with your endeavours.