Gabriele Purpura

Huge framerate gains are coming to Halo: Dreamcast Evolved, with no loss in graphical fidelity. I’ve been making games as a side hobby for about 26 years now. From DarkBASIC to Unreal Engine, I’ve done a lot of devving, and I have to say, the Dreamcast might be my favourite platform I’ve ever developed on. I think I’m in love with the SH-4. The Dreamcast never came close to realising its true graphical potential. When you cut out needless waste, your game can start competing with its bigger siblings from that console generation. Sure, there’s no hardware bloom, and none of the tricks the Xbox and GCN have (though you could fake some of it in software), but you can still get some very pretty graphics. So far, I think Halo on the default “Balanced” preset is one of the better-looking Dreamcast games, and it runs better than most of them too. Sonic Adventure ran horribly, was super buggy, and, well, it hasn’t aged gracefully (I still love it). It’s crazy to think what could have been. Honestly, without @falco_girgis’s SH4ZAM and KallistiOS, I’m not sure we’d even be talking about GTA3/VC, Halo, and RE4 on our creamy white console. Right now I’m working through the big blockers: the lifepod interior (why is it 7k triangles???), the control room screen (2,400???), and the other vehicles. I’m drastically cutting polygon counts, and you genuinely can’t tell the difference unless you pull both models up side by side and go, “Ah yes, that one corner is slightly different when I zoom in.” On Xbox, the designers could get away without optimising their geometry because the hardware handled it all like a champ. The Downed Pelican went from 5,429 vertices to 2,099. They look nearly identical. I’m not telling you which one is which in this image. 👀