Astérix Speedrunning: general

yaro_69

sadek

martyste

I discovered something interesting about XXL 2 while testing performance and accuracy on PCSX 2 ( now better than ever )

martyste

Some areas like this one use a *separate render layer* for far away backgroung landscapes! Just like Valve games!

martyste

It's not always perfect, you can see this tower rendering in front of the red house, even tho the tower is meant to be further away.

martyste

this does allow the game to cheat with its rather short render distance, tho!

martyste

Here we can see the wall from the actual level disappearing and be replaced with the wall part of the background layer.

martyste

XXL 1 didn't implement that, and that's why it had ridiculous fog, to hide the render distance.

martyste

this scene also has you seeing almost too far. the render stop where the toilet target is, and the mountain is currently a background one, with less polygons. However the flat monkey texture will remain at closer distances

martyste

seen from this angle, part of the level geometry mountain renders but with the flat monkey now being forced to clip inside the mountain.

martyste

a bit more interesting, the deleted area behind the JP door has a little grass field in the level geometry but nothing at all in the background layer.

martyste

because they used the level geometry to always render ontop of the background, this let a mistake occur: we see this black area from the dark ghostly ride with barrels inside the mountain, and its black walls are part of the background layer. But because we walked away far enough for the level geometry cliff to start clipping away, we can see that this particular segment lacks a background cliff bit to hide the black walls of the next area.

martyste

or, the indoors background just pokes out of the background cliff, that's a possibility.

martyste

So yeah i bet disabling background rendering would really reveal how short the render distance truly is. They made the background separate likely for the same reason as Valve: allow backgrounds to extend very far from the camera, without causing Z-tearing due to lack of floating point precision. The background layer is actually very small, maybe a couple meters in length, and is stored out of bounds somewhere. If you somehow got Asterix to move to the background's location, while keeping the camera in the level's bounds, you could see a giant Asterix, but forced to render in the background, behind every level object.

martyste

Adrien confirmed my suspicions! This is for instance, the background layer for the Pirates Boss, just as tiny as I imagined.

Deleted User

should we add bash the all

Deleted User

to the discor

stinkek

Not sure we could have a lot of discussion around a game with repetitive gameplay and (as it seems) no fun skips. I tried co-op with someone new to it and they dropped it after Level 1

Deleted User

why not make a completly new asterix game

Deleted User

that is orignal

Deleted User

whitch astetrix uses time travel

#general