Xiden wrote:Much love is deserved to Sega and Epic Games for being to gracious to the retro and homebrew communities
Epic definitely. Sega not so much. I'm not sure how much luck Petter has had with current Sega employees but I've contacted several so far with no replies. Contrast that with the CEO of Epic who replied to me in 6 minutes flat. Former Sega employees like the one I'm in contact with are a lot more helpful.
Xiden wrote:Much love is deserved to Sega and Epic Games for being to gracious to the retro and homebrew communities
Epic definitely. Sega not so much. I'm not sure how much luck Petter has had with current Sega employees but I've contacted several so far with no replies. Contrast that with the CEO of Epic who replied to me in 6 minutes flat. Former Sega employees like the one I'm in contact with are a lot more helpful.
With Sega I was mostly happy about them letting people make all sorts of Sonic Homebrew without tossing a DMCA on people And saying the support us reviving DC games.
Absolutely. I wish there was a way for us to show our support and appreciation for the old team members for even trying to help, let alone be passionate about it.
Epic & Fam really respect and love their fan base, and if this pans out in anyway and gets some press, it'll show.
As far as UntealT not being a WinCe port. That is almost surprising. I know a few games were direct CE ports like 4x4 and Starlancer. But I guess given especially the memory restrictions of the dreamcast, SecretLevel might have gone to a customDCOS/AssemblyLanguage style code to make it run well.
Gotta say, if we are able to get even say 2 or 3 always on dedicated UT servers with some bots on them. It could act as a real hub to bring more 'always online' style of gameplay to the dreamcast. Something you could jump on anytime, join a game
For a few matches, and jump out. It's a holy grail, but it's possible ^_^
Xiden wrote:Much love is deserved to Sega and Epic Games for being to gracious to the retro and homebrew communities
Epic definitely. Sega not so much. I'm not sure how much luck Petter has had with current Sega employees but I've contacted several so far with no replies. Contrast that with the CEO of Epic who replied to me in 6 minutes flat. Former Sega employees like the one I'm in contact with are a lot more helpful.
With Sega I was mostly happy about them letting people make all sorts of Sonic Homebrew without tossing a DMCA on people And saying the support us reviving DC games.
They also are the only company i know of that officially endorses modding via the steam hub. Another reason for not commenting on dc stuff is because a number of the games are not made buy sega so they might get scared of copyright ect.
Regarding approval from Sega I dont think they care at all but modifying the servers (or rather improving) is a good safety meassure for avoiding problems from Sega, the publisher. But I doubt they want to destroy whats left of their true "fans" - its not like they actually have as many left considering Sega from the DC era doesnt exist today - but hopefully what they said recently about making up for their lack of innovation in the recent years will come true and possibly gain alot of their original fanbase back - they did actually give approval for Shenmue 3 and hopefully thats just the start. They hopefully figured new Sonic games is not the (only) way to go and wont get their huge fanbase back by only releasing pretty boring games with the easiest way to go at almost every new game they launch.
http://www.dcserv.org - NOT up to date.
Will be online for educational purposes, for now.
Xiden wrote:Much love is deserved to Sega and Epic Games for being to gracious to the retro and homebrew communities
Totally agree with this although they have promised to take a new turn, beginning with giving out the Shenmue 3 license.
Epic definitely. Sega not so much. I'm not sure how much luck Petter has had with current Sega employees but I've contacted several so far with no replies. Contrast that with the CEO of Epic who replied to me in 6 minutes flat. Former Sega employees like the one I'm in contact with are a lot more helpful.
I actually have friends that work there as well as former employees (..family) so I probably have had an advantage on help from them. But yeah they arent really very open to give out much other than technical details as Sega is very strict on this he said .
Former ones is a totally different thing, so spot on right there.
I also spoke alot to the guy who took over for Kosaka in the development of KAGE on the Dreamcast to what later became SNAP (SnapCOM they called it at that time). I nearly got access to their old CVS repo through him aswell, and that is a real shame I did not get to do in the end. But either way, there probably was not much left of the Dreamcast support and they really did massive changes to what was originally written in C/C++ (compiled on CentOS with gcc), but later ported to Java which is what you can download from the archives given out by LordNikon, available at dcserv.org.
Last edited by petter3k on Thu Oct 27, 2016 6:54 am, edited 1 time in total.
http://www.dcserv.org - NOT up to date.
Will be online for educational purposes, for now.
Thmanx wrote:
As far as UntealT not being a WinCe port. That is almost surprising. I know a few games were direct CE ports like 4x4 and Starlancer. But I guess given especially the memory restrictions of the dreamcast, SecretLevel might have gone to a customDCOS/AssemblyLanguage style code to make it run well.
Thing is, WinCE with their DirectPlay stack for online gaming does not support the BBA, aswell as yeah - performance is better by doing it from scratch (coding the engine that is), especially in regards to memory which the WinCE uses more of than what the Katana SDK allows you to. That SDK is really good, especially with their latest release.
I imagine they used the NextGenIP stack as other games do aswell, which allows support for broadband connections.
http://www.dcserv.org - NOT up to date.
Will be online for educational purposes, for now.
petter3k wrote:Regarding approval from Sega I dont think they care at all but modifying the servers (or rather improving) is a good safety meassure for avoiding problems from Sega, the publisher. But I doubt they want to destroy whats left of their true "fans" - its not like they actually have as many left considering Sega from the DC era doesnt exist today - but hopefully what they said recently about making up for their lack of innovation in the recent years will come true and possibly gain alot of their original fanbase back - they did actually give approval for Shenmue 3 and hopefully thats just the start. They hopefully figured new Sonic games is not the (only) way to go and wont get their huge fanbase back by only releasing pretty boring games with the easiest way to go at almost every new game they launch.
I found it remarkable that Sega is letting two amazing Sonic fans create Sonic Mania
Former Sega employees like the one I'm in contact with are a lot more helpful.
And saying the support us reviving DC games. 
