Dreamcast-Talk.com

Picassio never got beyond an in-engine scripted sequence. There was never a game, just the paper design and an art generated sequence.

I wrote the PC part of the engine for what was original Powerboat Racing 2, this get canned and replaced with Renegade Racer. It was in many ways over the top, as we had worked with (and been paid by) Intel on the tech which would become Pentium 3 (SSE etc.). So we did a bunch of demos for them, as part that we have tools to do quite complex scripted scenes. So Picassio was a pitch that used that tech to show in-game footage.

The Dreamcast engine was based on the PC (tho with a new custom transform engine rather than the SSE based pc one), I can't remember if we actually ran Picassio on Dreamcast, though we could have. The GC/PS2 was purely 'intention' from our boss Russell try to get a deal.
NVIDIA once said that we had the fastest engine at that time (we could push more polygons than there latest card could handle, over 1.2 Millions tris with lighting a second! Hilariously low compared to now ), so it was great for doing demos, as we could throw unoptimized assets and it would still run well. We did a few car driving demos, in a similar way. Dropped in high poly car assets (over 10K per car :O) using the Renegade Racer driving engine.

pcwzrd13 wrote:Got some more info about Picassio. Sadly it seems the "gameplay" footage on YouTube is actually just a scripted in-engine demo and there's no actual gameplay. This is as far as it got. It apparently used the same engine as Renegade Racers.

Picassio never got beyond an in-engine scripted sequence. There was never a game, just the paper design and an art generated sequence.

I wrote the PC part of the engine for what was original Powerboat Racing 2, this get canned and replaced with Renegade Racer. It was in many ways over the top, as we had worked with (and been paid by) Intel on the tech which would become Pentium 3 (SSE etc.). So we did a bunch of demos for them, as part that we have tools to do quite complex scripted scenes. So Picassio was a pitch that used that tech to show in-game footage.

The Dreamcast engine was based on the PC (tho with a new custom transform engine rather than the SSE based pc one), I can't remember if we actually ran Picassio on Dreamcast, though we could have. The GC/PS2 was purely 'intention' from our boss Russell try to get a deal.
NVIDIA once said that we had the fastest engine at that time (we could push more polygons than there latest card could handle, over 1.2 Millions tris with lighting a second! Hilariously low compared to now ), so it was great for doing demos, as we could throw unoptimized assets and it would still run well. We did a few car driving demos, in a similar way. Dropped in high poly car assets (over 10K per car :O) using the Renegade Racer driving engine.

cloofoofoo wrote:Do you plan to add quotes from devs you didnt talk to but had mentioned they had it running on dc? For example grand theft auto 3 with rockstar directly mentioned dc prototypes. Ssx with lead boss mentioning it was also on dreamcast. Or zone of the enders with lead programmer admiting first versions of prototypes were on dreamcast?

colgate wrote:3d motion controls for Skies?

I don't have that much to share on the topic other than very early on in the development of what became SSX we were prototyping in a PC environment initially thinking that it might make sense for the Dreamcast. However, when EA leadership was unable to make a deal with Sega that made sense for EA, we were told that we (as a company) would not be focusing on Dreamcast as a platform. At that point, we began to move our focus to the PS2, which I believe ended up being a better fit for what we were trying to do title.

pcwzrd13 wrote:Well I'm sure this is going to disappoint a few people but I'm now able to confirm that SSX was never playable on Dreamcast. While Dreamcast was the original target console very early on, prototyping was only done on PC. Console development didn't start until the switch to PS2.

From the executive producer:

I don't have that much to share on the topic other than very early on in the development of what became SSX we were prototyping in a PC environment initially thinking that it might make sense for the Dreamcast. However, when EA leadership was unable to make a deal with Sega that made sense for EA, we were told that we (as a company) would not be focusing on Dreamcast as a platform. At that point, we began to move our focus to the PS2, which I believe ended up being a better fit for what we were trying to do title.

dubcity wrote:EA didn't publish any games for the system so not surprising.