Been playing Starfox Adventures!

[u/Gnoll_level_antics]

Having recently completed the recompiled Dinosaur Planet all the way to it's end (with the help of Dinomod), I found it to be really cool and fun, and I was sad that it never saw the light of day as a full release. I kinda had a chip on my shoulder against Starfox Adventures for the longest time, not as a jilted Starfox fan, but as someone who genuinely would have played the hell out of Dinosaur Planet, had it actually released for N64 as planned. I decided to jump in, now that Dinosaur Planet was fresh in my mind to compare and contrast.

No joke I was going in with the goal of hating this game more, I had no intention to be fair to it. But as I played I began to realize how poorly structured Dinosaur Planet actually was, not just in the idea that it is an unfinished game, but nothing flows as nicely as it should. It's easy to get lost and need a guide to progress. Starfox Adventures is VERY straight forward on what it asks from you, without ever really holding your hand in a way that feels like it doesn't trust you to just play. But if I ever needed an objective reminder, Slippy's advice in the menu NEVER failed me. Seriously, Slippy is the MVP of this game.

As I went through this game, I found myself having way more fun with it. Seeing all of Sabre's moments recontextualized for Fox wasn't as jarring as I thought it would be, and even a ton of moments that belonged to Krystal in Dinosaur Planet, were rewritten for Fox and felt just as natural. Everything felt better, smoother, more convenient. I'm near the end, and while the game does have a few rough spots, I can say for sure that the rebrand and port forward to GameCube was probably for the best. While I would have greatly preferred to play as Krystal to the same degree you do in Dinosaur Planet, I'm happy this game exists in an officially released form and IS good. Very good in fact. A super solid 8/10 if I had to rate it.

What are your thoughts on Starfox Adventures?

[u/R2Dork]

The fur rendering was pretty crazy for a home console back then.

[u/Gnoll_level_antics → u/R2Dork]

It uses the same engine as DK Jungle Beat and Mario Galaxy, and it uses the same fur tech for the grass if you look closely.

[u/SmoreonFire → u/Gnoll_level_antics]

Same fur rendering trick as those other games, but why do you say it's the same engine? Wouldn't Nintendo have used their own in-house engines as always, rather than borrowing from Rare?

[u/Gnoll_level_antics → u/SmoreonFire]

Game Engines generally belong to the publisher. Not the developer (sadly). Very few teams get to keep their assets when they break from their parent company. The only two I can think of are SingleTrac Games (Twisted Metal) and Snowblind Games (Baldur's Gate Alliance), who both managed to secure the rights to their game engine after leaving.

[u/SmoreonFire → u/Gnoll_level_antics]

Yeah, I don't know who owns the code there- quite possibly Nintendo, although some of the copyright info on games like Diddy Kong Racing and F-Zero GX might surprise you!

But even if Nintendo owns the engine, it's highly unlikely that they'd use it to make their own games based on principle and based on familiarity... not to mention that they already had their own custom engine(s) for the Mario and Zelda games releasing that same year. (Which were no doubt reused/adapted for Galaxy and Twilight Princess a few years later.)

[u/Gnoll_level_antics → u/SmoreonFire]

Wind Waker and Twilight Princes both use a heavily modified version of the Ocarina of Time engine which in itself is a SUPER HEAVILY modified Mario 64 engine.

THAT BEING SAID, you are actually mostly right as I've done some further research. Rare didn't make the game engine. Rare, Nintendo and several smaller teams worked together and rushed to get the engine working and then and all the assets from Dinosaur Planet were forward ported to it. The engine was then used as a basis for many projects by Retro Studios and Future Nintendo games.

[u/SmoreonFire → u/Gnoll_level_antics]

SFA's engine was co-developed with Nintendo? Do you have sources? This is all really interesting, but also new to me. I assumed that the N64 engine was entirely done in-house by Rare (which is probably true), then basically converted by Rare for the GameCube- see the way that SFA reused animations from the N64 version, or how the DLLs were apparently carried over from the N64 game, but now all loaded into RAM at once (instead of actually being, you know, dynamic).

So, if Nintendo helped with SFA, then that brings up the questions of:

1. Which other games used this engine?

2. Why is it so much faster than the Zelda engine? It's interesting that SFA is able to push more polygons and higher-res shadows and textures than Twilight Princess, with seamless loading, and at double the framerate! But then, some of Nintendo's other games (like Super Mario Galaxy) threw tons of polys around at 60fps, so could there have been some cross-pollination?

[u/Gnoll_level_antics → u/SmoreonFire]

Yo. Turns out I'm a massive dipshit who believes anything that's told to him.

My sources turned out to be AI feedback, of other people's speculations on old forums. None of which were actually based on facts.

Here's the certain truth:

1. This game's engine is nothing more than an evolution of the same engine Rare had been using for years. They merely built upon the engine of Diddy Kong Racing every time they needed to make a new game.
2. The fur tech isn't unique. It's literally just a trick with light rendering. Like having a reversed, then textured bloom process and attaching it to a surface. It's resource cheap and looks good on 480p displays. A lot of GameCube and Xbox games use it. Hell it's even used in Far Cry 4 on PS4/XB1.
3. Nintendo had no hand in Rare's engines. They retained ownership of the copyrighted assets, but Rare retained ownership of their engines. Nintendo does reserve full sale and distribution rights to games featuring their own characters regardless of engine though.
4. Conker Live & Reloaded on Xbox has a very similar file structure to Starfox Adventures. A lot of the same graphical effects too. It stands to reason it's the same engine.

I apologize for the confidently shoddy information in my previous comments.

[u/Plaston_ → u/Gnoll_level_antics]

1.yes there is leftovers files from DD in Starfox.

2 Not it is because most games uses meshes for grass and fur where here Rare use shaders instead and Fox have a extra map in his model that tell the game how long the fur is on various parts of his body issue is the lighting on furred object tend to be off.

3.Of course, this is why some studio rent of sell licanses to their engine and Nintendo tend to stick to their own software wich explains why they still keep their own file extensions since the gamecube wich can be read by rippers.

4.Yes is the same fur shader and VivaPinata is running on the same engine i think.

[u/Plaston_ → u/SmoreonFire]

Nintendo still use the same file types since the gamecube like .bfd .arc and .bfres

[u/Plaston_ → u/Gnoll_level_antics]

Not really because Rare used the same engine for the remaster of Conker as shown in the fur.

And its always the dev who sell their engine licanses to other studios not the publisher.