NEWS: Supermodel WIP Update (2012/01/30)

I've been getting a bit worn out from having to attend endless late night cocktail parties at lingerie models' condos. Being an emulator developer is a tough life! I decided to take a little break from mingling with the gliteratti and whipped up something shiny and sparkly for Supermodel. The diffuse and ambient lighting model has been tweaked resulting in improved colors. Shadows in Daytona USA 2 that were previously barely visible are now very prominent.



Taking inspiration from my friend Kim's shiny dress, I figured out how to implement very preliminary specular lighting, which makes vehicles and metallic background objects appear shinier (as on the real Model 3 hardware). Below are three Youtube videos demonstrating the new lighting effects. Specular highlights are particularly prominent in Scud Race and the Daytona USA 2 car selection screen. Also note that the 3D Sega Saturn logo on Scud Race's daytime beginner course now appears with a prominent specular highlight and glint as the sign rotates. The lighting is far from being correct but it's a positive start!



Our devoted fan nuexzz.. discovered the missing selection screen graphics in Daytona 2 by disabling the 3D graphics. I've partly re-worked the 2D rendering engine to support layer priorities. Not all possible settings are known yet but I was able to get it working for most of the games I've looked at so far. The code currently in SVN needs to be optimized and cleaned up.



Among other things, the HUD in Star Wars Trilogy no longer disappears behind 3D objects, the small Sega logo is now positioned correctly on Scud Race's attract mode sequence, and layers that are supposed to obscure the 3D graphics in Virtua Fighter 3 now correctly do so.









Last but not least, Nik has managed to squeeze a little more performance out of the rendering engine (a 5-10% increase in the frame rate) when running in multi-threaded mode.

News Source: Here