Some cool 1.5 exclusive screenshots (**As seen on TV!**)

[biohazard_star]

Reference or coincidence? Same lab area, same hallway.

There are lots of neat parallels, probably as a result of them building over the original concept. Not really surprising, seeing as how retail is just an extension of 1.5's development. The two precincts alone share more than a dozen common elements between them (room placement, where events happen, etc.).

[Gemini]

Gemini, with your engine is it now possible to fit in quick knife in 1.5? I know D.Birkin said it was possible but they have very limited memory and could not be used because of all the other processes using up the memory. Does your engine free us space for more processes to be run and in turn, allow them to have this enabled?

Most likely possible. I use a 64 KB buffer to store weapon data and they usually end up filling barely half of that room. There should be enough room to cache more animations, extra packet pools, and the knife model itself.

Without any knowledge of coding, how bad was the 1.5 engine in direct comparison to your's? I know it was terrible and bloated, but I want to know more. I guess how much more memory ussage did you open up with your engine and is there a visible performance difference.

The main issue with older RE engines is how they access memory. RE1 has the worst strategy I've ever seen in any game that uses of sub-executables managed as overlays. 1.5 is a little better but not that much really. Both execute most structure accesses by loading pointers from memory, multiple times in a row because compilers do that if you're not careful. There are several other issues related to bigger chunks of data, animations mainly: player files contain a ton unnecessary animations that are used only in very specific cases. On top of that you get matrix calculations that are used to compute speed values in real time, an utter waste of CPU/GTE cycles (better if these values are pre-computed and stored as true speed values). Matrix compound calculations are fine as long as there aren't too many enemies in a scene, but when you need to animate 6-8 zombies per frame it gets quite intensive and lag is expected.

[Deathlygasm]

I always found that 3rd Birkin form to be so freaking intimidating idk why! Imagine if he ran, he'd be a much more formidable opponent. Anyone know if the 4th and final form of Birkin in 1.5 could run and what his other possible attacks were? All I can think of is that his tail would swing out and hit the player.

[Guest]

I always found that 3rd Birkin form to be so freaking intimidating

I've always felt this way also, as a kid his 3rd form gave me nightmares the first time that I fought him. If I remember correctly, my first encounter with Birkin's third form was on the vertical train that takes you to the lab. Did the same guy design all of Birkin's forms? Anybody know?

[Rombie]

The main issue with older RE engines is how they access memory. RE1 has the worst strategy I've ever seen in any game that uses of sub-executables managed as overlays. 1.5 is a little better but not that much really. Both execute most structure accesses by loading pointers from memory, multiple times in a row because compilers do that if you're not careful. There are several other issues related to bigger chunks of data, animations mainly: player files contain a ton unnecessary animations that are used only in very specific cases. On top of that you get matrix calculations that are used to compute speed values in real time, an utter waste of CPU/GTE cycles (better if these values are pre-computed and stored as true speed values). Matrix compound calculations are fine as long as there aren't too many enemies in a scene, but when you need to animate 6-8 zombies per frame it gets quite intensive and lag is expected.

You obviously know why that is though... but there are people here who probably don't get why this is the case (excuse this well duh statement I'm about to make). I mean obviously the team working on RE1 (and any teams at the time working on anything really) were doing stuff not done before and while there was official support for all developers from Sony, people were making up strategies on how to implement things well in advance of the finished hardware and with features mostly never dealt with before in gaming. It only begs to show that if there was any improvement between 1 and 1.5 (and again to 2 retail) that progress was being made. You have almost 20 years of tech advances, including the 10 from the industry work with the console directly, and less pressure in some ways to work with... so it allows you many choices never available to the devs much to your development benefit.

[Gemini]

Not quite, they had almost the same stuff that Sony (actually SN) delivered later with updated toolchains (IIRC RE1 was compiler with at least a 3.0 revision of the SDK, 1.5 with 3.6 or slightly earlier builds). These improve support for some features but they were ultimately going to work with whatever strategies the user provided (i.e. micro optimizations and shared link maps were the biggest differences). The problem isn't the toolchain because the main fault was caused by CAPCOM engineers not aware of what the binary would turn out. Lazy accesses and extra calculations are really the programmer's fault, then again the CAPCOM team for RE admitted they weren't that experienced at the time.

[Rombie]

^ That's more what I mean though. You're basically asking inexperienced people to work on projects not done to that level in the company before on equipment no one at the company knows any better. At the end the support tools provided by Sony to help and be the baseline release standard don't mean much if there isn't any real experience and knowledge to do it. Something you have much more of at this point.

[Gemini]

Yeah, I guess my previous works on straight assembly also helped me in finding optimal strategies for critical code. Bless you, romhacking.

[Deathlygasm]

Gemeni should take over the Team IGAS page

[News Bot]

I've always felt this way also, as a kid his 3rd form gave me nightmares the first time that I fought him. If I remember correctly, my first encounter with Birkin's third form was on the vertical train that takes you to the lab. Did the same guy design all of Birkin's forms? Anybody know?

Ryoji Shimogama.

[Carnivol]

Gemeni should take over the Team IGAS page

Wouldn't they first need to have a page for it to be "taken over"?

[Ultimacloud123]

Team Gemini!

[Unmasked]

Let's praise the lord...again

[Deathlygasm]

They have one on facebook called TEAM IGAS and they're constantly spammed by people who don't use this forum to release another update.

[SheyGrell]

Hello there.

I've been pointed in this direction from someone else on these forums, so it seems at this moment, I'll be saying something on here for a change
I've actually been following 1.5 for a little while now & have been very interested to see it all turns out. I did read however, that voice acting was quite possibly not going to be included because of various issues. Far be it from me to show up like I'm a reason to change your minds on that, since my service is provided to Gemini when the time comes, I thought I'd at least give this a mention.

As you might have seen from the thread 'Behind the Mask', I'm a voice actor that showed up with a video for RE2/1.5, thanks to the recommendation of another user. Since it seems that a lot of attention is being put into this project in particular right now, I'm gonna leave this here:

Please forgive the last section of talking to subscribers. It was for my YouTube channel, but doesn't exactly come across as a professional thing to show others >.>

Just please keep in mind that I'm not showing up to ask that I get to play as someone like Leon, just because I did a video on this. Nor am I insisting that I get to be a part of it. I'm simply bringing this up should you have any need for anyone in the future. Even then, you probably would have someone else in mind for this character in particular.

Since this was recorded a while ago now, I need to point out that I've gotten ahold of considerably better equipment since then. I'd bring up an example or two of this, but I feel it's not exactly the place to start advertising myself further than I already have.
One last thing; If there is any chance that you'd be interested, if you're planning to do something about voice acting anytime soon, then I have to mention in advance that I'm currently having hard drive problems. It's on the road to failing, screeching & scratching away at my frickin' ears, but am planning to get another one as soon as possible. If any kind of result comes from showing you this stuff, then I will try speeding up the process of fixing this problem.

Regardless of whether or not you have any need of me, I'll take this opportunity to say best of luck on the rest of 1.5 & it's looking better than ever The screenshots I saw of it in the official Playstation Mag. have stuck in my mind since I saw them all those years ago, so actually getting to play this is like... well, it's quite literally the stuff of legend.