Do the original Silicon Graphics models for Killer Instinct Classic still exist anywhere in some form?
To clarify, I know the company has shifted around quite a lot since then, and I think the original workstations used to produce the 3d models were rented, or something like that. So, are those models still saved somewhere? I would kill for some high res images of orchid from the original model. If so, I would love to see these models, or any renders or anything you could come up with. It’s a question that has been bothering me for years, since i do 3d modeling and have for over a decade now, I know the importance of each polygon. For history’s sake if nothing else, I really hope there is access to this media, because out of all multimedia, KI Classic is my absolute favorite. First time posting so, I apologize if I put this in the wrong section or something, maybe a moderator can assist with that? Thank you for your time! See you on KI Classic online (same gamertag).
Honestly the official devs don’t really come around here anymore and ‘13 was made by a completely different company so I doubt they’ed be able to answer. You’ed be more likely to get an answer asking Rare directly.
Awesome. Thank you!
According to an interview with someone from Code Mystics, the original source code for KI1/2 is gone.
The Xbox One is well-suited to modern gaming needs… you can do a lot at once with 10 cores, but classic games are designed in a different mind set. In the case of KI, it’s basically one CPU doing all the work, so there’s virtually no opportunity to take advantage of the multicore setup of the Xbox One. Now, you might rightly say that even one core of the Xbox One can outperform a 20-year-old CPU. The thing is, though, emulation is not a port. Emulation simulates the original hardware of the old system and then that simulation runs the original code. We have to do this because the source code was long gone and the original binary code is literally a foreign language to the new CPU. That simulation can easily demand 10x or 20x the CPU power to get the same performance as the original game.
I’m of the opinion that the 3D assets are bodied as well. As someone who has gone through efforts to reverse engineer the arcade ROM for educational and personal reasons, you can only hope to extract the converted sprites of the characters. The alternative would be emulating or getting your hands on IRIX (the OS that ran on SGI machines) load up the 3D software and recreate the models based on whatever is available to reference (purist version of using modern software).
That’s an incredibly informative reply, thank you! I’ve been making models for games for 12+ years now, so worse comes to worst, I’ll just get my hands dirty. I wonder if some form of photogrammetry might assist with that, on the animation of them spinning around in character select.