In just a moment, Yuji Naka understood a lot.
Lin Lixin's Legend story can be gleaned from flipping through magazines featuring prominent figures of the era.
Only at this moment did he truly grasp the extent of Lin Lixin's strength.
He just grabbed an ordinary development machine, and after a short while, he could easily pull out a demo that the other person couldn't understand.
It was a demo that made him clearly feel, "Maybe it really can work!"
"How... how did they do that?"
"Hmm? What do you mean?"
Lin Lixin took the coffee from Hayao Nakayama, took a casual sip, and looked at Yuji Naka with a smile.
"Little brat, even Carmack was completely under his thumb, so shocking Yuji Naka would be a piece of cake."
"----All features include high-speed scrolling, 3D parallax background scrolling, ground-hugging movement on sloped and curved surfaces, and high-performance optimizations----"
Yuji Naka spoke haltingly, counting on his fingers as if reciting a familiar list.
Don't be fooled by how simple this little demo is; it doesn't even have scene textures, everything is just the most monotonous colors.
piece.
But the more knowledgeable you are, the more you can see the extraordinary nature of this.
The saying goes, "The greatest truths are the simplest," and in Yuji Naka's eyes, this is the most terrifying basic skill.
Take, for example, the seemingly insignificant ground-hugging movement; it's not something that can be easily accomplished in a short period of time.
Hayao Nakayama clearly noticed the change in Yuji Naka's attitude and looked at the blue square on the screen that was moving rapidly and closely following the green line with a strange expression.
"The character's movements are grounded; isn't that a basic skill? What's there to question?"
"No----"
Yuji Naka shook his head vigorously. "If the game map were a flat, straight plane like Mario's, then that would be correct. But—this map has 360-degree loops and lots of sloping ramps."
As a programmer by training Yuji Naka knew very well what this meant.
In the case of a purely horizontal plane, to achieve motion, it is actually sufficient to consider the mechanical simulation in the two directions of the y-axis and the horizontal axis.
All forces are direct and straightforward. Even the left and right movements during the ascent actually involve forces acting along two separate axes.
In this standard 2D character controller, there is no concept of resultant force or oblique mechanics.
Not only is it impossible, but even if it were possible, it would be a huge overhead on performance, making it extremely uneconomical.
In Lin Lixin's view, everything he did was simply a complete physics engine created from scratch, achieving such map-fitting movement through real-time physics calculations.
This would have been absolutely impossible in the past.
No, even by today's standards, it's an extremely exaggerated technique.
Oh, you mean this?
Lin Lixin released the controller and then explained with a smile, "Actually, you're overthinking it. It's not calculated in real time, nor is it attached to the ground. It's—stuck to the ground."
"Clatter"
He pressed a key combination to open the reserved Debug mode backdoor.
The image on the screen immediately changed.
The original green lines on the ground have completely disappeared, replaced by a dense grid of dots.
The entire map, including the 360-degree loop and the slope, has been deconstructed into a long string of dense dots.
"Understood?"
"Well----"
Yuji Naka's gaze lingered for a moment before he suddenly looked enlightened, as if struck by a revelation.
Although he can't compare to someone like Lin Lixin, he's still a top-tier talent. Given all the hints he's received, there's really no reason why he can't understand.
"Are you saying that the map is predefined using discrete points, and when a character moves, they are actually snapped to the corresponding path based on the map data?"
That's exactly right.
Lin Lixin nodded.
This technology was one of the core technologies of the early Sonic.
Keep in mind that the original Sonic didn't eat this well; Sega didn't have a processor of Athena's caliber in that timeline.
MegaDrive uses a genuine Motorola 68000, but it's just a 16-bit processor.
To create a high-speed side-scrolling action game like Sonic in that kind of environment, it would be impossible without some ingenious techniques.
No matter the era, there will always be ruthless individuals who excel at carving out intricate details within limited functionalities.
Although the dot matrix curve technology seems to be much more complex than the WYSIWYG approach, it does indeed save a significant amount of CPU resources while ensuring motion accuracy in high-speed environments.
"But—won't that make map design incredibly complicated? We'd have to design the number of dots one by one." Duh, why not just use a continuous tool for level design, and then use a program to translate it into a discrete dot matrix?
"Ah----President Lin is right--"
Yuji Naka nodded repeatedly, standing right in front of Lin Lixin, not daring to utter a single word of dissent.
The shock this scene brought to Hayao Nakayama was far greater than the details he couldn't understand.
How could such an unruly genius, a guy who was arrogant even at Sega, be so submissive?
"Then what's with this background scroll?"
"Huh? This is just simple parallax scrolling, isn't it? Shigeru Miyamoto already used that in Super Mario."
In terms of background image scrolling, GAMENOVA was certainly not a pioneer.
Even when Super Mario were first introduced, the technology in this area was already close to mature.
Lin Lixin and his team first used this technology in the early arcade era with "1942".
That flight shooting game created a very good sense of three-dimensionality through parallax scrolling, which was one of the key factors that helped them make a name for themselves at the time.
"No, no, Chairman Lin, of course I know that, but yours is... a little different from theirs."
Yuji Naka frowned as he stared at the background image on the screen.
Due to time constraints, Lin Lixin did not create any complex backgrounds; he simply drew some simple shapes using pixels.
Clouds, distant mountains, forests, and the like.
But the most direct feeling it gave Yuji Naka was—three-dimensionality!
He stared intently at the background image on the screen, and after a long while, he suddenly realized the reason behind it.
"It's the number of layers! You've added more layers!"
Yes, if we're looking for something that sets this background apart from other works, this is probably the most direct difference.
In the past, parallax backgrounds typically only had one layer.
Even "1942" is simply a film that adds another layer of cloud cover on top of that.
It's not that developers are unwilling to add more layers, but rather it's purely a hardware limitation.
Sega's Mega Drive, which was touted as the last dance not long ago, only supports two native backgrounds at the hardware level.
But what Lin Lixin did—judging by appearances, it must have at least seven layers!
What does this mean?
In other words, with just a Kung-Fu Master of his hand, he easily surpassed Sega's hardware limits from last year.
This is undoubtedly partly due to the 32-bit ATHENA chip that GenesisNE0 used, but beyond that, it's probably mostly due to ingenious software techniques.
The entire background was divided into several layers.
From the trees and rocks in the foreground to the clouds and mountains in the distance.
"Yeah, that's pretty much it."
Lin Lixin nodded and continued, "However, I've made a small modification to this."
He picked up the controller again and made the character move again.
Yuji Naka had a new insight this time, and he stared intently at the movement of the background image.
This time, he actually managed to capture even more details that would otherwise have been difficult to notice.
"Dynamic multi-weighted scrolling -- no way --"
In traditional side-scrolling games, the scrolling of the background scroll is often basically synchronized with the movement of the character.
However, this is not the case in the simple demo created by Lin Lixin.
When the character begins to accelerate, the game dynamically calculates the speed of movement on each scroll.
The closer an object is to the player's background, the faster it moves, and vice versa.
Through such an extremely clever little trick, a 2D game composed of multiple planes was transformed into a visually deep 3D experience.
This effect complements the character's frighteningly high speed perfectly, instantly elevating the sense of space to an unprecedented level.
Even more alarming is that, even under these conditions, the overall performance overhead of the game still doesn't see much improvement.
It's as if Lin Lixin achieved all of this using those scraps of performance that would otherwise have been wasted.
Instead of writing a function specifically for it.
"Cocoa----"
Yuji Naka scratched his head, pointed at everything on the screen, and tried to say something, but then stammered and couldn't utter another word.
Holy crap, is this the fighting power of North America game developers?
Chairman Lin?
The Godfather Lin!
With this level of skill, coming to Sega to make games for Japan is just plain stupid – they got tired of playing those games and came here to play low-skill games.
The most urgent task now is to find a way to get myself on this ship.
This project—it absolutely must remain in AM8!
If I let the Godfather Lin escape because of my negligence, whether it's Yu Suzuki or the other members of the development team who snatch him away, I'm finished.
"I know what you're going to ask: how to quickly load long levels when memory is insufficient, right? Come on, look here, this is my invention, 'streaming loading'----"
"No----"
Yuji Naka wanted to admit defeat, but Lin Lixin, who was already caught up in showing off, didn't care about that anymore. He grabbed Yuji Naka and continued to talk to him about his many more clever ideas.
Lin Lixin talked non-stop for more than ten minutes, until Yuji Naka's brain was completely saturated and could no longer absorb any more information, before reluctantly stopping.
Yuji Naka stared blankly at Lin Lixin in front of him, his eyes glazed over.
After a long pause, he finally spoke quietly, "President Lin, I want to play a game!"