SEGARPGFAN this week released his performance improvement hack for SEGA Touring Car Championship, which greatly improves the overall performance in all five tracks, especially in Time Trial mode, resulting in a much more optimized port of STCC on Saturn hardware.
He also added support for his previously released STCC Online Ghost Car Portal, which allows you to use your NetLink or Xband Saturn modem to upload active ghost cars to a leaderboard site, as well as download other players’ ghost cars to race against. The site now features a Challenge Lobby, which lets players create and participate in events to get in their fastest ghost car before the set time runs out.
Head over to the SHIRO! Discord to get the latest build, as well as any additional information from the saturn_online chat.
Brick Wall Town
SEGARPGFAN explained to SHIRO! why he wanted to make this hack in the first place:
“Tuning Sega Touring Car Championship is a labor of love for me. I think it’s a fantastic game that gets maligned for two reasons — its framerate and its controls. The first is a fair criticism and the second is because people approach it wrong. SaturnDave already has a good article on how people approach the game so I won’t expand on that. The framerate is one that’s nagged at me since Trekkies demonstrated a significant performance boost by turning off textures and running in wireframe mode.
My first approach with the game was actually going to be a completely flat shaded game like Virtua Racing. Flat shading, in other words just rendering a polygon as solid filled color instead of a texture, is significantly cheaper for the Saturn hardware to do. But as I went along, I realized that there was some real potential for fine tuning the textured version of the game and making some big performance gains.”
Grünwalt Circuit
SEGARPGFAN continued:
“At a high level, what this performance mod does is:
- Selectively downscale some textures across the game’s three detail levels (yes it has an LOD system!).
- Prevent polygons you can never see from rendering.
- Selectively convert polygons from textured to flat shaded.
This is done with a combination of global changes and per-polygon changes. Every texture change, every polygon rendering change, I’ve hand-picked by playing the courses ad nauseum while nitpicking the visuals and performance.
To make these changes, I’ve enlisted AI to build a set of tools. The tools unpack the course model files and extract the textures. I can then make texture edits that can be re-packed into the files. Beyond that, the re-packing tool can take in lists of individual polygon changes, like which polygons to delete, render flat, which flat color to use, or use a different texture entirely and so on.”
Country Circuit
“In order to effectively make these fine-grained decisions,” SEGARPGFAN said, “it became apparent I needed a way to identify specific course polygons. To facilitate this, another tool was created for viewing the course models in 3D space. This tool is actually public if anyone wants to see how the courses are made up. I used it to manually align every section of every course (very time consuming) and then to generate the polygon change lists for the re-packing tool.”
The model viewer can be found here.
“This is still a work in progress and my love of this game coupled with my mild perfectionism means I might never be completely happy,” he said.
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