I'm going to build a web page on 3do and one section is going to be about the M2 and what happened to if after it was bought from 3do. Do you have any pictures , links, for the M2? anything would be of help.

thanks

mrpeZ

Sorry but I really have zero.

The game we were making was Distrupor which is/was out for Playstation. The M2 version was planned to have 10 times the polygons and full 3d characters around 600 to 1500 polygons each but otherwise would have been about the same. We got the enemy 3d animation system working as well as our first level in memory but that's about as far as we got before the project was cancelled.

I'm sure there are many reasons the M2 never saw the light of day. From my personal point of view the people at 3DO just didn't have a clue. Instead of giving us a machine with a minimal OS and docs on the hardware they wanted to not give out hardware documentation and have programmers do all things through their OS routines. We showed them that this sucked. For example at the time you could display the famous COW model at a reasonably good frame rate but if you just tried to display 10 cubes with 6 polygons each it would run at only 10 frames a second. Instead of giving us hardware docs they wanted to add more features to the OS to try to make it work around some of it's slowness. note: they didn't want to make it faster they wanted to work around it's slowness by programming kludges and other useless things.

Because they spent so much time trying to write a really fancy OS they neglected what game programmers really needed. A fast C compiler, assembler and debugger. Compiling our game took 8 minutes.  If you changed 1 line of code you had to wait 3 minutes to see the changes on the screen because of how poor the tools were. As a comparison on CTR to compile the entire game at the end of the project took 4 minutes.  Changing 1 line of code and seeing the results probably took less than 30 seconds.

I'm sure there were lots of other reasons it failed but I tend to believe that had it been easy to write software for it then cool software would have appeared and driven the rest of the platform. It would have excited people. As it was all anybody ever saw was the COW.

-gregg