Today we're shining the Sega Dreamcast homebrew spotlight on an all-original new 3D tactics game, "Gael Force," which is being developed exclusively for our favorite little white box of Dreams.
Developer, spacecaptain2, has been teasing the hell out of us in the DC development Discord server with updates, promising to bring us a full tactical combat system along with deep inventory management mechanics, taking place in an immersive 3D world.
He also wanted me to let you guys know that he's looking for people who are interested in contributing art, music, and gameplay testing for the project, so let me know, or go tag him in the Simulant DC dev Discord server if you're interested!
I'm also stoked to say that he's using my SH4ZAM accelerated vector math library for SH4 to get his gainz and buttery smooth performance! Once I heard he was interested in per-vertex dynamic lighting, I shared with him how to implement the same high-performance vectorization of the diffuse lighting calculations that we used in our GTA3 and VC ports.
For you fellow nerds and gainz enthusiasts out there, it's essentially leveraging SH4ZAM's XMTRX API to calculate the diffuse light intensities of 4 light sources onto the surface normal of a vertex in parallel, by loading the XMTRX FP register back-bank with the light directions of 4 light sources as 4 4D row vectors, then transforming the the 4D surface normal vector by them with a single instruction, FTRV, which will achieve 4 dot products in parallel in 7 clock cycles!
Anyway, stay tuned for more updates as spacecaptain2 continues cooking!