From the AAMA Gala: Sega's Operation GHOST, Dirty Drivin', Flight Control FX

From the AAMA Gala: Sega’s Operation GHOST, Dirty Drivin’, Flight Control FX

Arcadian Aug 30, 2011 19

We had a little more to share from the AAMA Gala that took place a short time ago in Lincolnshire, IL and as promised, here you are.

First is Sega’s latest light-gun shooter Operation G.H.O.S.T., which we have already mentioned as being a sequel to the original GHOST Squad and sporting features such as a unique multi-colored LED targetting system and a speaker in the scope of the gun that issues voice commands to the player. This is not the final release version of the game so changes could be made to it by that time – one thing I noticed right off the bat is that the gun holsters in these pictures does differ from the image shown recently on Sega’s Amusement website. I actually like this design better, it seems to be a better way of holding the guns in place. Of course there is no system that will guarantee an operator that people won’t leave the guns lying on the floor (I’ve lost track of how many times I pick guns up from various games I have) but the easier it is for people to holster them in the first place, the better. Also you heard it here first : I have confirmed with Sega that Operation G.H.O.S.T. runs on Sega’s ~~RingEdge~~ RingWide hardware. Apologies for the confusion as I was given that information from a high-up source in Sega but I’ve confirmed with several sources within Sega that it is in fact RingWide.

Sega also had some other products at the show they brought back to show off.

This also was the event where Raw Thrills’/Specular Interactives Dirty Drivin’ was announced, as we discussed (picture via AAMA)

Next up was the latest offering by Adrenaline Amusements, Flight Control FX. This is scheduled for a November release, I actually didn’t expect to see this until IAAPA. As a brief catch-up in case you missed this, it’s the big screen version of a popular game which is found on some smartphones and other touch screen devices like the iPad. (Picture via AAMA)

Also don’t forget to check out what Namco had there, in case you haven’t seen it already, which included new cabinets for Pac-Man Battle Royale and Deadstorm Pirates.

[AAMA Website]

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Arcadian

Website: https://arcadeheroes.com

I'm a lifelong fan of video games and I have been operating my own arcade, Arcade Galactic in West Valley City, Utah since 2008. Soft spots in my heart for Atari, Sega, and Nintendo.

19 comments

Arcades4ever August 30, 2011 at 8:35 am

Finally a game that uses the ringedge other than the ringwide. It doesn’t matter so much that the ringwide is used for game that require less power like sega giant tetris but for a game like operation ghost ai think it’s essential so that it gives the game more depth and realism and a real sence of adventure, not unlike what they did with lets go island and sega golden gun

editor August 30, 2011 at 11:41 am

dont get too excited the replacement to the RingEdge is planned to be on the floor at JAMMA soon!

arcadehero August 30, 2011 at 11:51 am

Hehe, of course, just as Edge finally gets around to landing here. But if they have something new which will blow everyone’s socks off, then that is good news.

Arcades4ever August 30, 2011 at 3:21 pm

NOOO WAAAAAY????!!!!!! They’re anouncing another new arcade system this year? But the ringedge and ringwide are barely just 2 years old, what a waste of investment in arcade hardware only to be given the boot, OMG even the lingbergh lasted longer than ringedge and ringwide. I wonder if they’re making much more powerful hardware so that it will be used for arcade games that adapt to 3D monitor use that are glasses free? I guess it does take alot of power for a 3D game like on the 3DS from what I’ve heard and if thats the reason then I think thats a good move for the arcade industry, do you know when they plan to show off the hardware with the specs and games that are in development for the system arcadeheroes?

arcadehero August 30, 2011 at 9:05 pm

As Editor mentioned, it will be shown at JAMMA next month in two weeks from the 15th – 17th (which just made me realize that I will once again have to be ready to debunk rumors that it’s a new Sega game console in development, which happens every time Sega releases new arcade hardware). I don’t know what new games they might show but we should know pretty soon, Taito has some new games they are announcing so Sega will be soon.

Hikaru August 31, 2011 at 12:14 pm

SegaLeaks has the world exclusive scoop –

http://s3gal3aks.wordpress.com/

It shall be capable of real time Ray Tracing, and there will be a console counterpart scheduled for debut in time for holiday season 2012.

arcadehero August 31, 2011 at 4:53 pm

Real-time raytracing was a big thing maybe 10 years ago if a console could do it (like the failed NUON platform). But I’ve seen demos of it being done today and it’s ok but any decent PC can do that now. It’s also rare to see anyone bother to create a game using the technique despite the hardware being out there to do such a thing.

As for the console counterpart, this rumor has been pushed by Sega fanboys ever since the Dreamcast died for every piece of arcade hardware they have developed. It happened with Lindbergh and it happened with RingWide/RingEdge and all of the rumors about a console release turned out to be a complete dream. The exact same thing will happen this time as well so I think that fans would be better served by not getting themselves excited/hyped up for DC2 until Sega actually says they are doing so. With the economy worldwide still being in the crapper, I fail to see how 2012 would be a great time to spring yet another console onto the marketplace, an endeavor that takes billions of dollars to pull off successfully.

Opcon August 31, 2011 at 10:02 pm

Sorry but these shots do not look very ray traced to me:

http://www.zax.com.au/operation_ghost.html

Also SEGA ships most of their cabinets using Windows XP embedded. So they use either OpenGl or DirectX for their graphics. None of which support real time ray tracing. I suppose they could throw all that out and use nVidias CUDA technology to achieve this. But to what end? Most people wouldn’t know the difference.

Also making a custom board just for the arcades is equally crazy. It makes no sense just to have the buzzword “ray tracing” on the list.

It is pointless for me to discuss the console rumor. The “ray tracing” rumor is enough of a pipe dream that we can leave it at that……

arcadehero September 1, 2011 at 6:31 am

Opcon,

Thanks for sharing that link, those are the first direct shots of OG I’ve seen! Although it won’t be using the new arcade board the site linked above is going on about, it uses RingEdge.

I for one fully agree with you though – seeing “raytracing” as a part of the rumor raises a red flag for me as that was hyped up years ago, mostly in the 90s but I’ve seen modern examples of it and compared to what they can do with shaders these days, it’s pretty much a pointless technique as it has to use up massive amounts of processing power to achieve something you can do using shaders. Play any DirectX11 game on PC and it will probably look better than what raytracing can do anyways.

Hikaru September 1, 2011 at 9:11 am

Rasterization cannot compete with Ray Tracing, as the following demonstration proves –

http://s3gal3aks.wordpress.com/2011/08/21/a-sneak-peak-at-the-technology-powering-segas-next-console/

Opcon September 1, 2011 at 12:19 pm

Hikaru, you just made my point with this demo…..

That demo shows absolutely NOTHING….. as with all ray tracing demos……. There is also one I saw of Quake 4 being rendered with ray tracing and it looked WORSE than the original game. They had some beefy hardware and all they could get was 30 fps and it still looked WORSE than the original game.

I have YET to see a ray tracing demo that shows something that drops people’s jaws at interactive frame rates. Your link proves the point….. Look how small the viewing window is and look at the horrible frame rate….

Ray tracing is NOT the future. Assume commercial quality video cards arrive on the scene that support ray tracing at 1080p at 60 frames per second (Let’s not EVEN begin to talk about price).

Here is what developers will do: “Look at how many MORE polygons and lights we can push with this new card if we use rasterization instead of ray tracing”

They will ditch ray tracing on the new card in favor of using the extra horse power on the card to do rasterization and push more polys and lights to the scene. The consumer will not know the difference. There are too many tricks that developers can use to convincingly fake the effects you will see in ray tracing.

Ray tracing is a losing proposition no matter how you slice it. The only way it would succeed is if nVidia and ATI and Microsoft and the OpenGL standards comity drops total support for rasterization and forces ray tracing down everyone’s throat.

This is unlikely……..

Hikaru September 1, 2011 at 2:10 pm

—————————-
“Here is what developers will do: “Look at how many MORE polygons and lights we can push with this new card if we use rasterization instead of ray tracing”

They will ditch ray tracing on the new card in favor of using the extra horse power on the card to do rasterization and push more polys and lights to the scene.”
——————————–
It’s not the developers that make the decisions on what to ditch and what to support. That is down to the execs.

If you watch the above video again you shall hear the man from Caustic Graphics state that using Ray Tracing over Rasterization decreases development costs by up to one third.

The reason for this is down to the fact that with Rasterization you require a team of individuals to do manually what is automated with Ray Tracing.

This equates to savings of tens of millions of dollars at the end of any given project.

When the execs at the Top 30 major publishers are crunching their numbers on their calculators, take a guess who they’re going to support.

arcadehero September 1, 2011 at 2:11 pm

That’s the best point to be made about raytracing, any time you hear about it these days – it can be done already (in fact I have a game for the Atari Jaguar that uses the technique but only in menus) so if it’s such a great graphics technique, why don’t we have major games using it all the time? We don’t, all we get are demos. The NUON console also could do full-time raytracing but the one game that would use the technique called aMaze didn’t look leaps and bounds ahead of other techniques. I saw the Quake demo you mention Opcon – I saw one for Wolfenstein and another for Enemy Territories Quake Wars but these were afterthoughts and demos, the games were not shipped using procedurally raytraced content.

In reality the future seems to be leaning towards voxels and different techniques using those like sparse voxel octrees. Not that voxels are perfect either but at least different ways of using them have been used in a number of major games. I’ve even seen a few arcade titles begin to use things like volumetric textures.

Most likely the new Sega arcade board will be yet another PC with a special I/O board, specialized for stereoscopic 3D content as Sega has already indicated that non-glasses 3D is the direction they are headed in, with games like Let’s Go Island 3D. I highly, highly doubt it will be anything like Model I or NAOMI hardware or any of the old Sega stuff. Even if it is, at the end of the day what will really matter is whether Sega can produce fun games which make the most of that hardware. If not, then it won’t matter what’s under the hood.

Hikaru September 2, 2011 at 5:18 am

John Carmack himself states that Ray Tracing will win the rendering wars –

Forward to 11:20 –

RJAY63 September 1, 2011 at 11:25 am

This whole ‘s3gal3aks’ thing is a well known hoax site.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=segaleaks+hoax&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=

arcadehero September 1, 2011 at 12:03 pm

Yep, this “Zach Morris” was the moron pushing the Ringedge console garbage last time. At least this new site of his is a good laugh, although it’s sad at the same time that there are a few out there who actually believe the tripe. But last time the proclamation was that Sonic 4 was going to be a launch title for the home system, I see that has worked out well! Now the tune is Mortal Kombat will be the next thing…whatever.

Arcade Heroes