random historical note about how the same engines can stare you right in the face when they aren't publicized:
Krazy Ivan,
Colony Wars and
Colony Wars: Vengeance all use the same engine built originally for
Ivan with the
Colony Wars games just adding new stuff piled on top
a new team was formed to do the third
Colony Wars game,
Red Sun, they started over because it was so patched together and held together with coding duct tape with zero useful documentation and much of the lower level structure was referring to
Krazy Ivan systems but the actual functions had been replaced by new code for
Colony Wars yet the old stuff was never stripped out and the functions would run through the
Ivan code before hitting the CPU even though the game didn't use them, they found they couldn't even reuse the memory card code separately
all sorts of timings in the code for the physics especially relied on it going through these long chains of commands to where rewriting the code to be simpler made the framerate
worse and they couldn't just stick stuff back in, management assumed that since they already had an engine up and running that the game needed
less time, when they wound up spending six months constructing a new engine from scratch
G-Police's infamous two foot draw distance was similarly related to some Psygnosis code spaghetti, that's why the whole outline drawing "solution" in the second game actually doesn't help because it's still stuck within the same draw distance limitation...the PC version in theory shouldn't have limitations but the engine is such that it basically has the same problem, no idea if there were fan fixes to this
I have a feeling
Wipeout 3's similarly tossing out everything and starting over rather than just building on top of
XL could be a similar situation but I do not have any documentation on that it just fits timewise and sure seems like it
a lot of this I think relates to how Sony wanted to dump Psygnosis but at the last second retained ownership of it, they had massively proliferated studios and needed to give them something to do so they'd give them new games in established series while the older studios started new IPs, Sony eventually just absorbed the company and killed off a lot of the extra studios... related to that, Sony bought Psygnosis for like $25 million as it was gearing up for the PS1, it was getting offers of like $300 million to sell it off, it wasn't anything related to performance either, it was infighting between management
random and most important fact of all, the custom games played at the start of
Nick Arcade to decide which team went first, half were developed by Psygnosis
