OutRun: I started porting it!

[reassembler]

Originally Posted by reassembler

What's next?
- Off-Road Effects
- Smoke When Accelerating / Cornering / Changing Gear
- Crashing Into Stuff

Pleased to say that the above is all now complete.

OutRun's crash code alone is over 1,300 lines of assembler and uses multiple data animation formats - it's pretty meaty. If you're familiar with OutRun, you'll know there are at least four different ways to crash:

1/ Slow motion crash, where the car gently rises into the air
2/ Mid speed crash, where the car spins 360
3/ Fast Crash which flips the passengers out into the landscape
4/ Super fast crash where the car sprite 'zooms' towards and fills the screen.

There are also multiple animation sequences played between the passengers at random - finger pointing, the woman hitting the man etc.

Had to do some wild stuff to get it working with my current crop of optimizations.

In terms of the playable game, the only thing left to do now is implement traffic... but there's a lot more beyond that in terms of scoring, HUD, optimizations and so forth.

I'm moderately confident I'll have something playable on the 030 once I get my chainsaw out. But let's see.

[gimbal]

chainsaw-driven development, I like it.

[kriz]

Epic work, thanks for the updates @reassembler!!

[Marchie]

Simply amazing, keep it up!

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by reassembler

Pleased to say that the above is all now complete.

OutRun's crash code alone is over 1,300 lines of assembler and uses multiple data animation formats - it's pretty meaty. If you're familiar with OutRun, you'll know there are at least four different ways to crash:

1/ Slow motion crash, where the car gently rises into the air
2/ Mid speed crash, where the car spins 360
3/ Fast Crash which flips the passengers out into the landscape
4/ Super fast crash where the car sprite 'zooms' towards and fills the screen.

There are also multiple animation sequences played between the passengers at random - finger pointing, the woman hitting the man etc.

Had to do some wild stuff to get it working with my current crop of optimizations.

In terms of the playable game, the only thing left to do now is implement traffic... but there's a lot more beyond that in terms of scoring, HUD, optimizations and so forth.

I'm moderately confident I'll have something playable on the 030 once I get my chainsaw out. But let's see.

Thanks, what a great job you did here !

[alexh]

Impressive. Very Impressive.

[mrupp]

Originally Posted by reassembler

Had to do some wild stuff to get it working with my current crop of optimizations.

That sounds very interesting, tell us more about the wild stuff, please!
And maybe post a small video? Please?

Screenshots look amazing, excellent work, keep it up!

[mrupp]

Ahhh... and while I'm at it... it's probably a bit early to ask for this already, but maybe you could put the following to the veeery bottom of your todo list:

First an easy one (I guess):
- It would be great to be able to enter a highscore name by keyboard.

Now, second:
- There's this small but great feature from the Lotus games that I always missed when playing OutRun: once the time runs out, OutRun just stops and it's game over while with Lotus the car seems to run out of fuel and goes on for just a little bit more while getting slower and eventually come to a stop but quite often this JUST did the trick to reach a checkpoint and that was always a great cheering moment in the game.
Maybe we could have this as an option for OutRun, as well?

Sorry again for asking for this already...

[derSammler]

Maybe we could have this as an option for OutRun, as well?

What's the point of that? This "feature", as you call it, would be a huge change in gameplay. If you run out of time, you are game over - as with most arcade games. That's the whole challenge behind.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by derSammler

What's the point of that? This "feature", as you call it, would be a huge change in gameplay. If you run out of time, you are game over - as with most arcade games. That's the whole challenge behind.

From one side i hear him, that feature was to make you rage insert coins to try again - which you don't need at home

[Angus]

I agree it was a cool feature, and I'm sure it was featured in a few games to good effect, but I think Reassembler is moving Heaven and Earth doing his thing converting Outrun, and that's surely more than enough to think about at the moment. Maybe if and when he puts out a final demo, it would be a time for feedback.
Personally, I'm hoping he can interface the game with Gunship 2000, so we can find out if a Testerossa can outrun Hellfire missiles.

[reassembler]

Alright, you asked for it - a video:

[ Show youtube player ]

I'm not going to go wild implementing 'new' features in the Amiga version. I've really done that as part of CannonBall (modern machines) and OutRun Enhanced (runs on Arcade hardware). This is more of a 'just get it bloody running' effort. That being said, I have fixed a few of the simple bugs present in the original game.

I've actually done a lot of optimization. A lot. My numbers tell me it's worked. In fact, despite now having most of the game logic ticking away and the game playable, it's running faster than the previous demo. That being said, the speed is obviously not fast enough yet.

[reassembler]

Also OutRun's Attract code AI / Logic is so crap... it can't do anything right! I wrote a much improved version for CannonBall. But the original was sitting there in 68k ready to be used, so I just quickly ported it.

[Angus]

Originally Posted by reassembler

Also OutRun's Attract code AI / Logic is so crap... it can't do anything right! I wrote a much improved version for CannonBall. But the original was sitting there in 68k ready to be used, so I just quickly ported it.

I hear what you say about optimisations but it already looks flipping awesome to me.


Any likelihood of getting our sweaty hand on another demo anytime soon?

[saimon69]

My question is different: will the code - once you reach the point of not be able to proceed further - be open sourced so that others (unfortunately not me since am not a coder) could use it as a base for their own ports or similar projects?

[lmimmfn]

Originally Posted by reassembler

Alright, you asked for it - a video:

[ Show youtube player ]

I'm not going to go wild implementing 'new' features in the Amiga version. I've really done that as part of CannonBall (modern machines) and OutRun Enhanced (runs on Arcade hardware). This is more of a 'just get it bloody running' effort. That being said, I have fixed a few of the simple bugs present in the original game.

I've actually done a lot of optimization. A lot. My numbers tell me it's worked. In fact, despite now having most of the game logic ticking away and the game playable, it's running faster than the previous demo. That being said, the speed is obviously not fast enough yet.

Wow, that looks absolutely stunning so far, hopefully it will be somewhat playable on a 68030/50Mhz but let's see(not a reflection on your optimizations but more a general comment, let's see )

[DanyPPC]

It's just a miracle to see Out Run running on a 030/50 machine

[reassembler]

Originally Posted by lmimmfn

Wow, that looks absolutely stunning so far, hopefully it will be somewhat playable on a 68030/50Mhz but let's see(not a reflection on your optimizations but more a general comment, let's see )

Not to understate the work still needed, but the simpler levels of the game already play pretty nicely on my 030. I'm moderately confident that I'll end up with something acceptable overall.

In terms of source code, whilst what is there is highly optimized for OutRun itself - rather than some form of generic Sega System 16 library - there's still a lot that could be reused.

[h0ffman]

Was looking at one of the recent videos and got me thinking. I wondered if the background (clouds / mountains) could be done with hardware sprites? Would save you a bit of drawing and keep the custom chips busy.

[reassembler]

Originally Posted by h0ffman

Was looking at one of the recent videos and got me thinking. I wondered if the background (clouds / mountains) could be done with hardware sprites? Would save you a bit of drawing and keep the custom chips busy.

Maybe. That would need to be benchmarked in terms of Sprite DMA usage trade-off, amount of chip ram needed as the cached tilemaps are huge, the cost of accessing chip ram vs. fast ram etc. Plus I've already eaten the cost of chunky conversion anyway, so that computation wouldn't be recovered.

So the honest answer is, I don't really know without spending considerable time trying it. It's more of a case of considering the overall architecture of the engine, as opposed to a binary 'sprites are almost free' unfortunately (an imaginary quote not yours!)

I'd probably rather keep remaining chip ram for music and sound effects.

There would be a considerable saving to be made by merging the tile layer into one single layer with no transparency - as them I'm just movem.l'ing (is that a new expression?) data around fast memory. Plus native sprites wouldn't handle the parallax anyway - which is the expensive part of this.

I think Agermose was experimenting with sprites for the tile layers on his AGA port. He may have some insights into the pros and cons. Bear in mind I'm using a full 8 bitplanes, so I'm already hammering those DMA slots hard... My lack of Amiga coding experience makes it hard to anticipate how it would play out. From previous experiments with Blitter usage it was a pain in the arse / bottleneck on the 030.