Anyone still making Amiga games for 500 / 1200?

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

I would probably go for Blitz BASIC as it gives you less of a PD look than Amos generally but whatever you prefer I guess.

This is not the fault of the language. Amos is perfectly capable in the right hands.

The "problem" is that Amos is easier than Blitz, so the bar for making something is lower. But if you think that choosing a more difficult language is going to improve your coding, I suspect you are going to disappoint yourself. But I never tried Blitz.

Game kits can be fun. I'm just starting work on "Beanbag Creator", essentially the Mr Beanbag developer suite packaged for consumer use. So that could be fun for somebody I guess. What I've got at the moment is pretty esoteric and not suitable for release, but if I can turn it into something nice for anybody to use I don't see why not. (I want to make it nicer just for my own sake, in any case.)

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by commodorejohn

"Churning out" is not what we need. A good basic framework for things like I/O and scripting can be a big help to quality game development, but make a system specifically geared towards one type of game and all you'll get is a flood of shovelware, like RPG Maker games. The Amiga deserves better than that.

Not really, to makes something as good as a classic cinemaware game you need to write a system to control the characters in the game world (AI), contain their conversations, control their on screen presence (facial movement, movement on screen), managing on screen objects not people, 'set background' simulator etc etc.

As Cinemaware were one of the few companies that weren't writing pure drivel and trying to make the most of the A1000 chipset (ie 1mb chipram never required) making a system that means you can focus your energy 100% on the story and plot twists is not a bad thing. It sure as well would look better and play better than PD quality games being made now. If you could sit down and produce an Amiga game version of some old movie like N by NW etc it would be an amazing addition to the Amiga catalogue in 2012.

You have to reach for beyond your grasp to make anything truly awesome.

Anyway it's a moot point as my Amiga coding days are over, the A1200/600 keyboard is horrible to code on and bix bog Amigas with HDDs are too expensive these days.

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

This is not the fault of the language. Amos is perfectly capable in the right hands.

The "problem" is that Amos is easier than Blitz, so the bar for making something is lower. But if you think that choosing a more difficult language is going to improve your coding, I suspect you are going to disappoint yourself. But I never tried Blitz.

Game kits can be fun. I'm just starting work on "Beanbag Creator", essentially the Mr Beanbag developer suite packaged for consumer use. So that could be fun for somebody I guess. What I've got at the moment is pretty esoteric and not suitable for release, but if I can turn it into something nice for anybody to use I don't see why not. (I want to make it nicer just for my own sake, in any case.)

All BASIC dialects aimed at producing graphically/sonically rich games are underpinned by their own machine code/object libraries to achieve things like moving BOBs around the screen etc and the back end of Blitz is much more powerful in terms of % of total chipset ability/bandwidth you can use.

I could draw the best graphics in the world, neigh arcade quality sprite rips even, but AMOS doesn't have the underlying power to move all that stuff around the screen to NOT make it look like a PD game in terms of amount of action on screen. Still it's better than SEUCK Plus Cinemaware used a high level language to create their games too, like a bespoke game maker, so for me it makes it tantalisingly plausible to do high quality Cinemaware style games that ape the commercial originals.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

All BASIC dialects aimed at producing graphically/sonically rich games are underpinned by their own machine code/object libraries to achieve things like moving BOBs around the screen etc and the back end of Blitz is much more powerful in terms of % of total chipset ability/bandwidth you can use.

I could draw the best graphics in the world, neigh arcade quality sprite rips even, but AMOS doesn't have the underlying power to move all that stuff around the screen to NOT make it look like a PD game in terms of amount of action on screen.

Now that's just not really true. It may be that Blitz has a more efficient Bob engine than AMOS (I'd like to see some benchmarks though) but not all commercial titles rely on large numbers of bobs for their action, and even if that's what you want, AMOS's performance isn't that bad, and I can think of plenty of professional and highly regarded games that are less than silky-smooth. I reckon I could easily match Magic Pockets, for instance.

[Photon]

Re: the topic, I'm still hoping to find time to finish some of my games.

[TCD]

As THB would say: DOO EET!

[Lonewolf10]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

Now that's just not really true. It may be that Blitz has a more efficient Bob engine than AMOS (I'd like to see some benchmarks though) but not all commercial titles rely on large numbers of bobs for their action, and even if that's what you want, AMOS's performance isn't that bad, and I can think of plenty of professional and highly regarded games that are less than silky-smooth. I reckon I could easily match Magic Pockets, for instance.

I don't know whether Blitz takes over the whole system when running or not, but quite a number of AMOS games don't close Workbench when running (I know this because they don't block the Amiga+A switching). Doing so would give a noticeable difference in execution speed of the AMOS game.
Dithell's Wonderland is a great example of a platform game that has a fair bit going on and runs really smoothly.

[fishyfish]

Blitz really is significantly more powerful than AMOS for moving graphics around. A factor of 2 or more isnt unrealistic, not to mention proper aga support, use of aga fetch modes, aga sprites, and so on. I did a rough test a while back and was able to move 11 (double buffered screen) 16x16 bobs with amos without dropping a frame. Using exact same bobs with blitz I stopped trying once I hit 30 'cos that was excessive for what I wanted to do already.

For games on the amiga its second only to ASM (although you can also use nline asm directly in Blitz (and with colons to seperate commands )).

I actually enjoy AMOSPro though. Its good fun, and fun to see what can be squeezed from it, but it just doesnt compare for raw speed/fluidity/flexibility, or in any way I can think of (apart from ease of use). That said AMOS is still capable of some decent stuff if you avoid it's weaknesses.

[Graham Humphrey]

Will be keeping an eye on this one too

[kriz]

Cool progress CarasGhant !!

[roberthazelby]

Great work! I'm really looking forward to giving this a go.

Very polished indeed!

(I've updated the blog with details of the updates)

[lole]

Nice

I'm working on a shoot-em-up in Blitz (and possible also in C).
Here's my blog:

http://tonesoftales.com/blitz/

[diablothe2nd]

I plan on making an Amiga game.

Though my coding experience is only the editing of xml/cfg/lua/python/html and various other scripts, so I'll be starting from only a very basic understanding of it.

I just managed to grab a Blitz Basic 2.1 box with manual so i have something to thumb through while teaching myself.

the graphics part will be the easy bit as i've been a 2d/3d artist for over a decade professionally in some form or another. Music is a hobby too

[Peter]

Originally Posted by lole

Nice

I'm working on a shoot-em-up in Blitz (and possible also in C).
Here's my blog:

http://tonesoftales.com/blitz/

@lole - enjoying your blog mate - fascinating to see this project come together - I will stay tuned...

[Predseda]

lole, if you are interested in that graphics, could you PM me at least?

[lesta_smsc]

Nice blog lole - I'm sure this has a lot of potential! I created something very similar on AMOS when I was first getting used to programming, but it never fruited! The unfortunate part was the source code was saved on a my harddrive that went caput!

[Cammy]

Here's one I'm working on:





You can test it out if you want, it's only one incomplete level at the moment but it's playable: http://home.exetel.com.au/~amiga/BackboneGame.lha

[roberthazelby]

Originally Posted by Cammy

Here's one I'm working on:

Wow! That looks absolutely stunning!

What's that been put together using? Backbone?

I'll get this installed and tested tonight, and up on the blog tomorrow.

[Cammy]

Yep, using Backbone, because Rebel and I are writing a tutorial on Backbone and needed to make an example game to go with it. All the graphics are by him so far, I'm just working on level design on this one at the moment.

[Peter]

That Backbone tutorial is great news.