Could an Amiga with an 030 do Virtua Fighter?

[Old_Bob]

Originally Posted by VladR

So, I spent 10 minutes pausing the YT vid and could count polygons on one character:


8: Neck
2*25: Fist
2*78: Arm (13 segments * 6)
2*48: Leg (8 segments * 6)
2*20: Feet
64: Front Torso (8 segments * 8)
20: Back Torso
51: Head
------------
485 Quads = 970 triangles


Not so low-poly after all


I might have missed a polygon here and there (especially on head and feet), but it's a relatively good estimate.
Obviously, each character will differ in polycount based on its features.

It would be interesting to know exactly how that compares to the Model 1 coin-op. And, for that matter, the 32x port. It might also be useful for somebody to have a fiddle around in some modelling program to see just how few polygons and colours we might get away with, while still producing something recognizable as a Virtua Fighter character.

B

[Juz400]

Originally Posted by Old_Bob

It would be interesting to know exactly how that compares to the Model 1 coin-op. And, for that matter, the 32x port. It might also be useful for somebody to have a fiddle around in some modelling program to see just how few polygons and colours we might get away with, while still producing something recognizable as a Virtua Fighter character.

B

The Saturn looks pretty close to the Arcade, the 32X is a more realistic target, the heads/faces are very small at times, any way to cheat here?


I was going to have a bash at modeling yesterday but had no Idea what software to try to figure out using before even starting on a model.
thought I would try 3d construction kit on Amiga but found it too fiddly?


Running x86/win10 if any suggestions

[VladR]

What's wrong with 3dsmax?

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Old_Bob

to see just how few polygons and colours we might get away with, while still producing something recognizable as a Virtua Fighter character.

We could send the famous Amiga Juggler into the fight!

See: https://toribash.com

[ Show youtube player ]

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by VladR

What's wrong with 3dsmax?

Although I have access to 3dsmax through work, I'd say "price" is what is wrong with 3dsmax.
Its difficult to argue against Blender 2.8 these days..

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

I'd say "price" is what is wrong with 3dsmax.

- Price
- Almost no support
- Very slow updates
- Very slow bug fixes
- Braking stuff the worked before (composite map, for example).

One guy, Tyson Ibele, with his free plugin Tyflow, managed to do more updates in one year, then Autodesk in 10 years.

And yeah, Blender is really starting to look very, very serious.

Sorry for oftopic.

[VladR]

Since I still don't have a way to deploy builds to my Vampire, I had a remote test of the benchmark build, using the high-poly scene from my Heimdall video (at the end of the video). Rendering batch was 10,000x, so all CPU spikes from OS were averaged out into stable, reliable values.

I think this build still should run at 68030. The only questionable code at the moment is floating-point scanline traversal (extremely elegant and short and saving 6 registers that are then available for the rest of scanline algorithm).

Did 68030 already have FPU integrated or you still needed external chip?

I'm running this in WinUAE but it's targeting 68040, and I didn't have much luck when trying to switch WinUAE it to 68030...

In worst case, I still have an older working version that has Integer scanline traversal.


But, here's the breakdown of the major engine pipeline stages that we can use to quite precisely estimate the cost of rendering Virtua Fighter characters:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  3,909   quads / Frame      : 3D Transform/Projection (Camera)
  1,972   quads / Frame      : Quad Set-Up (sorting, Edge Computation)
 41,383   scanlines / Frame  : Scanline traversal
637,484   pixels / Frame     : Pixel Fill
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Since I am currently in U.S., I assumed NTSC 60 fps. PAL users can add ~20% to those numbers (well, not quite, NTSC is 20% slower per frame than PAL)


First 2 stages depend on number of polygons (regardless of camera).
Second 2 stages depend on how close camera is (scanlines and pixels)

Examining the screenshots from VF, it appears, that for most of gameplay, it's rendered into ~85x120 window (10,200 potential pixels), of which, about 40% is filled, hence ~4,080 pixels are drawn.
From experience, I would estimate the number of scanlines to be around ~1,500.

When I plug those numbers into excel, this pops up:

  7.67 %    3D Transform
 15.21 %    Quad Set-Up
  3.62 %    Scanline Traversal
  0.63 %    Pixel Fill
-------------------------
 27.13 %  Of Frame Time

This is based on quads. 
If you would rather want to render triangles, 
you must double the cost of 2nd and 3rd stage :)

So, a single VF character could be rendered in ~27% of a frame time on Vampire.
Of course, each frame's CPU cost is different - number of scanlines and pixels vary wildly (hence the framedrops in games).

But, it should be possible to do VF on Vampire around 50-60 fps. Background will not be free to render, of course, and it has a lot of pixels and scanlines. Something will be taken by Clearing framebuffer and bitplane conversion.

But, worst-case scenario - 30 fps locked.


Obviously - on 68030 - 30 fps is not going to happen

[VladR]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Although I have access to 3dsmax through work, I'd say "price" is what is wrong with 3dsmax.
Its difficult to argue against Blender 2.8 these days..

Last time I bought blender (as far as I recall it wasn't free at that time - but perhaps I'm mixing it with the other 3D package, it's been some time) was over 15 years ago. We played with it a bit, but when I needed to hire some local 3D artists for my PC games, they all used 3dsmax.


So, I had to buy 3dsmax and never really examined Blender since.

[Samurai_Crow]

@VladR
Blender is now a free open-source package and the GUI has undergone some refactoring since the early days.

68030 needs an external FPU for floats.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by VladR

Last time I bought blender (as far as I recall it wasn't free at that time - but perhaps I'm mixing it with the other 3D package, it's been some time) was over 15 years ago. We played with it a bit, but when I needed to hire some local 3D artists for my PC games, they all used 3dsmax.


So, I had to buy 3dsmax and never really examined Blender since.

To be clear, I've used 3dsmax since 1999 or so and it is only now since v2.8 that Blender became a serious contender.
Now, depending on how long back in time we go, yes, Blender was actually a commercial product around the year 2000. It failed pretty badly though, so it was re-booted as an open source project a couple of years after that. Then is sucked for about 15 years, but here we are now. v2.8 is the real deal ;-)

Anyway, it doesn't matter too much if assets are created in max or blender as both can export a bunch of well known and supported formats..
I just wish there was a more standardized "platform" for Amiga 3d assets..

Btw, Alain Thellier ("famous Amiga 3d engine coder guy") released Microbe3D which reads .obj

It would also be great if we had a native Amiga 3d format that suits the needs of the Amiga...
How about your custom format @Vlad, will that be the next universal Amiga 3d format standard?

[VladR]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

To be clear, I've used 3dsmax since 1999 or so and it is only now since v2.8 that Blender became a serious contender.
Now, depending on how long back in time we go, yes, Blender was actually a commercial product around the year 2000. It failed pretty badly though, so it was re-booted as an open source project a couple of years after that. Then is sucked for about 15 years, but here we are now. v2.8 is the real deal ;-)

Anyway, it doesn't matter too much if assets are created in max or blender as both can export a bunch of well known and supported formats..
I just wish there was a more standardized "platform" for Amiga 3d assets..

Btw, Alain Thellier ("famous Amiga 3d engine coder guy") released Microbe3D which reads .obj

Well, as long as the 3d modeling package in question exports it in a format that coder already has a parser for, then it's fine.


I used to swear by ASE format, but it has become very buggy. Recently, I wrote *.OBJ Parser and 3dsmax , at least for now, seems to export the data consistently. So, wel'll see.


But, I wouldn't trust an *.OBJ from different SW.

Originally Posted by eXeler0

It would also be great if we had a native Amiga 3d format that suits the needs of the Amiga...
How about your custom format @Vlad, will that be the next universal Amiga 3d format standard?

Not sure such thing is even possible. Each game should have a format that makes sense for that particular environment - a compromise between storage costs, loading time and processing time.


That's going to differ greatly given the vast performance range we have here - from vanilla A500 all the way up to Vampire.




BTW, now that I finally have real-world benchmark from Vampire, and implemented a performance estimate for current scene (polygons,scanlines,pixels), I can go and load your track 3D mesh in WinUAE to see how it would run...

[VladR]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

@VladR
Blender is now a free open-source package and the GUI has undergone some refactoring since the early days.

68030 needs an external FPU for floats.

That's unfortunate about the FPU. So, without messing with code, it wouldn't run now there. Oh, well...

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

68030 needs an external FPU for floats.

yes the 68882 is external, but the instructions are of course the same.
(actually it has more functionality than later integrated FPUs)
and you can let it work in an parallel fashion:

https://www.drdobbs.com/embedded-sys...code/184409255

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by Gorf

yes the 68882 is external, but the instructions are of course the same.
(actually it has more functionality than later integrated FPUs)

Yeah the 68881 and 68882 were great when they were released, but the later integrated FPUs smoke them on the supported instructions, and the software implementations of the deprecated transcendental functions were still about as fast as the 68882 doing them in hardware (as long as the code was native and not being done with trap+emulation).

Off-topic on the R-Zone, I bet you could make a kick-ass retro heads-up display by replacing the LCD layer with a modern high-res LCD matrix but keeping the R-zone's plastic housing, lighting, etc.

[Gilbert]

Pretty sure the CD32 could run Virtua Fighter, If the Megadrive can run Virtua Racing (with the SVP chip). Then the CD32 must be able to match and better that.

Those SVP chips must be cheap while the CD32 has an expensive blitter and a 68020 super CPU

[trixster]

The cd32 in stock form is incredibly slow.

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by Gilbert

Pretty sure the CD32 could run Virtua Fighter, If the Megadrive can run Virtua Racing (with the SVP chip). Then the CD32 must be able to match and better that.

Those SVP chips must be cheap while the CD32 has an expensive blitter and a 68020 super CPU

The SVP is completely different from the 020 in the CD32. The SVP is a DSP used for vertex calculations and it does it an order of magnitude faster than the 020/14 can.

[roondar]

This gives rise to an interesting notion (well for me anyway )

The various low end Amiga's all have at least one expansion port that can be used to plug an accelerator of sort in. Now, normally these ports were either used for memory or a Motorola 68K processor/memory. But there was really nothing stopping Commodore (or others) from including such a DSP or other high performance specialised chip on the board. We've seen one such thing in the form of the A314 expansion for the A500.

So, if we accept that the Mega Drive can do Virtua Racing with an expensive DSP chip - perhaps we can also accept that the A1200/CD32 can do something similar if it is coupled with such a chip?

It's not really on topic I know and it definitely isn't doable right now (there are no DSP/"foreign CPU" accelerators for the A1200), but I still find it interesting that generally we all consider a game like the MD version of Virtua Racing to be a native MD game - even though it has a massively powerful CPU on board that basically bypasses the MD CPU. But on the other hand, we'd usually not consider a game needing say a 68060 a native A1200 game. To me this is a grey area. Anyway, enough off-topic stuff

[trixster]

The difference is console games with extra chips came with the hardware on the cartridge, there was no upgrade wall barring anyone with the console from playing these accelerated games. With a computer where games were exclusively shipped on floppy disks or cds, the number of owners with the necessary third-party hardware was much smaller than the full user-base, so only a fraction could play such a game.

Consoles with accelerated cartridge games were inclusive to all users. Computers requiring extra hardware were exclusive of a large portion of users.

[roondar]

Ah, but there was nothing really stopping anyone from making cartridge games for the A500/A1200, it is actually possible to completely take over the computer using the side/trapdoor slot cards. In fact, such side/trapdoor cards already exist for the A500 - they just weren't made to play games.

Note: I do understand why it wasn't done (the trapdoor/side car slots were not really designed for many repeated insertions/removals), but it was technically definitely possible to make A500/A1200 "cartridges".

Anyway, enough random speculation.