Can I write a game in 3 weeks?

[deimos]

For the next 3 weeks I'm cat sitting in the middle of the countryside. I've decided to see if I can complete something that resembles a game in that time. I won't be starting completely from scratch as I have various bits already working and I only have a few chores I have to do each day, so can spend a solid chunk of time coding, maybe equivalent to a full working day.

I thought it might make it more fun if I kept this thread up to date with my progress, and to allow anyone who wants to chip in with help and encouragement to do so here. If I have really specific technical questions I'll create separate threads and link back to keep this thread more approachable.

I'm aiming to write a flight simulator along the lines of F/A 18 Interceptor, though the 3 weeks I have means I'll be happy if I can fly around, shoot missiles, look around from inside and outside the plane and crash into the ground.

I'm starting with a bunch of mostly interrupt handling code, giving me keyboard reading, triple buffer display and a blitter queue (currently limited to clearing the screen and drawing lines). I also have a separate bunch of code that I wrote last year (http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=93740&page=7) that does a lot of 3D, including drawing a model jet fighter using a hard coded BSP tree.

Preliminary plan, I'm changing the stars to hyphens as I complete tasks.

Progress so far, Day 0

- Set up PC
- Order a longer network cable
- Rework blitter queue to use callbacks
- Rework blitter queue to perform multiple operations from a single queued blit (test code now 24fps, was 18)

Day 1

- Implement polygon fill in blitter queue
- Implement data structures for polygons
- Implement polygon clipping (I may already have this)
- Rework for arbitrary clipping rectangle
- Implement polygon fill
- Scratch area
- XOr line operation
- Fill operation
- Rework line data structures for consistency with polygons
* Write test / benchmark code
- Create a plan for Day 2 and beyond

Day 2

- Revive my 3D transformation code
- Revive my BSP code
- Draw spinning jet on screen
* Draw ground / sky

Day 2.5:

- Add Scratch B and C areas and delete scratch clearing
- Bounding boxes for area fill and blits from scratch

Day 3

* Rework so that the jet is "us", so not visible from inside cockpit
* Add ability to change camera to outside aircraft and to change between split and full screen

Day 4

* Add some instrument panel detail (will need advice from people who have seen inside a modern jet fighter)
* Write code to only redraw instruments when they change their values

Day 5

* Rework models to allow sub-models, i.e. missiles mounted under wings, undercarriage

Day 6

* Implement thrust and acceleration (will need advice on calculations and jet fighter capabilities)

Day 7

* Implement banking / turning (I'll probably need to order a joystick)

Day 8

* Implement missile launching

Day 9

* Basic sound effects, engine noise, missile launch (never done sound before...)

Awesome Idea? Daft idea?

[malko]

I would say it's a crazy but cool idea
Even if I don't play "Flight simulator games", I will follow this thread with interest and hope you will manage to code something interesting within these three weeks !
All the best !

[redblade]

Good luck with the project

Now for some questions:
Is it for Amiga 500 or Amiga 1200?
How many bitplanes is it? What does 8 colours, Interlace look like with your engine?
If running on AGA will it run in other screen modes apart from the NTSC/PAL?
Will it use modern input? (mouse for x,y gradient then keyboard for barrel rolls and thrust)
For your HUD are you using dual playfield or will you just use sprites over the top?

Once again good luck and enjoy your holiday

[deimos]

Originally Posted by redblade

Good luck with the project

Now for some questions:
Is it for Amiga 500 or Amiga 1200?
How many bitplanes is it? What does 8 colours, Interlace look like with your engine?
If running on AGA will it run in other screen modes apart from the NTSC/PAL?
Will it use modern input? (mouse for x,y gradient then keyboard for barrel rolls and thrust)
For your HUD are you using dual playfield or will you just use sprites over the top?

Once again good luck and enjoy your holiday

I'm targeting OCS Amigas, so unexpanded 500s.

Currently planning 16 colours for the main view, 8 for the instrument panel. Main view triple buffered, instrument panel single.

Will be running in PAL mode only initially, but I'll try to keep everything as constants so that can be changed easily. I'm not going to touch anything AGA.

I don't think I'll use the mouse for flight control, I think I joystick is more fun. I am considering how I could use the mouse to make other things more intuitive, such as changing weapons, selecting targets, etc.

For the HUD, I don't think dual playfield would offer any advantage, plus I wouldn't be able to have 16 colours for the main playfield. I have considered sprites, but not decided yet. May not even get that far in the time I have.

[Shatterhand]

All 3 Amiga games I made took me less than 3 weeks to code.

Though none of them were Flight Sims

[deimos]

I've written up a plan for the first 10 days, but it's on the computer that won't be connected to the internet until the postie comes with my network cable. I'll update my original post when I can to keep the plan up the top.

Today is about 2D polygons and filling them on the screen, starting with clipping them.

EDIT: Network cable arrived, plan has been updated. Today I have implemented polygon clipping and am now working on ONEDOT / XOR line drawing, then filling.

[phx]

Yes, of course you can write a game in 3 weeks. It depends on the game - I wrote a new one every day on the VIC-20 in 1983.

A working flight-simulator, even a simplistic one, but especially with the features you listed, is quite ambitious in the timeframe given. I see you have some existing code which you can revive or reuse, which might help, but I can guarantee that you will run into serious problems at some point during development, which renders a daily pre-planning quickly obsolete.

Nevertheless, I love your project, and hope you have something to show after some time. The Amiga's 3D-capabilities have aged much more than its scrolling/sprite features, but at least this is something completely different than the usual Jump'n'Runs and Shooters of these days.

Originally Posted by deimos

* Add some instrument panel detail (will need advice from people who have seen inside a modern jet fighter)

I'm not a pilot, but I can fly most planes from a Cessna to a 737 in X-Plane 11, so I know which instruments you need and how they look like.

* Write code to only redraw instruments when they change their values

Provided the simulation generates useful data for all the instruments.

* Implement thrust and acceleration (will need advice on calculations and jet fighter capabilities)

That might become quite complex...

* Basic sound effects, engine noise, missile launch (never done sound before...)

Depends whether your game is OS-compliant or takes over the system. It's probably easier when programming the audio hardware directly.

[deimos]

Originally Posted by phx

I can guarantee that you will run into serious problems at some point during development, which renders a daily pre-planning quickly obsolete.

Agreed, but I wouldn't know if things were going pear-shaped unless I had a plan to compare to.

[deimos]

I've integrated my polygon clipping code and am blitting the outlines in one-dot / xor mode to a scratch area. This all seems to work (I'm temporarily pointing the bottom half / instrument panel area of my screen to the scratch area so I can verify this).

I'm then blitting in area fill mode to draw the polygons onto the main screen. Typing this message makes me realise that I've only set things up to copy the filled polygon to the main screen, without preserving the background, but even that isn't working. I've posted another thread asking for help on that.

So, there you go, one day in and I'm already behind schedule.

Edit: Got some help from Antiriad and now have polygons. I still need to work out how to keep the background around the polygons, but things are looking better.

[sandruzzo]

Any screen shots?

[deimos]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

Any screen shots?

Not that you want to see yet.

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by deimos

Not that you want to see yet.

As a programmer, I found them allways interesting! Are you going to use pure blitters' filling?

[deimos]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

As a programmer, I found them allways interesting! Are you going to use pure blitters' filling?

Yes, that's what's not working at the moment. I'm trying to fill a polygon that's been one dot line drawn into my scratch area straight over lines that have already been drawn on my mainscreen buffer. Beginning to think it's not possible and maybe I need an intermediate step, which doesn't feel right.

I have lines like this attachment, that are moving about, and the polygon I'm filling is a big diamond shape that goes over all four edges so is clipped to an octagon. I'm trying to fill the polygon directly over the lines so you should just see the occasional line poking out from behind. But it's currently a mess.

I've been discussing it more over on this thread: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=99190

[sandruzzo]

What about this tips?

https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2012/0...real-part-5-1/

https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2011/1...t-real-part-5/

https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2011/1...t-real-part-4/

https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2011/1...t-real-part-3/

[ Show youtube player ]

[deimos]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

What about this tips?

https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2012/0...real-part-5-1/

https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2011/1...t-real-part-5/

https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2011/1...t-real-part-4/

https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2011/1...t-real-part-3/

[ Show youtube player ]

That implies that you need to fill the polygon and copy it over in two steps, so maybe what I want to do is impossible.

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by deimos

That implies that you need to fill the polygon and copy it over in two steps, so maybe what I want to do is impossible.

I think filling direct on planes, you should to do line setup with cpu, and do a direct copy D=A with blitter, and use proper if any mask for first and last word.

Disadvantage of this is thta you need one blitting for line.

[deimos]

In order to progress I've updated my polygon code to fill in the scratch area before blitting sets/clears to each destination bitplane. It doesn't feel right, but at least I can move on.

If this does end up being the preferred approach then I'll have to revisit it as I'm not using any bounding boxes, so I'm blitting far more data than I need to, but that's for later.

void ClipAndFillPolygon(const ScreenBuffer * screenBuffer, const ScreenBuffer * scratchScreenBuffer,
                        const UWORD n, const Point2D polygon [], const Rectangle2D clipRect, const UWORD colour)
{
    Point2D clippedPolygon[10];
    UWORD c = ClipPolygon2D(clipRect, n, polygon, clippedPolygon);
    for (UWORD i = 0; i < c; i++) {
        Line2D line = {
            clippedPolygon[i],
            clippedPolygon[(i + 1) % c]
        };
        DrawOneDotLine(scratchScreenBuffer, line);
    }
    InPlaceAreaFill(scratchScreenBuffer);
    CopyScratchInColour(screenBuffer, scratchScreenBuffer, colour);
    ClearScratch(scratchScreenBuffer);
}

[sandruzzo]

Here another interesting one, about blitter lines clipping

http://www.schwinde.de/blog/index.php?a=13

[deimos]

Having successfully, though inefficiently, achieved polygon filling, I've moved onto the day 2 tasks (Revive my 3D transformation code / Revive my BSP code / Draw spinning jet on screen). I'm now at the point where I think I've moved all the necessary existing code over from my previous work and updated it to use my blitter routines rather than the CPU based scanline fill I previously had.

If you look very carefully you may be able to make out a small fighter jet!

[deimos]

So, this blitter fill stuff... does it actually work? I mean for actual, real life, not a demo, things like this?

At the moment I think I can see a way to make it work, but it's going to take a lot more than the "just xor the lines and throw away the first bit" explanations that I keep seeing online.