Why is the homebrew scene on the Amiga not as impressive...

[Mrs Beanbag]

there is in fact amos.library...

nobody's forcing you to use them anyway, write everything from scratch if you like, you can write your own assembler too.

[Retro1234]

What you may not know is some people telling me this is a good idea also told me You cant do that in Amos or you need extention or you souldnt use gosub etc Lol! they spoke before they tested even the most basic routines -guess its a little personal.

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

you can write your own assembler too.

Lol fair dos

fuck it im going back to AmigaBasic.

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by Boo Boo

I doubt we will see this but I've been an amigan a long time and heard all this before. But you take away the collision and scrolling your not writing the game yourself realy.I don't care about language or libs etc - The goal is to take away everything

There is much more to a game than scrolling and collisions and actually these are the most boring parts.
- reaction to player input (movement mechanics, inertia, speed, etc.)
- behaviour and animation of NPCs (be they alien spacecrafts or walking creatures)
- core gameplay:
- interaction player/world
- objectives, sub objectives, conditions, rewards, penalties, etc.
- interaction world/world
- effects:
- animations, sounds, particles

Even in a shoot'em up scrolling and collisions are the least defining features.
Look at SOTB: fantastic scrolling, shitty gameplay. I wish they had used a parallax scrolling library and concentrated on actual gameplay!

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by Boo Boo

What you may not know is some people telling me this is a good idea also told me You cant do that in Amos or you need extention or you souldnt use gosub etc Lol! they spoke before they tested even the most basic routines -guess its a little personal.

well of course you "can" do this or that in Amos, but if it is anything vaguely complex i certainly wouldn't want to waste my time and sanity doing it for how slow it would be.

i've committed to making PuzCat 2 in Amos just to see/show what can be done, but it will be quite a simple game.

Could i write Mr Beanbag in Amos? Well that's how it started out, although it was doing its own hardware bashing, creating its own copperlist, and at that point you have to wonder why you don't just use asm. And there's no way i would have been able to put the bad guys in, i had to write my own bob engine because of the way the scrolling works... and you can't load other Amos programs in as modules and call their procedures, you just can't ok. It would all have to be in one huge monolithic program, which would be unmanageable.

i kind of think of Amos programming as a feat akin to getting printers to play music, or making a bicycle out of beer cans

[beezle]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

i kind of think of Amos programming as a feat akin to getting printers to play music, or making a bicycle out of beer cans

Bit of a sidebar, but for me that's one of the things I like about AMOS.
While I wouldn't use it for a serious project I really enjoy round hole/square peg type programming. The bigger the mismatch the better.

Ive not touched it in a long, long time, but one of the most fun projects I've attempted was an OS written with Amos. Completely unsuited, but that's why I chose it. Amos is great for these type of projects as there's so many restrictions.

I also tell myself I'll write a Tandy coco 3 emulator in it one day, but deep down I know its unlikely I'll ever start.

[Lonewolf10]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

i kind of think of Amos programming as a feat akin to getting printers to play music, or making a bicycle out of beer cans

I'd like to see that bicycle...

http://www.greendiary.com/recycled-a...inum-cans.html


... it's number 8 in the list


Anyway, I agree that AMOS can be slow at some things. But when you choose a language to program in you have to trust that the routines that it uses are optimised to the best ability. (Obviously assembler is the exception to this as it's up to you to code the routines, unless you use libraries or borrow someone elses code...)

As far as the topic goes, homebrew on the Amiga isn't very impressive (most of the time) as we struggle to agree on anything, sometimes lack time to finish projects and choose the wrong things at the start of the project.
Hmmm... maybe we need an education in planning/designing a game aswell as tips for coding in our chosen language/s?

[Retro1234]

I feel ive been a bit harsh this kind of thing doesnt help - Long live Amiga! and all Amigans!

Originally Posted by beezle

I also tell myself I'll write a Tandy coco 3 emulator in it one day, but deep down I know its unlikely I'll ever start.

What about a prog to convert coco to Amos, Im a bit of Dragon 32 fan and I seem to remember two machinces had level of compatibility - Jeez the days of editing Dragon Basic - even more

[beezle]

Ah, cool.
The Dragon and Coco seem pretty under appreciated in most places it seems.
I've never used a Dragon myself, but my understanding is Dragon 32/64 and coco 1 and 2 are pretty much the same machines, but with different ROMs.

The coco3 was backwards compatible, but enhanced. Somewhat parallels a500/a1200.
Enhanced graphics modes (quite similar to Atari st there, but with only 6bit palette depth), faster Motorola 6809, updated ROMs, etc.

I was surprised at some of the game titles available when checking out Coco stuff online. Lots of big name games I was unaware of as a child.
Pitstop2, arkanoid, last ninja, gauntlet, legend of Zelda, thexder, zaxxon, Leisure Suit Larry and a bunch of others, both official and unofficial (don't know how they got away with some of the unofficial stuff though).

Gauntlet 2 looks pretty close to Atari st/master system versions, although its one of the unofficial games and is called "gantelet2". There's also a "gantelet1" for coco1,2 and Dragon which plays quite well, but of course isn't as nice to look at.

[Mrs Beanbag]

this is the worst attempt at getting back on topic i've ever seen

[beezle]

Hehe.
I've been advocating it for a while, and started yet another completely off topic subject


So, in an attempt to realign the stars, my answer to the original question is:

We're too easily distracted

[Etze]

I asked this before but didn't get an answer:

Has anyone ever tried Gamesmith? Isn't this what everyone's asking for (a set of link-libraries for C and Assembler to help creating games)?

[invent]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

this is the worst attempt at getting back on topic i've ever seen

Hehe

I know it I win the 23 million lotto on weekend I'll be doing more not less Amiga pixel work , time is the only enemy.

[clebin]

Originally Posted by Etze

I asked this before but didn't get an answer:

Has anyone ever tried Gamesmith? Isn't this what everyone's asking for (a set of link-libraries for C and Assembler to help creating games)?

Wow, sorry I must have missed your post. I'd never even heard this mentioned before. I'm just looking at the PDF manual now - very excited to try it out!

[beezle]

Ah, yes, Gamesmith.
Seems to be a package that people overlook and/or forget about, myself included
Quite a few times I've rediscovered/remembered it, only to forget again shortly after, and the cycle repeats.

Its not even that its bad at all, in fact quite the contrary. Every time I remember about it I get quite motivated and excited, yet for some reason I'll have forgotten again within a few days.

I seem to recall it also has some useful tools in addition to libraries?

Maybe I should get a reminder tattooed on my arm

[Samurai_Crow]

Gamesmith is primarily a CPU assisted blitting library with some well optimized routines for transparent blitting in particular. It also has a little bit of Copper magic but mainly for doing SOTB-style horzontal parallax games. It does have some animation tools as well, but little, if anything, for doing tilemaps. According to the claims, with a mostly idle CPU, the blitter assistance is worth 50% speedups on an '030, 100% speedups on an '040 and 200% speedups on an '060.

[Mrs Beanbag]

not much use on stock machines, then? seems a bit disappointing

[davideo]

Originally Posted by clebin

Wow, sorry I must have missed your post. I'd never even heard this mentioned before. I'm just looking at the PDF manual now - very excited to try it out!

I've tried it out and in fact it may be my PDF you are reading

It's not bad and as said earlier has a few tools to help with the graphics/animation/screen flipping, etc.

But to be honest I didn't get to far with it as I'm only just starting to learn C so had a bit of trouble understanding some of it.

UPDATE: There are some example programs on Aminet using the Gamesmith system

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

I like how you use the same keyword for all the end statements. But i would swap round the syntax of the short and long versions, so that "do" is a universal block beginning. Then you can always see that there is a block even when confronted with an unfamiliar statement, which maybe also eases expansion of the language.

That's exactly what ARexx does. It only has one kind of block (unless you count procedures): DO … END
You can have
IF a=10 THEN b=2
…or you can have
IF a=10 THEN DO
b=2
c=3
END

And DO has parameters such as DO FOR, DO WHILE and DO UNTIL.

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

Quite... but the width of a tab could be set to anything in the editor so it gets a bit awkward! I've pondered using some other character, maybe |, like so:

One advantage to all-alphabetic languages is that they can be written on any keymap with equal effort. "|" is easy enough to write on an Amiga keyboard, less so on many PC keymaps.

Mind you, anything is preferable to HTML/XML inspired markup, which uses both full names and two special characters for each keyword.

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

so you can trace down the lines and see where it lines up, which can actually be quite difficult with only whitespace indentation, if you have a very long function (more than a screen).

It's a good idea, but coming from AMOS, I tend to favour editors with full lexical parsing. That gives you those lines (and proper indentation) for free.

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

yeah yeah fair enough i do know how function calls work at the low level, but pushing a couple of 32 bit integers on the stack really doesn't account for how slow AMOS's procedure calls are, there must be something else going on there.

I have no idea how the AMOS source code works, but I think they key lies in the SHARED command. Whenever a procedure is called, it sets up its own work environment and stacks away the variable space of the calling routine.

For the same reason, I use mostly gosubs in my current Blitz project, instead of the tidier functions and statements. When I was programming in AMOS, I only used procedures, but Blitz's (otherwise horrible) manual was friendly enough to suggest the use of gosubs in the chapter on optimisations.

[alexh]

I saw yesterday that the gfx for Witchwood on the PC had been found many years ago and were available. If anyone was doing a Zelda type game on Amiga I'm sure you could borrow some of this and it would be unique to almost all of us

[copse]

Originally Posted by alexh

I saw yesterday that the gfx for Witchwood on the PC had been found many years ago and were available. If anyone was doing a Zelda type game on Amiga I'm sure you could borrow some of this and it would be unique to almost all of us

You got a link so we can all go and see it without playing guess the google keywords