Final Fight Speculation

[saimon69]

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Actiually there is a version of TMHT for Amiga but looks incomplete...

[sandruzzo]

@Shatterhand

Do you think that Amiga Ocs could have done better with Final Fight ? I agree with you it's crap game play, like xenon 2

[Retro1234]

You think its crap but think IK+ is good?

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

You think its crap but think IK+ is good?

At least is playable...

[Shatterhand]

Yeah, I know the Amiga port of TMNT Arcade, huge dissapointment when I got it back at time. Yes, it looks like the devs had to rush the game out due the demise of Mirrorsoft. I read somewhere the game even has music tracks on the floppy that aren't used anywhere in the game. It's nearly as bad as Final Fight Amiga anyway

@Sandruzzo.

Yes, I think it could be a better game. Like I said, if the game had smaller BOBs the speed would be better and you could have more frames. Keep all player moves and make them WORK like in the arcade (combos, special moves, jump kicks, etc) and I'd already be happier even if the game looked and sounded like the oficial version.

I mean, Leatherhead's (Rest in peace mate) version running on ECS was *pretty* good, and that was made on Blitz Basic. Though, ok, it required 2mbs ram to run. But still it's an example that *gameplay* could had been a lot better, even if you had to do lots of cuts in gfx and sfx department.

@Retro1234

"At least its playable" its a perfect response. IK+ *WORKS* as a game. Final Fight Amiga barely works. It's not just a bad port, it's a bad *game*. The game has dozens of issues on the gameplay department, the most important one is how enemies can gang you up and you can't do ANYTHING but wait til all your health is depleted and then you gain invencibility at the start of the next life. This is a *serious* issue and this should *never* passed in a complete comercial game.

[sandruzzo]

@Shatterhand

Maybe on Ocs will smaller BOBs we could hit 25-17 fps? Would be great Try it

[saimon69]

Hey Sandruzzo,

i actually think that Amiga CAN do better, especially if using the megabyte expansion: look at the bob sizes in Powder, even though was running at 25fps;

[mindwandering]
Maybe good results could be even reached on dual playfleld with cleverly designed bobs and (wild guess) tricks like dynamically addressing the copper in the same way as a c64 dynamic tileset colormap to increase colors on the screen, but all this is pure brainstorm since i have no skills to verify if something like this is feasible
[/mindwandering]

[Shatterhand]

I *Really* want to try out to do a beat'em up game on Amiga at some point. I actually begin to learn how to code for Amiga because I wanted to do a beat'em up for it. When I feel more confident (and have enough free time, something I barely have up until October) I'll try to do my own.

But no Final Fight port, I'd rather do something new and original

Amiga could have a good beat'em up. Its not a Hardware fault the system doesn't have any good Beat'em up

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by Shatterhand

I *Really* want to try out to do a beat'em up game on Amiga at some point. I actually begin to learn how to code for Amiga because I wanted to do a beat'em up for it. When I feel more confident (and have enough free time, something I barely have up until October) I'll try to do my own.

But no Final Fight port, I'd rather do something new and original

Somenthing designed around Amiga HW!

[Shatterhand]

Originally Posted by saimon69

Hey Sandruzzo,

i actually think that Amiga CAN do better, especially if using the megabyte expansion: look at the bob sizes in Powder, even though was running at 25fps;

[mindwandering]
Maybe good results could be even reached on dual playfleld with cleverly designed bobs and (wild guess) tricks like dynamically addressing the copper in the same way as a c64 dynamic tileset colormap to increase colors on the screen, but all this is pure brainstorm since i have no skills to verify if something like this is feasible
[/mindwandering]

I am pretty sure with 1Mb you could make BOBS that used up to 6 "16x16" blocks and you would have a good size for player and enemies. (This would give an average 32x48 pixels BOB)

If you use Dual Playfield to not have to redraw background while characters move, you could get 50 fps with few enemies on screen. You could make the game drop to 25 fps when you have more enemies on screen (you could even keep the player at 50 fps and just enemies at 25 fps for example) and I am pretty sure you could go away with it and have a very good game.

Of course you would need a pretty good artist to work with just 8 colors on the BOBs, but it's doable if you pick a smart palette

Alternatively, you could have a mini-beat'em up with 16 pixels wide characters drawn with just 3 colors each. It would like shit, but you could draw everything as sprites and have a 50 fps game with 2 simultaneous players and up to 6 foes on screen But 16 pixels wide and 3 colors is not enough to do anything that looks anywhere near good.

[saimon69]

My crazy idea was to change some of the colors according to a grid 8x8 made with the copper and dynamically allocated by the approximate position on screen of the bob (a bit like on the c64 and spectrum the attribute grid is changed dynamically) so that some enemies might have different colors like in the Capcom Arcade.

Why 8x8? To reduce copperlist changes and possibly create it dynamically - amiga copper has an horizontal step of 8 pixel; for the vertical just make an increment every 8

A similar technique was used in games like Lionheart or Turrican 3, albeit not that extensively: might create some color clash but is an interesting idea, just hope not too processor time consuming... by the way, if in a ZX spectrum the dynamic change is fast enough to simulate multicolor (nirvana engine), i guess on Amiga should be sorta feasible too (albeit in assembly, not in blitz basic or AMOS).

[Shatterhand]

It could be used for background, but for the BOBs itself I don't think you would be able to change colors fast enough to be usable.

I am not a very good Amiga programmer anyway, so maybe someone could prove me wrong

But honestly, Master484 did a test with redrawing Streets of Rage 2 sprites using 8 OCS colors.... and the results are pretty good:



The Ninja Fury game I showed a few posts ago, the artist was working with a palette very close to the one Master484 used on this for the enemies. With this palette I think you can do very fine.

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by Shatterhand

It could be used for background, but for the BOBs itself I don't think you would be able to change colors fast enough to be usable.

I am not a very good Amiga programmer anyway, so maybe someone could prove me wrong

But honestly, Master484 did a test with redrawing Streets of Rage 2 sprites using 8 OCS colors.... and the results are pretty good:



The Ninja Fury game I showed a few posts ago, the artist was working with a palette very close to the one Master484 used on this for the enemies. With this palette I think you can do very fine.

If we could hit stable 50hz, we can interlace 2 different versions of charcters and at least double the colors!

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by saimon69

My crazy idea was to change some of the colors according to a grid 8x8 made with the copper and dynamically allocated by the approximate position on screen of the bob (a bit like on the c64 and spectrum the attribute grid is changed dynamically) so that some enemies might have different colors like in the Capcom Arcade.

Why 8x8? To reduce copperlist changes and possibly create it dynamically - amiga copper has an horizontal step of 8 pixel; for the vertical just make an increment every 8

A similar technique was used in games like Lionheart or Turrican 3, albeit not that extensively: might create some color clash but is an interesting idea, just hope not too processor time consuming... by the way, if in a ZX spectrum the dynamic change is fast enough to simulate multicolor (nirvana engine), i guess on Amiga should be sorta feasible too (albeit in assembly, not in blitz basic or AMOS)

If we use too big copper list we'll ended up with few dma slots for bobs'

[Shatterhand]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

If we could hit stable 50hz, we can interlace 2 different versions of charcters and at least double the colors!

If you don't use Dual Playfield, yes.

My idea was to use Dual Playfield to get extra speed. For me the catch is to make scrolling stop when you have more than 1 enemy on screen (actually many fighting games do that), so you don't have to blit background tiles when you have moving enemies on screen.

Then with Dual Playfield you can move enemies without having to redraw background. This gives you a pretty good gain on performance, at the cost of having less colors.

If you use a full 16 color mode with no Dual Playfield, I don't think you'd able to get 50 hz with 2 players and 3 foes on screen, maybe not even 25 fps. (THe logic for games like this do take a hit on the CPU, you have to account for AI for the foes and you have to sort BOBs by the Y axis each frame to draw them with the correct priority, and even collision detection on this kind of game is more complex than on typical shoot'em ups and platformers, in a certain way you have to deal with 3 dimensional hit-boxes, since you move up and down but you can also jump)

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

If we use too big copper list we'll ended up with few dma slots for bobs'

hmm, is one color change (leaving a jolly color) dynamically allocated 40x20 times (and maybe optimized to not change adjacent same 8x8 element) every 1/50s a too big copperlist? I have no clue

BTW am going to make a separate thread because this is an idea i had since a while and want to see if something might come out of it

[Shatterhand]

Man, I had never noticed this before.

Some enemies on Streets of Rage 2 are identical at the bottom half. The 2 enemies on the right column of the image I posted are identical at the bottom half.

You could use this to save a lot of RAM! You could have many different enemies sharing the same blocks of graphics

[Retro1234]

I don't think its that unplayable if they gang up you haven't responded quick enough and just use the special move.

[saimon69]

And don't forget you can make player as 16-color sprites too, so will look more colorful

[Shatterhand]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

I don't think its that unplayable if they gang up you haven't responded quick enough and just use the special move.

Special move doesn't work like in the arcade version, it does not give you invencibility (also doesn't take your energy). And you can't activate it while you are in the "stunned" frame... which you stay forever when they gang you up.

Sorry bro, *NO* beat'em up game does that unless it's stupidly designed. On every beat'em up after you get hit 3 or 4 times the player goes down and then you have a little invencibility time to recover. This is game design 101. And this is just one issue with the game, it has LOTS of issues , like how you get a Health pick-up at the start of first level and then NEVER MORE, what the fuck? How there's zero variety in the way enemy attacks, you have like only 3 attackings moves, the game has no music and just 2 sound effects, enemies appear out of thin air, and in one parcticular level while the screen is still fading-in you are already being beaten by enemies (a problem that also happens on Double Dragon 2 and its completely stupid), the complete lack of presentation which doesn't even make clear when you actually beaten a level (I mean, the Amiga version doesn't even have "levels")........

And don't forget you can make player as 16-color sprites too, so will look more colorful

No you can't. You can have BOBs on a playfield drawn on top or behind a sprite, but you can't have both at the same time. If you draw the player as a sprite, all enemies will be either behind or in front of the player.