Beats of Fire

[ImmortalA1000]

Yeah keep plugging away, looking nice

After I get to grips with 6510 M/C programming I will try wrapping my brain around 68k and also ways to use the chipset. Whilst Blitz would have been OK for my Buck Rogers game it certainly would not have made it possible to do much with my Gradius 32 colour mockups. By this time an Amiga 2000 or 4000 worth the price may surface on [pe]e-bay haha

[leathered]

[ Show youtube player ]

3 months on and here's a quick update on the current state of this project.
Firstly, my thanks for the support/advice from all of you that have taken a look here, and my apologies for any misunderstanding on my behalf. The Blitz Support Suite provided much insight besides the cia tracker player whilst other considerations have led to the development environment becoming slightly more user friendly and in time customisable.
I've been re-configuring some of the graphical aspects and doing some 'destruction testing; putting as much as I can into the memory and tailoring to suit where I can.

The demo shown here now uses 5 bitplanes with a layer of 8 attached sprites for the parallax, and runs at 50 (EDIT: actually 25 - I can't count) for the most part, although enemy collisions were turned off some time ago during the testing process. I now have an 020 testing machine using an external FD to load the adf as the internal is unreliable. Results on this and 030 are similar, the 020 showing slowdown when other objects are blitted on top of 4 enemy onscreen with busy AI. The 030 showing slowdown when pushed a little more! The most recent development is the mapping of the first 'slum' section to save memory, I'm glad it works. Of course I may return to aspects of the previous graphics setup depending on several things, but this is the development setup for now.
The development will focus on producing a playable game for the 020 which is optimised for 030. I'm considering using fast ram 030 blitting for static objects and stuff like that.

I'm thinking there will be a 'modern' options screen where various optimisations/comprimises can be considered e.g. force 50 fps/ blit every frame, max number of enemy.
There is still plenty of memory to play with (now) although the characters happily eat memory - atm just over 930kb left after loading from workbench.

The next thing to do is put the 'Hollywood' character in there and then the rest of the objects, then work on the AI and object interaction, if there's room then I can add some 'palette swap' characters before finally adding the little touches like enemies emerging from doors, and maybe some energy bars!? To me it's worthwhile spending a lot of time on this first section of the game as that's the core from which the rest of the game will build. It's been said before, (Bippy); but Final Fight is basically made up of variations upon a theme. Once the characters and weapons are in there the development should speed up.

I'll get another download going soon. Thanks for taking a look

@ImmortalA1000. Sorry for late reply! I enjoyed reading your thread some months back. Good luck with the ASM. I'm still discovering what Blitz2/ the Amiga can do but would never want to be without ASM as a point of reference. Hope you got your 4000

[desiv]

That looks great!!!

Wow..

desiv

[amiman99]

Looks nice!

[viddi]

This is an impressive demo!
I must confess that I really like the static parallax layer.
It looks more believable than its scrolling counterpart.

[frsoldier]

great work, thank you for the wip video

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by viddi

This is an impressive demo!
I must confess that I really like the static parallax layer.
It looks more believable than its scrolling counterpart.

i don't think it is static, i'm sure its scrolling 1 pixel sporadically.

[viddi]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

i don't think it is static, i'm sure its scrolling 1 pixel sporadically.

Mhh...didn´t noticed that.
Will take a look at it again.

[viddi]

Yep, I missed it somehow.
Anyway, it looks awesome!

[leathered]

Thanks everyone for taking a look.

Originally Posted by viddi

This is an impressive demo!
I must confess that I really like the static parallax layer.
It looks more believable than its scrolling counterpart.

That's what my missus said. I like it too although I'm not sure you can call it 'parallax scrolling' if it don't scroll!

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

i don't think it is static, i'm sure its scrolling 1 pixel sporadically.

That's it. The display is underscanned to 240*208, and uses 8 attached sprites for the parallax layer. That leaves 16pixels for the scroll, hardly worth it really.
The reason for the underscan is purely for the benefit of the sprite layer, will have to live with it until I can work out horizontal sprite multiplexing, or maybe just shading in some buildings using the copper.

TBH the sprite layer is about the only thing that's really AGA and even that could be done on older chipsets in the right hands (bar the colours). Then Final Fight 020 would probably be a more accurate name, although that's beyond me right now.

EDIT: Just noticed there's (unwanted) sound on the video. The sound has been really butchered since the last version and I've not worked on it bar trying the tracker player and attempting to 'mask' a sound channel for the fx, which didn't work and was abandoned in favour of working on other things. I'll return to it after some more research and try again. I'd assumed the game was silent,; guess I was just working on it with the sound unplugged!

[turrican3]

when i see your incredible job do you think it could be possible to enhance super street fighter 2 turbo because it seems they don't put all frrames in the game and don't tell tha amiga cd32 is less powerfull than a snes !!!

[turrican3]

thank you for your job and i'm happy to see new good amiga stuff

[leathered]

I was also disappointed with SSF2T as I'm sure most people were. IMO they made some poor compromises with the frames they chose to cut e.g. why include the backing off walking frames and slash some more vital ones? It seems the creators didn't really understand the vital components of the gameplay, which includes some key animation frames. The speed is also very ropey.

The non turbo version is much better. The graphics where pretty poorly done in several aspects but are fast and the gameplay is a match for the other versions. It rocks! Inspired by the DX graphic updates I looked into trying to change the .mus files used for the music by Dave Lowe, which proved impossible (for me).
The hardest thing to remake efficiently would be the AI, which was as it should be in this version - I think they got the source from Capcom.
Were it not for that and the impressive DX update from Viddi and Boo boo, I might have been working on a SF2 conversion now. This project kind of started life as a potential SF2 project, trying at great pains to get Ryu up on screen in the right resolution in a language I'd not used before. Final Fight became more appealing and seemed on the whole to be a bit easier - the AI is important for the gameplay but seems on the whole a little simpler.

Is a better version of SF2 possible? You betcha, I reckon the Amiga can handle chucking around 2 bobs at 50 fps no problem. I'm not putting my money where my mouth is yet though.

On the subject of AI - Hollywood is sliding and jump-slashing his way around the screen and Slash defends himself now. Time to put some object interaction in, collision tests, and hope it all runs quick enough

[dlfrsilver]

they did something wrong inside the code. Also, they could have used RNC propack like on the PC release, instead of using the crappy stone cracker 4.04 compressor......

[Hillsy_]

Will check this out, thanks! like to beat the crap outta people - in a video game..well maybe Final Fight, Double Dragon, Streets of Rage 2 and of course Turtles in Time, still own the Snes version

[Retro1234]

I do like the game play off SSF2 - the colour depth isn't very deep and the dimensions are not nice

The DX was really. Just viddi fixing background errors, please :-) do not think this should get in the way off any plans to do SF2 conversion

[leathered]

Originally Posted by Boo Boo

The DX was really. Just viddi fixing background errors, please :-) do not think this should get in the way off any plans to do SF2 conversion

I decided that for now it's good enough. People usually wish for an Amiga version of SF2 with the great graphics as well as the gameplay, and I'm the same. SSF2 falls short graphically by some margin but was even worse on the eyes with all those red streaks everywhere in the background. I understand what you are saying, but the DX is the way to go for now and is pretty cool.
If I thought I could pull it off I might have started a conversion but there's some intricate stuff in there, would need to get hold of an old SF2 players guide (one of the SNES magazines published one that could make you a master) to sort out the basic mechanics even before the AI.
It was with some consideration that I chose Final Fight, but I love both games. I played SF2 (all versions) so much that I can say honestly the Amiga version of SSF2 plays as well as I could wish for and I could not convert the gameplay better. But look at the MUGEN games, and the HD remix version of SSF2. Great graphics, not so hot AI on the version I had = too easy. I think one could only consider trying it if there was a lot of input on the AI front if you really want a great conversion, although I admire the fact that it was attempted in the above case and it proves it can be done well without the 'official' AI.
Phew.
This will without doubt come up again, and I haven't said I won't try - but it's a bigger undertaking. And to be sure, I've still got some way to go before most people will believe that this conversion of Final Fight will ever be finished. The first stage would be a start

[turrican3]

Originally Posted by Boo Boo

I do like the game play off SSF2 - the colour depth isn't very deep and the dimensions are not nice

The DX was really. Just viddi fixing background errors, please :-) do not think this should get in the way off any plans to do SF2 conversion

i didn't speak about this one, i spoke about ssf2turbo not ssf2.
http://hol.abime.net/2215

[leathered]

Heh heh mate. I think everybody knows that; it’s just that they’re pretty close if you’re comparing the arcade boards and the best we’ve got on the miggy is the other one The DX update also fixed it to work on CD32 and it’s great with a CD32 pad.
I think it would require a decent team to get a new SF2 conversion ‘right’, the reason it was such a world beater was the depth of gameplay. I think the turbo conversion was also made with the source from Capcom, if someone could get into it they might be able to fix the issues and ‘bring it home’. Put me down as a playtester

[dlfrsilver]

ideal would be to decompress the files from the PC release, and compare with what we have in the amiga files. (not counting picking the PC music files and convert them in order to add them on A1200).