Quote:
Originally Posted by Photon
This is a long thread for what is an extremely simple and dumb game (Doom).
|
It's not Doom. Whether it will be 'extremely simple and dumb' depends on the level design. I like 3D games with more exploration and puzzles than shooting, but 'simple and dumb' can be good too if well executed.
Quote:
|
The first attempts at textured 3D or semi 2D were indeed slow on PC. Those who forget played it years after release. This is not bad code, just low performance hardware in your $1500 PC and devs trusting to users upgrading.
|
That's right. Coding for a machine that nobody has (because it's far too expensive or doesn't exist yet) isn't bad, it's the user's fault for buying the game and expecting it to run at a reasonable speed on his (soon to be) outdated hardware! This game I wrote for the Amiga in 1987 with full raytraced 3D isn't badly coded, it's just waiting for a powerful enough machine to run it!
Quote:
|
But chunky alone doesn't help with a slow CPU. The ways in which resolution is reduced with the bitplane tricks makes us accept it, and in fact without bitplanes, it might not be possible. As in, you don't no longer have to process 8bpp bandwidth.
|
That's the main idea behind bitplanes - you can fine tune the color depth and memory requirements to suit the application. Most other home computers had ad hoc display modes that used various combinations of sub-byte chunky pixels, character-based tiled graphics with attribute color, NTSC chrominance tricks etc., often with peculiar limitations. The Amiga did away with all that and gave us a clean, flexible and expandable bitmap system with higher performance which was easier to work with.
Bitplanes do have the disadvantage of having to do several writes to change the color of one pixel, but this doesn't become a major handicap until you have a large number of bitplanes and want to set one pixel at a time (a technique that most game programmers avoided like the plague due to high overhead on graphics that weren't mapped 1 byte per pixel).
It's understandable therefore that the Amiga's designers didn't consider adding a chunky mode, and stuck to that philosophy for AGA as well (remembering that chunky textured-mapped 3D games were not a thing when it was designed!). Still, it's a pity that Commodore's engineers didn't think ahead enough to put a chunky mode in AGA. And now that real-time fully raytraced games are a thing, we can say it was a pity they didn't implement that too!