English Amiga Board - View Single Post - Turrican 2 MS-DOS AGA conversion

Muzza · 16 November 2021, 05:49

New release: World 3 has been added to the zone and to dropbox.
(EDIT: see next post - there is likely a serious bug in this release)

This one contains all 3 levels from World 3 (all the spaceship levels).
All enemies and bosses are working. The player can now die, but has infinite lives. There may be some balancing issue, veteran Turrican 2 players, please give feedback about whether it is too hard/easy.

Features that I know to be missing:
-The mines are supposed to emit some kind of energy weapon after being destroyed.
-The bounce weapon still only has 1 level of upgrade.
-The short success music track at the end of a level does not play.

Features that I've improved from the MS-DOS version:
-World 3-2 has a parallax layer (although it is a bit boring due to the source background graphics having only two colours)
-World 3-2 boss battle is played over a fast moving background. (Amiga version has this but PC version was static)
-World 3-3 boss battle is played over a fast moving rotating background. (again the Amiga version has this but not the PC version)

Some info on the development:

Normally the game has separate code modules, so the code that controls the enemies is only in RAM for the levels that need it. I've made the mistake of not testing on real hardware recently and discovered today that something has broken it (works fine under emulation). So this build has the code modules turned off - the only difference to the end user is the loading times and how much Fast RAM it requires. But I do need to fix this next and I'm not particularly looking forward to painful debugging cycle of transferring files between PC and Amiga, running it, crashing it, rebooting, etc.

If you read one of my previous posts, I had 95% of this demo ready more than a month ago. So why has taken so long? One reason is real life getting in the way - dealing with lawyers and a neighbour dispute has zapped a lot of time. The other reason is that I've made a large change to the way I develop the game. I had created a tool that allowed you to change everything - you could redo all graphics, music, maps and enemy behaviour and then have it output a completely different game. I thought this was a good idea when I started, but in the end it resulted in spending 90% of my time working on the tool, and the complexity was growing out of control. So I've completely cut down the tool to the basics that I need to get the game done and hopefully going forward I can put 90% of my time into the game and only 10% into the tool.

Anyway, I hope some of you enjoy this, and that it actually runs on your hardware!

16 November 2021, 05:49	#195
Muzza Registered User Join Date: Sep 2019 Location: Sydney Posts: 357	New release: World 3 has been added to the zone and to dropbox. (EDIT: see next post - there is likely a serious bug in this release) This one contains all 3 levels from World 3 (all the spaceship levels). All enemies and bosses are working. The player can now die, but has infinite lives. There may be some balancing issue, veteran Turrican 2 players, please give feedback about whether it is too hard/easy. Features that I know to be missing: -The mines are supposed to emit some kind of energy weapon after being destroyed. -The bounce weapon still only has 1 level of upgrade. -The short success music track at the end of a level does not play. Features that I've improved from the MS-DOS version: -World 3-2 has a parallax layer (although it is a bit boring due to the source background graphics having only two colours) -World 3-2 boss battle is played over a fast moving background. (Amiga version has this but PC version was static) -World 3-3 boss battle is played over a fast moving rotating background. (again the Amiga version has this but not the PC version) Some info on the development: Normally the game has separate code modules, so the code that controls the enemies is only in RAM for the levels that need it. I've made the mistake of not testing on real hardware recently and discovered today that something has broken it (works fine under emulation). So this build has the code modules turned off - the only difference to the end user is the loading times and how much Fast RAM it requires. But I do need to fix this next and I'm not particularly looking forward to painful debugging cycle of transferring files between PC and Amiga, running it, crashing it, rebooting, etc. If you read one of my previous posts, I had 95% of this demo ready more than a month ago. So why has taken so long? One reason is real life getting in the way - dealing with lawyers and a neighbour dispute has zapped a lot of time. The other reason is that I've made a large change to the way I develop the game. I had created a tool that allowed you to change everything - you could redo all graphics, music, maps and enemy behaviour and then have it output a completely different game. I thought this was a good idea when I started, but in the end it resulted in spending 90% of my time working on the tool, and the complexity was growing out of control. So I've completely cut down the tool to the basics that I need to get the game done and hopefully going forward I can put 90% of my time into the game and only 10% into the tool. Anyway, I hope some of you enjoy this, and that it actually runs on your hardware! Last edited by Muzza; 16 November 2021 at 06:42.