Ultra Violent Worlds - Best AGA Graphics?

[lionagony]

I'd played the first level of Ultra Violent Worlds before but despite my love of shmups I'm not very good at them. So last night I got a trainer for the game and went through the whole thing. Wow! The graphics are incredible, those colours, that palette. It really is a feast for the eyes, especially the second and fourth level, look at this video at 14:07 and 25:04 for example [ Show youtube player ] The sense of depth from the art syle and the vertical parallax is unprecedented. I was really blown away. It's definitely the best use of colour on any Amiga game I've seen.

Sadly the game seems to be extremely unappreciated. There is only one comment on Lemon Amiga and a combined 5 comments on all the Youtube videos. I just wanted to give it some love. Banshee, Super Stardust, Reshoot R and parts of Wendetta (especially the later levels) are really great examples of the AGA chipset. It's funny too that they are all shmups, but I think in terms of graphics Ultra Violent Worlds might take the top spot.

[CCRider]

It plays like sh!t.

And, since one can't polish a turd...

[DanyPPC]

I remember Wendetta 2175, but surely not the best AGA shoot'em up.

[lionagony]

Just talking graphics not gameplay. Here's something I'm unsure of, Ultra Violent Worlds requires 2MB of Fast Ram. Does having Fast Ram help improve the graphics in any way? I know it would help having longer levels and maybe more enemies on the screen at once but a stock A1200 should be able to display the exact same graphics for a shorter time right?

[Cris1997XX]

Originally Posted by lionagony

Just talking graphics not gameplay. Here's something I'm unsure of, Ultra Violent Worlds requires 2MB of Fast Ram. Does having Fast Ram help improve the graphics in any way? I know it would help having longer levels and maybe more enemies on the screen at once but a stock A1200 should be able to display the exact same graphics for a shorter time right?

FastRAM unlocks the 68020's full potential, making it run at 14MHz instead of 7 like the original 68000 (It's not much of a difference, but hey). If you've got enough processor grunt you could just use AGA as a framebuffer and render everything with the CPU

[lionagony]

Originally Posted by Cris1997XX

FastRAM unlocks the 68020's full potential, making it run at 14MHz instead of 7 like the original 68000 (It's not much of a difference, but hey). If you've got enough processor grunt you could just use AGA as a framebuffer and render everything with the CPU

OK. So thinking about it would this be correct? The stock A1200 could display the same graphics as Ultra Violent Worlds but it would run slowly. So in order to have a game that looked that good with 256 colours and ran at a good rate you would need Fast Ram. I think I finally figured out why everyone is always saying Commodore should have included Fast Ram with the A1200/CD32.

[lionagony]

Also would love to know if anyone can explain how they did the vertical parallax. I was thinking some of it might be with 64 pixel wide AGA sprites but there are also horizontal platforms and such that scroll by. That second level is a graphical masterpiece.

[jotd]

I'd say dual playfield for the parallax (16+16 colors total, with some possible dynamic color changes) and blitter in copy mode for the vertical extra parallax bridge (or combined 16 color sprite but panel already uses that, not sure it's possible to do 2x15 color combined sprites with a different palette), and 64 pixels combined wide sprite for side status panel that's for sure (Banshee uses the same trick)

Using blitter in basic copy mode (no masking/cookie cutting) on aligned bytes saves bandwidth. Not as fast as a sprite but much faster than "cookie cut" blitting.

Technically impressive but seems not that good at gameplay.

[lionagony]

Originally Posted by jotd

I'd say dual playfield for the parallax (16+16 colors total, with some possible dynamic color changes) and blitter in copy mode for the vertical extra parallax bridge (or combined 16 color sprite but panel already uses that, not sure it's possible to do 2x15 color combined sprites with a different palette), and 64 pixels combined wide sprite for side status panel that's for sure (Banshee uses the same trick)

Using blitter in basic copy mode (no masking/cookie cutting) on aligned bytes saves bandwidth. Not as fast as a sprite but much faster than "cookie cut" blitting.

Technically impressive but seems not that good at gameplay.

You really think it uses dual playfield? I guess it's possible and they just picked an amazing palette but it really looks like more colours than that to me. The HOL entry https://hol.abime.net/1807 emphasizes that it was advertised as using 256 colour AGA graphics. From the discussion of Fast Ram I was thinking that maybe they did actually use all 256 colours and then
were able to move it around at 25 fps because of the extra ram. If you play it on a big screen the colours really pop unlike anything else I've seen on the Amiga before. It was also simultaneously released on the same CD for the PC in 1998 [ Show youtube player ] which looks identical except for a somewhat different HUD and an extra intro and outro so that also made me think they used less specific Amiga tricks and just more brute force like the PC was probably coded. I'm just guessing though.

[redblade]

Originally Posted by lionagony

Sadly the game seems to be extremely unappreciated. There is only one comment on Lemon Amiga and a combined 5 comments on all the Youtube videos. I just wanted to give it some love. Banshee, Super Stardust, Reshoot R and parts of Wendetta (especially the later levels) are really great examples of the AGA chipset. It's funny too that they are all shmups, but I think in terms of graphics Ultra Violent Worlds might take the top spot.

Those banging techno beats on the Wendetta soundtrack

Is it techno or hard trance?

[Reynolds]

Wendetta2175 is somewhat stunning in the pseudo3D tunnels, but not even in every levels it contains. The sidescrolling ones are more likely boring for me. The audio fits well to the game anyway, but the endpart... well...

Ultra Violent Worlds looks really good, but it's soundtracks are rather annoying for me, but that's just one opinion. Surely thought for the first time that the audio replayer is buggy
Can't recall the playability, but will give a go a bit later.

If we are talking about AGA shooters, obviously Banshee is on the top of (my) list, but XP8 also visually impressive. Can't tell anything about it in terms of gameplay, as I wasn't really in the shooters way back when it came out but preferred other genres, so did not spend enough time to get caught. Will give a second chance for that one I think.

[jotd]

Originally Posted by lionagony

You really think it uses dual playfield?

No, you're probably right. I was also guessing. I tend to see dual playfield everywhere.


Here they're using sprite for the side panel, hardware scrolling, but extra layers or narrow and rectangular objects (so bliiter can work in direct copy) wheneven possible.


Then smart use of 25fps half-updates.

[gimbal]

Why I find Banshee nice to look at above all is because it depicts a recognisable world. You are on a journey, you are actually crossing an ocean to reach another land and shoot the crap out of it.

This game... No. Doesn't do anything for me. There is more to graphics than technical wizardry, FPS and smoothly transitioning animation frames.

[jotd]

Banshee is the only AGA shooter that I find enjoyable. The graphics are Bitmap bros style, with superb palette, the sfx are great, there are also nice rain effects, and the game is really good.

XP8 and other "modern" AGA shooters are crap in comparison, even if they can be visually more impressive / technically advanced. But

- switching from pixel art to crap 3D rendered models in 256 colors looks cheap
- gameplay is often not good enough
- they're often using 16 million color super-slow fade ins/outs for intro screens - THAT really drives me crazy!

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Cris1997XX

FastRAM unlocks the 68020's full potential, making it run at 14MHz instead of 7 like the original 68000 (It's not much of a difference, but hey). If you've got enough processor grunt you could just use AGA as a framebuffer and render everything with the CPU

I'd be curious to know how does Wing Commander on CD32 with 256 colors runs much better than the Amiga 500 version in 16 colors if the CPU of the CD32 was running at the same speed. What make the difference ?
Same thing for Frontier much better on a stock A1200 than on A500.

[S0ulA55a551n]

Originally Posted by jotd

- switching from pixel art to crap 3D rendered models in 256 colors looks cheap

!

Hard agree, IMHO it looks shite.

That side panel really draws your eye from the game as well, cant find the words to describe the effect it causes. Like its from another game plonked on top

[TCD]

Since watching the footage yesterday I thought about what I didn't like about the graphics. They are colorful and look okay as elements, but together they look odd. Especially that part around the 14 minute mark looks pretty random. Doesn't help that the game looks very repetitive and boring too.

[lionagony]

My original post was actually meant to say that I think Ultra Violent Worlds has the best graphics of any AGA game, not just shooters. I just happened to notice that for some reason out of all the AGA games the shooters are the ones that have the best graphics, to me at least.

Originally Posted by sokolovic

I'd be curious to know how does Wing Commander on CD32 with 256 colors runs much better than the Amiga 500 version in 16 colors if the CPU of the CD32 was running at the same speed. What make the difference ?
Same thing for Frontier much better on a stock A1200 than on A500.

That's a good point. Obviously the 14 MHz processor helped things in some regards. Wing Commander CD32 also has been said to be the only game to use the Akiko chip. I was unsure if Fast RAM would make as big a difference as some people claim but Ultra Violent Worlds has changed my perspective. I think it was the only 2D action game to ever require Fast RAM (the magazine reviews of Wendetta say it also requires Fast RAM but HOL doesn't mention it so not 100% sure).

Now without the original coders chiming in I also don't know for sure if Fast RAM was the only or even any of the difference in how good Ultra Violent Worlds looks but it makes sense that it helps free up the processor to move more colourful screens around. If UVW really is a 256 colour scrolling action game and the lack of Fast RAM pushed most developers to only use say 64 colours for speed purposes than Fast RAM in 1992/93 would have made a significant difference to the visual quality of our action games.

[AestheticDebris]

I think one of the problems with using 3D rendered sprites is that the lighting on them often looks "off" and is sometimes inconsistent amongs different items on screen. The end result just looks a bit ugly and isn't nearly as impressive as carefully hand pixelled images can look.

Some of the parallax in UVW looks like it was done because it could be, rather than because it makes visual sense (especially the bits around the 14 minute mark in that video) and so while it is technically impressive, it's visually quite off putting. IMHO at least.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by lionagony

That's a good point. Obviously the 14 MHz processor helped things in some regards. Wing Commander CD32 also has been said to be the only game to use the Akiko chip. I was unsure if Fast RAM would make as big a difference as some people claim but Ultra Violent Worlds has changed my perspective. I think it was the only 2D action game to ever require Fast RAM (the magazine reviews of Wendetta say it also requires Fast RAM but HOL doesn't mention it so not 100% sure).

I'm pretty sure Wing Commander CD32 doesn't use Akiko at all, not according to the coder of the game himself (see here : https://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p...1&postcount=19).
Anyway the CD32 version just runs fine on the A1200 too, much better than the 16 colors A500 version (and obviously, the OCS version runs also much better).
And there is multiple examples of OCS games running much better on a stock A1200, thanks to the more powerful CPU.
That affirmation saying that a stock A1200 or a CD32 runs at the same speed than a 68000/ 7mhz is heavily contradicted by the facts (and by SysInfo).