Metro Siege: new arcade quality a500 brawler!

[Retro1234]

Can't wait to play more

[Don_Adan]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Greetings from MiSTer, runs just fine here

I don't say it too often but - wow. Brawlers are probably my favourite action genre and this one is simply amazing. No doubt the best modern-retro action game I have ever played, and also absolutely on par with old Amiga AND console action AAA classics. This game literally kicks ass!

-4 enemies are just fine, no need to crowd the screen more than that

-a few more breakables / pick-up-ables wouldn't hurt

-the shake effect is initially cool but after a while started to be slightly irritating. Perhaps best reserve it for big enemies, or put it in options?

-a modern malady: it might sound silly but I couldn't stop thinking that the 1st level would definitely cause at least some stir in certain quarters. Basically, you have a white dude beating up on only brown/black guys, and then a big white cop comes and whistles them in too. In our kerrazy world it is bound to rub some people the wrong way - even if it might make perfect sense from the game's narrative angle. Just sayin'

4+2 is easy game
4+1 is normal game
5+1 is hard game

If player finished 4+1 version, then perhaps will be try 5+1 version.

[saimon69]

My unhinged opinion:
Please leave forced DEI off Amiga, is already doing a lot of damage out there

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Predseda

Congratulations, you are the first

Stop it please, I do not think it is needed.

This.

[-=ARA=-]

Just tried the Demo!

Wow, this is really amazingly good.
Not only is it high frame rate and really well drawn graphics,
it was also all the details. Like in the subway station, when the trains pass by the paper note reacts to the wind, the train headlights light up the surroundings.
Clearly much work and love has been put into this piece of software.
Well done!

I´m curious to what the last playable character will be...

Oh, and bug reporting.
I personally did not encounter any bugs att all.
was lazy and used Winuae A500 with Kick 1.3 512+512

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

"sensitive" people will read something no matter what you create.
If they wanna find something to be offended, they will find it.

I call this the Proposed Internet rule 68 (double of 34): if exist someone will be offended by it

[lmimmfn]

Originally Posted by saimon69

My unhinged opinion:
Please leave forced DEI off Amiga, is already doing a lot of damage out there

100%

Its nonsense.

[pixie]

Originally Posted by saimon69

My unhinged opinion:
Please leave forced DEI off Amiga, is already doing a lot of damage out there

We are already DEI, we're but a fringe of a fringe of a fringe. Why so much melodrama. What does it have to do with DEI anyway...

[BSzili]

People are too busy shooting the messenger, and now I might get caught in the crossfire just for saying this

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

. What chance does a tiny publisher have, if a Kotaku or some such gets a whiff, and all of a sudden you maybe get booted off Switch or some other potentially huge market?

It would be the best publicity ever for an Amiga game in 2024.
Pure Streisand effect.

And don't forget that if it was because of offended people, we would'nt have Cannon Fodder on the first place.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

It would be the best publicity ever for an Amiga game in 2024.
Pure Streisand effect.

And don't forget that if it was because of offended people, we would'nt have Canning Fodder on the first place.

So no SPAM for my breakfast? o_O

(it was Cannon Fodder, btw - below obligatory Ahoy video)

[ Show youtube player ]

[alpine9000]

Here is some trivia and details on how Metro Siege works internally.

The coding project's internal name is Frieza, not to be confused with the teams internal name for the game which is RoidRage. Why not call t MetroSiege ? The game had undergone quite a lot of development before we settled on the name.

engine9000 has a kernel/operating system named Goku. The kernel hides the differences between ADF and System Friendly host environments from applications and provides the following facilities:

• Hardware interface
• Amiga OS interface (For HD version)
• Memory management
• File loading/saving
• Music player
• Sound effects engine
• Screen management
• Application loading
• Keyboard/Joystick reading
• Networking (if configured)
• Debug functions (if configured)

Next we have a shared library named Vegeta. This library contains code shared by some applications but not all. This currently includes:

• Retro animator character support
• Alarm system for running code in the future
• Random number generation

The Goku kernel code loads applications. These applications are developed using the Gohan framework. The same applications run unchanged between the ADF and Hard Drive versions with the Goku kernel shielding the applications from the host environment details.

These applications use a custom hunk format named DragonBall. This format has an option to compress some of the hunk sections and then the format becomes DragonBallZ - you will see in the HD version of metro siege many files with a ".dbz" extension - now you know where that originates

Now we move onto the applications, these are quite boring and don't have interesting names except the main game which is named roidrage.

roidrage goes a step further and it loads a level effects engine for each level. These again don't have interesting names, they are just named for example l1e.dbz for (level 1 effects)

If you look at the files in the HD version, you might wonder why all the files have number prefixes . This is how we lay out the files on the floppy version such that when it load multiple files, the floppy drive head doesn't need to skip between tracks out of order. The goal is to load nice and sequentially. The files are written to the floppy in alphabetical order, so I just have to change the name of the files to match the order that the game loads them. Doing this massively improved the floppy loading time (moving the disk head is slow, so skipping around the disk really slows down loading).

Why do we have such a complex architecture ? It's mainly about minimising the code we have loaded in ram at one time. Also Metro Siege also works on many other platforms, and this design makes it easier to maintain a single codebase that supports many platforms.

If people find this kind of stuff interesting I'd be happy to do more writeups about the way MetroSiege works internally.

[Amigajay]

Interesting stuff!

Btw any idea why the game won’t boot on a CDTV? I see you put a rmtm file in the startup for that purpose, i even remade the iso and it still won’t boot even with extra memory, is this a known issue, will it be fixed for final release and boot on a CDTV with extra memory like Worthy?

[sokolovic]

Alpine9000, yep very interesting.
Also, I've just played the demo today and it is probably one of the most impressive OCS game I've ever seen. Really looking forward to buy a physical copy.
The game is so much polished, that's really amazing. Congrats !

[alpine9000]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Interesting stuff!

Btw any idea why the game won’t boot on a CDTV? I see you put a rmtm file in the startup for that purpose, i even remade the iso and it still won’t boot even with extra memory, is this a known issue, will it be fixed for final release and boot on a CDTV with extra memory like Worthy?

Good question - we had a report of someone running it successfully on a CDTV on our discord. If you can reproduce the failure on an emulator we can more easily work out what's going on.

[phx]

I'm currently on holiday, so I cannot test it on real hardware, but this game is truly a masterpiece! Congratulations!

Originally Posted by alpine9000

Here is some trivia and details on how Metro Siege works internally.

I love reading technical details, thanks! Which development environment and which tools did you use for development, design (graphics, music, maps) and debugging?
Any chance you will release the full source text at some point in the future (in a few years, or so)?

[alpine9000]

Originally Posted by phx

I'm currently on holiday, so I cannot test it on real hardware, but this game is truly a masterpiece! Congratulations!

I love reading technical details, thanks! Which development environment and which tools did you use for development, design (graphics, music, maps) and debugging?

OS Builds on any linux or mac - we have an online build system the "creatives" can use to generate builds to test new assets

Editor Emacs with clangd for code completion etc

Compiler Bebbo's GCC which I modifed to use VASM/VLINK instead of bintutils - thanks phx I also use vasm and vlink for the asm files. I make extensive use of many vlink features as none of my binaries except the main Hard Drive version executable are standard Amiga hunk files.

Debugging 95% of the code is portable, so depending on the bug, I debug the Mac version using lldb, if it's Amiga specific code and I can't debug with print statements, then I use FS-UAE's debugger. The other benefit of the mac version is all the C code is checked using the various C runtime sanitisers that are built into modern compilers.

The engine has a nice debug serial output system which I use for debugging - any "print" statement is sent out the serial port via TCP which on an emulator I capture and display with "nc" - on a real Amiga I hook up a serial cable.

Maps we just use images, which my custom tools form into tilesets (including background animations). I do go via Tiled format, but we rarely (if ever) open the Tiled format files.

Profiling I use various profiling strategies. Firstly a system that involves using 68000 code to self profile - mainly useful for profiliing larger code blocks where the profiling code itself doesn't cause too much overhead. Secondly, I have a benchmarking system where the game runs an automatic play through, and totals the number of raster lines used as well as the maximum used for any frame. Very handy for quickly estimating if a change is a net benefit. Lastly I have a hacked version of FS-UAE that counts instructions and ties them back to symbols. I haven't used this one in a while.

Graphics The main interesting tool I can mention for graphics is Retro Animator by earok. This is the tool used for almost all animations. I believe the team mainly use ProMotion for the actual image creation. From RetroAnimator to engine9000 is a bunch of custom tools I developed.

Music I will leave this up to tsak to answer the tools he uses for creation of music/audio - we use P61 format with either 3 or 2 channels for the music, with a dedicated channel(s) for SFX - the train levels amazing are only two channels for the music, one channel for train SFX and another channel for general sfx.

Emulators I mainly use FS-UAE as I am on a Mac. I do use WinUAE via wine (which works great these days). I find that running 68040 with MMU and MuForce/mungwall is a great way to find bugs in the Amiga specific code.

Real Amigas Finally I have many real Amigas of different specs, A600 standard with real floppy, A500 with ACA500+, A1200 stock, A1200 with blizzard 030, CD32 and maybe some more I have forgotten - The A500 with ACA500+ is the best system for testing - if I had to pick only one, that would be it.

Originally Posted by phx

Any chance you will release the full source text at some point in the future (in a few years, or so)?

I think there is a good chance

[Flytag]

Originally Posted by alpine9000

Good question - we had a report of someone running it successfully on a CDTV on our discord. If you can reproduce the failure on an emulator we can more easily work out what's going on.

Hello, It's me who play on CDTV, but I'm using external Gotek to play ADF files. And I have switched the CDTV to boot in Amiga 500. Sorry , I don't tested it with CD-Rom.

EDIT: I read you need also a CDTV.TM file to boot on CDTV. Is there this file in the ISO?

[Master484]

Just tried the demo, great stuff guys.

Especially the subway train at level 2 is really impressive. This sets the standard for all subway levels in future Amiga games.

What I also find curious, is that every brawler on 16-bit consoles are also limited to max 4 enemies. Snes Final Fight port. Snes Captain Commando port. I didn't played Streets of Rage on Genesis, but from what I saw, it seems they are also limited to that number

The consoles rely on hardware sprites, and with these come limitations, such as the maximum amount of sprites on screen, or the maximum amount of sprite pixels on the same scanline.

For example Final Fight on the SNES still has sprite flicker in some situations, despite the reduced sprite sizes and being a one player only game.

But on the Amiga these kind of games usually use bobs for all moving characters, which have no such limits. The more you draw them, the slower the game runs, but theoretically you can draw as many as you like.

For example the first level of the Turtles Coin-op Amiga conversion has 2 players + 6 enemies at once + a screen wide animated fire effect, all made with bobs. But the game runs slowly, sometimes taking 6 frames to update the screen. Also the Amiga version of Bad Dudes vs Dragon Ninja seems to have at least 10 enemies on screen + 2 players.

But in order to run the game smoothly, 4 or 5 enemies at once is perhaps the best solution for the Amiga as well.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Flytag

Hello, It's me who play on CDTV, but I'm using external Gotek to play ADF files. And I have switched the CDTV to boot in Amiga 500. Sorry , I don't tested it with CD-Rom.

EDIT: I read you need also a CDTV.TM file to boot on CDTV. Is there this file in the ISO?

That explains why it worked for you (using adfs) and not for me using the iso.

Using the pre-made ISO gave me a red CDTV screen which means its not recognised as a compatible disc. (I.e they may have used a CD32.tm file)

Using the ISO i made, it at least cleared the trademark screen, but was left with black screen after that and no more loading.