How are the Demo scene people able to create very fast 3D polygon routines for OCS?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by carlosgod

Or more precisely, why can't commercial game developers replicate the technique?

Just found a great post for you: https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php...67#post1698867

[carlosgod]

Originally Posted by TCD

Just found a great post for you: https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php...67#post1698867

Okay, I guess I should have read that thread first before posting this one... but this is all really mind opening! Also, I finally got the backstory behind Brian the Lion's really cool intro scene, which means one of my life-long question since childhood days have been answered - so thank you for directing me to that thread!

On that note I checked out the 2024 Revision Demoparty which was mentioned by one of the responders. There was a lot of neat 3D/rotozoom stuff in there (the bitmap textured tunnel demo was cool... could that have been used for parts of the tunnel sequence in Stardust on OCS?).

However, "Attack of the Ego Bots" was really puzzling (at least for me). Ignoring all the controversies regarding the use of AI to generate the images for now, at first, I thought it was a bunch of HAM6 or HAM8 pictures. However, it turned out it was some sort of extreme Copper augmentation on Hi-res mode. I think someone from the team that created Hologon came up with this concept or was behind the coding used in the demo. How was that done I wonder? Is this what they call dynamic high-res? Nonetheless, I guess it goes to show that not every Amiga intro screen/ slide show that has 500+ colors need to use HAM!

[ Show youtube player ]

While the author said that this technique hogs up most of the DMA cycles so it's clearly not practical for games that requires a lot of computation, it makes me wonder if point and click adventure games that relies on still image and may be a couple of sprites could have used this technique. I could be wrong, but I suspect that the game Universe use similar technique (EHB mode and change first 15 colors every scanline), but it was low-res and had far fewer colors so didn't look anywhere as good. I suppose the issue would be how many of these hi-res still images you can squeeze onto a disk - I think the demo only managed to display12 images and that used up an entire disk so you'd probably need a dozen disks to make a decent adventure game.

[ Show youtube player ]

Anyway, a lot of really cool stuff, and I hope somehow these demoscenes techniques/sorcery - regardless of whether it's considered 'cheating' or not - find its way into next gen Amiga OCS games.