Compileable version of Alien Breed 3D II - The Killing Grounds

[pipper]

I pushed some more commits, restoring the border frame in game play and the double-height render mode for RTG. No Ammo/Weapon/Health output yet.

[abu_the_monkey]

Excellent!


hopefully when my PC has finally reinstalled the tool chain I will be able to take a look

[amipal]

As a thought regarding the menu, might it be worth using something like RTGMaster?
The menu isn't something that needs to be high-performance, and the API might allow you to knock up something quick for it.
Happy to be shot down for this - I'm not a programmer, just aware that this is something that was used for Napalm/Genetic Species/Nightlong/Crossfire.

[abu_the_monkey]

Originally Posted by pipper

Abu, somehow this points to some problem with amiga.lib
If you haven’t done so in a while, please delete the toolchain completely (even the source directory) and got clone/rebuild it from scratch. Hopefully this will fix it.

yep, that fixed it

[abu_the_monkey]

@pipper

see screen shots attached regarding 'restoring the border frame in game play'
is it meant to be like this? or is something else squiffy with my setup?

[Karlos]

I just pulled and built and it seems to be working (tested with UAE GFX 320x240). One thing I did notice is that it starts in smallscreen mode again - this is handled by sys_InitHardware, so some part of the 040 detection seems to not be working.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by abu_the_monkey

@pipper

see screen shots attached regarding 'restoring the border frame in game play'
is it meant to be like this? or is something else squiffy with my setup?

Mine also looks like that.

[Karlos]

Also a problem for the non C version but probably easier to fix in the C version, the dev overlay should render onto the back screen buffer, not the front.

[abu_the_monkey]

Originally Posted by Karlos

I just pulled and built and it seems to be working (tested with UAE GFX 320x240). One thing I did notice is that it starts in smallscreen mode again - this is handled by sys_InitHardware, so some part of the 040 detection seems to not be working.

the detection for 040 is working, but, is inverting Vid_FullScreen_b when it should be Vid_FullScreenTemp.
You can edit it in c/system.c
and also add
_Vid_FullScreenTemp_b::
directly before
Vid_FullScreenTemp_b: ds.b 1
in vid.bss.s

Originally Posted by Karlos

Mine also looks like that.

ok that's cool

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by abu_the_monkey

the detection for 040 is working, but, is inverting Vid_FullScreen_b when it should be Vid_FullScreenTemp.
You can edit it in c/system.c
and also add
_Vid_FullScreenTemp_b::
directly before
Vid_FullScreenTemp_b: ds.b 1
in vid.bss.s

Sounds like a PR is due ...

[abu_the_monkey]

Originally Posted by Karlos

Sounds like a PR is due ...

I will wait and see what pipper has to say, it might be an intentional change and part of the migration to c process he is working through.

[pipper]

I pushed one more commit that should fix the border issue.
When restoring the border and the screen resolution is smaller than 256, I chop off the according amount of pixels from the top, so the hud appears at the bottom of the screen. The visible portion of the screen is not the same as the screensize. Actually, in order to avoid problems, when allocation the RTG screen, the height will always be 256, even though only 240 lines are visible.
But the determination of the visible part of the screen size was wrong and caused the background/border restore to not copy anything.
What is also missing here, is proper placement of the render window from the top (I think we can do that easily in Vid_Present).

I started looking into how to port Draw_LineOfText() to RTG/chunky... But I'm not sure yet how to do it. Need to figure out how glyph rendering works. Essentially what we need to do is to

1. convert the planar font texture to chunky
2. convert Draw_LineOfText() to chunky rendering (while keeping the planar mode alive for AGA modes - at least for now)
3. make it so that vid_Present knows when the HUD changed and then include it in the copy/c2p
4. move AGA font rendering to chunky as well. I think not much perf will be lost if we C2P the HUD only when it got an update.

Converting the menu rendering to chunky will be lower priority.

One observation with RTG that I made... when running faster than 50Hz, the gameplay seems to run in slow-motion mode. Not a big deal on real hardware. I think this is the same problem we had earlier with fast JIT emulation. Short term this can be solved by throttling the rendering (i.e. wait for an increment in the frame counter before start rendering the next frame).
Or maybe we can switch to ChangeScreenBuffer() even for RTG screens? (Right now no double buffering is used, but weirdly I don't seem to get tearing).
On RTG, the vblank interrupt is being emulated by a 50Hz timer interrupt. This keeps music playback and gameplay speed correct even if the RTG mode runs at 60Hz or 75Hz or whatever. You can try playing with the timer interrupt and see what interesting effect it has :-)

Today I'm going to run out of my last weeks' time window of having a lot of time on my hands... I guess my contributions will slow down again... family duties :-) I know that the current C code doesn't look very nice and could use some more comments... but I wanted to get the PoC for the C migration working and get a feel of how easy/hard it would be. So far I'm pleasantly surprised.

[pipper]

WRT: Vid_FullScreenTemp... yeah, I guess I made a mistake there.
'Vid_FullScreenTemp' didn't sound like the right variable to switch. Assembly rules :-P

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by pipper

WRT: Vid_FullScreenTemp... yeah, I guess I made a mistake there.
'Vid_FullScreenTemp' didn't sound like the right variable to switch. Assembly rules :-P

Lots of variables in the assembly are referred to as temp but basically hold the current state of a value that has a default. I agree, some better naming is needed but when I started renaming these, this behaviour wasn't as obvious.

[abu_the_monkey]

cool stuff indeed, amazed how much you have got done in such a short space of time

[Karlos]

Re: Draw_LineOfText - it's not even working currently because it relies on rendering to different view in the original game. That lowest part of the screen was 640 wide and the text rendering was based around that. I believe it was a single bitplane region too and used custom glyph rendering. I recall seeing 020 bitfield instructions in there somewhere.

[pipper]

Originally Posted by Karlos

Re: Draw_LineOfText - it's not even working currently because it relies on rendering to different view in the original game. That lowest part of the screen was 640 wide and the text rendering was based around that. I believe it was a single bitplane region too and used custom glyph rendering. I recall seeing 020 bitfield instructions in there somewhere.

OOOHHH, that's why there's an assumed pitch of 80 bytes! I was wondering about that. So LineOfText() is just for the messages at the bottom of the screen? The original game would switch to a different screen resolution there?

[trixster]

Originally Posted by Karlos

While I appreciate the sentiment, have you tried Project Osiris?

Yes! and it's superb, but the dream is to play the original (which I think has the better gameplay and atmosphere of the two games) at the same resolution as the sequel. That would be something amazing to see.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by trixster

Yes! and it's superb, but the dream is to play the original (which I think has the better gameplay and atmosphere of the two games) at the same resolution as the sequel. That would be something amazing to see.

It wouldn't look as good in the same resolution: AB3D needs RTG or HAM C2P to achieve the same colour depth as the original chunky screen.

Regarding the atmosphere. I dunno, TKG had it, it's just spoiled by some of the annoying sense of incompleteness. However,.I'm trying to address that overall sentiment with my mod, which is becoming something of a remaster/re-imagining.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by pipper

OOOHHH, that's why there's an assumed pitch of 80 bytes! I was wondering about that. So LineOfText() is just for the messages at the bottom of the screen? The original game would switch to a different screen resolution there?

Yeah, line of text is used for the in game narration. It may be used by the level intro text too (without looking I can't be certain), which again is a 640 wide screen.