£200 for Stunt Car Racer at 50/60 frames per second

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

but if we were going to rewrite the graphics routine, which we'd have to, it "could" use the Blitter... but even if it didn't, we could still discuss how to actually implement a polygon fill routine that would be fast enough

But emphatically we wouldn't use the blitter in any case, its a bottleneck and for legacy software only.

On 030+, its CPU all the time.

I did have Stunt Car Racer Turbo running from 32bit fastmem at one point, but it was so fast as to literally be unplayable.

The topic is really a non-starter.

The only thing that I could see as being possible, would be to resource the game, and do a serious update to to that essentially makes it Stunt Car Racer 2, or develops the game further, and if you're going to do that, you might as well ask Geoff Crammond for the source code.

[twinbee]

but you might want to specify the hardware requirements

If it needs an 030, 040, or even an 060, then so be it. WinUAE can handle those with ease anyway.

Judging by the posts here, I see this is going to be harder than I expected. So I'm going to:

DOUBLE ALL AMOUNTS.

£400 instead of £200 from my original post, £200 instead of £100 etc.

[twinbee]

Just added to my original post "No 'tweening' of graphical frames to fake the smoothness." for clarification.

Anyone up for chipping in say £50 into the pot?

[AJCopland]

What's wrong with tweening as a solution?

We had a tweening based patch submitted to the remake (http://stuntcarracerwin32.bravesites.com/) but SourceForge was being a pain at the time and mangling our repository.

I've still got it here: https://github.com/fluffyfreak/stunt...FrameratePatch

[twinbee]

The same reason TVs which try to smooth 25fps footage to 50+fps look a bit fake. Also the same reason downsampling and upsampling a sound loses quality. Take a curve, and chose three points on it. If you interpolate (linearly or otherwise), you're going to lose the high definition of the detail in the original curve (especially if there are intended spiky bits in there).

In real terms, imagine you're coming down from a jump on SCR and you hit the track hard and bounce. The interpolated version could chop off the moment of contact when hitting the road, and instead interpolate between the moment just before and just after hitting the track. It won't look good.

Also, unless the collision polling is done more frequently than the screen refresh, the physics would become more accurate if it's checking every 1/60th for hard collisions with the road or the CPU car. Input lag will be reduced too, and subtle left/right car nudges (that last a fraction of a second) could be more responsive.

Still, I very much look forward to trying your patch out! It's not something I was aware of. Can you upload an executable since I'm having trouble compiling your solution (and others may not have access to VS) ?

[Mrs Beanbag]

tbh i'm kind of surprised a game like Stunt Car Racer wasn't written to cope with a variable framerate

[john1979]

Geoff's later game, F1GP, also had a frame rate limiter which meant faster machines didn't see much benefit. But someone managed to hack the game to get extra frame rate without affecting game speed. Is a similar hack to SCR possible?

[Steve]

Originally Posted by twinbee

If it needs an 030, 040, or even an 060, then so be it. WinUAE can handle those with ease anyway.

Judging by the posts here, I see this is going to be harder than I expected. So I'm going to:

DOUBLE ALL AMOUNTS.

£400 instead of £200 from my original post, £200 instead of £100 etc.

WOW!!! £400!!! A lot of programmers can probably earn that in a day. This project could take frickin' weeks!

I tell you what, I'll do it for £15,000. Can't say fairer than that. That includes the time to learn about the Amiga hardware. It's a bargain that.

Seriously though - the best idea would be to make a faithful 60fps PC remake using modern graphics.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by Steve

This project could take frickin' weeks!

Yes, but lots of projects get done in retroland for fun and no money, and sometimes those take months or more...

I believe what he's looking for is either a quickish fix (ala the F1 patch, which sounds unlikely in this case), or to find someone else who can do it and would like to and has the time/interest to take it on on the side..
For that person, maybe they have a few projects they'd consider doing for fun, and adding a bit of money might get them to lean that way.. ;-)
The money isn't going to get someone to take it on for profit, but ....

You never know.. Hence the ask..

desiv

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

tbh i'm kind of surprised a game like Stunt Car Racer wasn't written to cope with a variable framerate

No reason for it to need it, it was written for 68000 based A500's which was the defacto standard, there was no expectation that Amigas would ever be more than that at the time.

[twinbee]

Originally Posted by desiv

For that person, maybe they have a few projects they'd consider doing for fun, and adding a bit of money might get them to lean that way.. ;-)

Pretty much this. Also, that I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is shows how eager I am to see this. Like you say, they'd probably be somewhat keen on doing this for free due to loving the game like many of us here do

As for the 15k offer... That's probably a LITTLE more than I was willing to spend currently. Maybe if I become a millionaire sometime where I'm rolling in it

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

No reason for it to need it, it was written for 68000 based A500's which was the defacto standard, there was no expectation that Amigas would ever be more than that at the time.

true, but on a 3D game the frame rate is liable to change quite a lot depending on the amount of detail visible at any time, so it's either that or deliberately hold frames for a certain time.

Originally Posted by desiv

For that person, maybe they have a few projects they'd consider doing for fun, and adding a bit of money might get them to lean that way.. ;-)

It could equally have just the opposite effect, maybe it seems weird that offering to pay someone might put them off doing it, but it can, human psychology is weird.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Steve

[SIZE="5"]
Seriously though - the best idea would be to make a faithful 60fps PC remake using modern graphics.

Or the worst idea - you'd have a game without any wow-factor. I mean come on, SCR on the Amiga was amazing because it did 3D and physics on a friggin' A500; to hell with the framerate, I didn't even notice that at the time.

[Mrs Beanbag]

SCR could be done a lot faster on an A500 i reckon... maybe not 50fps, but a lot faster. But it will take a little while to code...

seven and a half...

[AJCopland]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

SCR could be done a lot faster on an A500 i reckon... maybe not 50fps, but a lot faster. But it will take a little while to code...

seven and a half...

My guess is that it was a compromise, it could have run faster in some sections but you'd have a variable framerate.
So a tight corner or a jump would run fast with little to draw, a long straight would be slow etc.
Better to run it consistently slow and avoid the surreal nausea you can induce with constantly fluctuating frame timings.

The other thing is screen tear, it might be that 50/8.33 = 6.0 is close enough to the scan timing to avoid tearing. That's just a guess.

@twinbee, i'll see about putting together a download for you, but I'm at work right now so don't have access.

[AJCopland]

I've dumped a release of the master branch here, this is without the tweening patch but is so people can try it.

https://github.com/fluffyfreak/stunt...leases/tag/0.1

[AJCopland]

And here's the build with the SmoothFrameratePatch

https://github.com/fluffyfreak/stunt...moothFramerate

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by AJCopland

My guess is that it was a compromise, it could have run faster in some sections but you'd have a variable framerate.
So a tight corner or a jump would run fast with little to draw, a long straight would be slow etc.
Better to run it consistently slow and avoid the surreal nausea you can induce with constantly fluctuating frame timings.

This is true. But i think it is possible to write a drawing routine that is faster *all the time* not just on the easy bits. I think the key is to process the scene so that only one fill operation is needed per frame. A while ago i experimented with rendering into a data structure representing a Run Length Encoded image, and then write that out to the screen all in one go, it worked, and i did get 50fps at 320x256 (i don't remember how many bitplanes) albeit on an A1200 with a 68060... i've also been pondering the use of Binary Space Partitions for that sort of thing.

The other thing is screen tear, it might be that 50/8.33 = 6.0 is close enough to the scan timing to avoid tearing. That's just a guess.

It will be double buffered, otherwise there would be worse effects than tearing.

[ant512]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

SCR could be done a lot faster on an A500 i reckon... maybe not 50fps, but a lot faster. But it will take a little while to code...

seven and a half...

What, not til next week?

[twinbee]

Originally Posted by AJCopland

And here's the build with the SmoothFrameratePatch

https://github.com/fluffyfreak/stunt...moothFramerate

Thanks. When I try to run the exe though I get the message:

The program can't start because XINPUT1_4.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem.

Can you supply this? I'm not sure if I trust the various DLL download sites out there.