New/undergoing projects

[saimon69]

An outrun Lotus might be interesting

[jotd]

been playing with gimp gradients to try to enhance static image. I'm no expert and I also leeched the actual Lotus logo that I downscaled

both pics in 256 colors (after a 24 bit phase for gradients).

[TCD]

I took the liberty to make a comparision shot of the two Lotus cars. Left is original and right is your gradient (also scaled 2x for better visibility):

[manossg]

Sweet!

[jotd]

the CD player dashboard got a lot of gradient



The original images (32 colors) are already very good. Adding more gray nuances looks great here.

[TCD]

This time the difference is really visible



Left: original, right: jotd's 256 colour version

[sokolovic]

It would be great for a Lotus AGA, apart of more colour on screen to have :
Full screen one player mode.
An option to have music plus SFX (even "lighter" sfx would be great).
Smoother scaling of the cars.

[Gzegzolka]

Yeah, that looks awesome as above stated those would be great features.

[jotd]

I love the burled walnut graphics. No need to change anything there.

It would be great for a Lotus AGA, apart of more colour on screen to have :
Full screen one player mode.

I'll try.

An option to have music plus SFX (even "lighter" sfx would be great).

I had a run last night. The SFX are there even if music is playing. Crashing into scenery, skidding, ...

Smoother scaling of the cars.

That sounds tough... Colored cars instead of gray would be easier.

[sokolovic]

Ahaha.
Just do what you want, it was only suggestion. That's great enough to imagine someone working on an AGA enhanced lotus game by 2023 on the Amiga.

[jotd]

So far at least 32 people agree with you!

Paraj (I shared the repository with him) already started to rip assets. He created the original images by reading the original ECS files and mapping the palette. We may be 2 working on that project.

[Estrayk]

jotd, I know you made it clear at the beginning of the post that you are only going to upgrade the graphics, but would it be too much to ask you to take a look to see if it is easy to try to make LOTUS run at a higher framerate in AGA? thx

[jotd]

Lotus AGA will use fast memory, so it should be faster. Also maybe try NTSC tooltype

But the game is faster that way so maybe harder, unless I can change something on the main game clock so the speeds match.

For instance it's probably possible to make music run at proper speed with NTSC by changing the replayer like I did in Supercars 2 AGA

BTW I played the original last night on my 68060, and I found the framerate very good already. Shaun Southern can certainly code a racing game!!

[sittingduck]

Just curious - how did you get the source code? And am I right that at some point you wrote that the source code for Lotus 2 was lost?

[paraj]

Yeah, code seems quite good for the time!

I think a simple fix for NTSC could be to skip the game updates every 6th time in the vblank handler. Maybe not so great for music, but might be OK (or could switch to a CIA timer based player, but should probably use CIAB since the blitter queue assumes a5 and a6 retain their values [unless rewritten of course]!).

Using FMODE=3 and using fast RAM should free up some DMA cycles, but some of the other feature requests work against that (e.g. more colors for opponent cars), so in the end the frame rate might not be improved that much

In principle I think smoother scaling of the cars/objects might be reasonable. Too early to say obviously, but since there's much more chip ram available it should "just" be a matter of having more fine grained scaling of the sprites. Obviously this would be done automatically and not by hand tuning each scale level (dunno if that was done for the original). Here's what the car sprite(s) look like:

[jotd]

pt player music replayer uses CIA interrupts so independent from vblank. I already adapted Supercars 2 sfx replay to use that, so maybe it will be even better than the original (more sfx to play at the same time for instance).

But if you skip game updates every 6th frame, wouldn't that be slightly jerky?

I was thinking about getting the "time per tick" variable somewhere (much easier than in F/A 18 since we have the source) and change it to get more screen updates but same overall speed.

About scaling of cars, yes, it's probably very easy to figure out how the game fetches the proper frame and double the frames.

What people also requested was a "random music" mode, which would avoid to get the same tune for all tracks. Of course quite easy too.

[jotd]

Originally Posted by sittingduck

Just curious - how did you get the source code? And am I right that at some point you wrote that the source code for Lotus 2 was lost?

Got it by Codetapper who got it from Shaun Southern, like Supercars 2 & Lotus 3 code. And yes Lotus 2 code was lost (or I would have it too). I'm not sharing it to the public but only to a few people (so several people have it just in case...). Seems that it inspired paraj who spent more time on the project than me now Good!

What's good in that code is that it's only one file, no super-complex stuff like Turrican 3 (14 MB with tons of files). I used a similar model for my arcade remakes and since it builds very fast, really it's a good choice.

[sokolovic]

Wow, thanks for the info about the scaling of the car. Seeing the frame now, maybe it doesn't probably recquires to double all of them. Just one or two step between the biggers images.

Anyway don't bother with it if it is too much work... Tha actual result if very fine. If I had to choose between more car diversity or smoother scaling, maybe I'll go for the first one in fact (I didn't remember that there was just one type of same colored car in the game)

[TCD]

Originally Posted by jotd

What's good in that code is that it's only one file, no super-complex stuff like Turrican 3 (14 MB with tons of files).

Just because I stumbled over it yesterday: Unpacked (and without the Mr. Nutz files) it's almost 39 MB with 3,132 files (some might be duplicate among the disks though).

[ImmortalA1000]

I didn't like Lotus 1 for the same reason I didn't like Pitstop II on the C64. That forced half screen 1 player game was naff on both but at least on Pitstop II you had the AI driver competing with you using the second half of your screen. Also, watching the other cars drive through the road works while you had to dodge them was a bit crap too.

AFAIK Lotus III RECS system is the reason why Lotus III on anything below CD32/A1200 (via AGAfix crack) is not same update quality as OCS Lotus II AND if the Amiga Lotus II source code is lost that's really bad.

There was some game that 100% used a hack of the Lotus engine with different graphics etc (same SFX even though it was a Formula 1 car). Good luck getting anything out of that guy though, he clammed up well over a decade ago when a youtube video surfaced.