Blood Amiga Port released

[Drittz78]

Brings back memories playing Blood. Really hope this gets the treatment that Quake and Doom have received for console. Great to see it released on Amiga as well.

[BSzili]

Blood Fresh Supply could have been ported to the consoles, but unfortunately Atari pulled the plug on the project pretty early. This is why not even the PC version receives updates anymore

[TCD]

Originally Posted by BSzili

This is why not even the PC version receives updates anymore

The 'Atari' on Steam that is I would guess. It's hard to tell who is behind them and they surely have no clue about the IPs they own. Imagine them let somebody fix Blood 2...

[Estrayk]

I've been testing the new version and made some video captures for BSzili to see the FPS on real machines.
Real Amiga 1200 AGA output with 68060 accelerator at 50Mhz
Real Amiga 1200 AGA output with 68060 accelerator at 80Mhz (2:38)

[ Show youtube player ]

[BSzili]

Originally Posted by TCD

The 'Atari' on Steam that is I would guess. It's hard to tell who is behind them and they surely have no clue about the IPs they own. Imagine them let somebody fix Blood 2...

They started out as GT Interactive, then Infogrames purchased them, which in turn got renamed to Atari, Inc. soon after. So it's now basically a branch of what used to be called Infogrames.

Originally Posted by Estrayk

I've been testing the new version and made some video captures for BSzili to see the FPS on real machines.
Real Amiga 1200 AGA output with 68060 accelerator at 50Mhz
Real Amiga 1200 AGA output with 68060 accelerator at 80Mhz (2:38)

[ Show youtube player ]

Very cool, thanks! There's an obvious performance hit, but I didn't expect it to run this well at 50 MHz. The first level is a good stress test as the cemetery in front of the morgue has a lot of voxel gravestones. In later levels you only see them used sparingly.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by BSzili

They started out as GT Interactive, then Infogrames purchased them, which in turn got renamed to Atari, Inc. soon after. So it's now basically a branch of what used to be called Infogrames.

Yeah, I remembered something like that. It's a shame really. Doom and Quake are good examples of how to make old games accessible on modern hardware. It's a shame that 'Atari' doesn't seem to see any potential in the Blood IP.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by TCD

Imagine them let somebody fix Blood 2...

It might just happen that Nightdive picks it up - heck maybe that is one of the four games they have in the pipeline currently. They already bagged the first Blood against everyone's expectations, so they may just follow it up by fixing one of gaming history's tragedies.

[TCD]

After what they did to Blade Runner I'm a bit less optimistic, but we'll see what they'll come up next. Exhumed was fun, so I'd say it's a coin toss if their next release (if it even is Blood 2) will be good.

Unreal (and Unreal 2...) could also use a bit of love and care

[gimbal]

Whatever they're working on besides System Shock (which looks and sounds awesome), the next release is probably going to be Quake 2. It would be stupid not to go for it after the (continued) success of their Quake 1 remaster.

[BSzili]

A new version is out on Aminet. This update adds cutscene support, the required files are listed in the readme. 90s pre-rendered FMVs didn't age well, but the voice acting is still great. Smacker playback is surprisingly CPU-intensive, and Monolith didn't include any keyframes in their videos, so expect some dropped frames unless you have a very fast system.
Besides the cutscenes there are some general performance improvements, that should reduce stutters when there's a lot of action and hopefully improve the average framerate.

[CrashMidnick]

Thanks BSzili for your hard work. Working great here with B1260@80 (AGA).

[BSzili]

Thanks for testing, it's good to hear it's working well on your setup!
Where it's not running that well is 32MB setups, as the additional static buffers for voxels and the increased executable size ate up too much memory. Blood's resource system doesn't use Build's cache, so running out of memory and fragmentation can be a big problem. Making voxels to use Build's cache system was fairly easy, but loading new sound samples from RFF files can still crash the game if the system memory gets eaten up. This won't be easy to rework

[wiz12]

In the instructions it says to copy these files for optional cutscenes - "CS1.SMK, ..., CSCS6.SMK, CS1822M.WAV, ..., CS6822M.WAV (optional, cutscenes)".

I the gog version I have where I get the files, the CS1822.Wav to CS6822.Wav files are missing and the cs1.smk etc have .ogv file extensions rather than .smk, would they work if I just rename them to .smk?

[BSzili]

OGV is a different format with Theora + Vorbis compressed video/audio, 68k Amigas are not powerful enough to decode it in real time. In the GOG version the SMK and WAV files in game.gog and game.ins which is a renamed bin/cue CD image. On Windows I can make a copy of game.ins called game.cue and open it using UltraISO to extract them.

[wiz12]

Originally Posted by BSzili

OGV is a different format with Theora + Vorbis compressed video/audio, 68k Amigas are not powerful enough to decode it in real time. In the GOG version the SMK and WAV files in game.gog and game.ins which is a renamed bin/cue CD image. On Windows I can make a copy of game.ins called game.cue and open it using UltraISO to extract them.

Thanks, that worked. I used Izarc to extract the files.

[BSzili]

That's good to hear! For the next version I'll add a note about game.gog and game.ins for the GOG version.

[BSzili]

A new version is available on Aminet. It reduces the overall memory usage a bit, and the load time between the levels. The loading of the first map won't be affected by this, as there are a lot of resources that have to be shoveled into memory.

[wiz12]

Originally Posted by BSzili

A new version is available on Aminet. It reduces the overall memory usage a bit, and the load time between the levels. The loading of the first map won't be affected by this, as there are a lot of resources that have to be shoveled into memory.

Thanks for your continued updates to this great game BSzilli.

Would it be possible to add a "Disable Joystick/Joypad Port 2" option? Whenever I play the game I have to make sure my joypad is unplugged because otherwise the mouse movement is locked and I can't turn?

[BSzili]

First I'd like to find out the cause of the problem. Could you make a screenshot of what this program shows on your system with the joystick plugged in?
https://aminet.net/package/driver/input/JoyPortTest
You can also try to run it after the game, to see if the "JoyPort1" value changes.

[wiz12]

I think JoyPortTest may have revealed the problem. When my Ktrl Joypad is connected to port 2, JoyPortTest reveals that the Blue button is pressing/activating about two or three times every second almost like turbo fire is enabled but the button is not being pressed, this has the effect of locking left and right turning movements in Blood although I can still strafe and move forward and backwards.

I have a second Ktrl joypad and when attached JoyPortTest shows that it works as normal with no random blue button presses and Blood works fine. I can only assume there is a fault with my first Joypad but strangely enough I only ever noticed it when playing Blood.