curiosity: Texture only at 256 or more colors?

[Seiya]

recently i asked myself if texture in a game could be applied also in 16 or 32 colors game.
Many times we saw Amiga OCS 3D game without texture and DOS equivalent in VGA or SVGA with 256 colors with nice texture.
So it is a technical problem or simply a estethic things?

i know that Citadel has texture on Amiga 500 OCS game, but in 3D flight simulator in 16/32 OCS colors or EGA colors could be applied texture?

[gimbal]

"Many times we saw Amiga OCS 3D game without texture and DOS equivalent in VGA or SVGA with 256 colors with nice texture" - ... really? I can't think of a single one at the moment.

[Samurai_Crow]

MS-DOS users threw CPU clocks at their problems. Amigans thought they could keep their systems stock and use the blitter to make up for it. The best solution is to get an accelerator and fast memory and pair it with a graphics processor (GPU) and throw everything you have at it. The previously mentioned one-sided solutions were a wasted effort.

[Predseda]

Originally Posted by gimbal

"Many times we saw Amiga OCS 3D game without texture and DOS equivalent in VGA or SVGA with 256 colors with nice texture" - ... really? I can't think of a single one at the moment.

Frontier?

[gimbal]

Well that's one then

[grond]

The required computing power for texture mapping doesn't really get less with less than 256 colours because you need to read the texel and then write it to the screen buffer. Since this is a chunky operation, it doesn't matter whether you are using all 8 bits in a byte or just a few of them. The only place where you would save computing power is the chunky2planar conversion. When processors were fast enough to draw screens pixel by pixel, graphics chips did 256 colours as a standard. Older 3D games usually use flat-shaded polygons because you can work in planar graphics if you have few colours and can use the blitter. You just don't want to draw planar flat shaded polygons pixel by pixel. You usually draw 16 pixels at once which you can do because all pixels in a flat shaded polygon are the same colour.

[Seiya]

In truth also on PC i never saw an EGA game with textures, but in some specific games i notice that:
Dawn Patrol for PC all 3D graphics is textured, while Amiga of course no (PC is in VGA and Amiga OCS). Samething also for Overlord and also for Frontier.

But teorically developer could add 32 colors texture to Frontier or Dawn Patrol or Overlord? Or was it impossibile or a waste of time?

[grond]

Originally Posted by Seiya

In truth also on PC i never saw an EGA game with textures, but in some specific games i notice that:
Dawn Patrol for PC all 3D graphics is textured, while Amiga of course no (PC is in VGA and Amiga OCS). Samething also for Overlord and also for Frontier.

But teorically developer could add 32 colors texture to Frontier or Dawn Patrol or Overlord? Or was it impossibile or a waste of time?

That is possible, of course. There just wasn't any market for such feature on the Amiga because of the dreaded 7 MHz 512KB base configuration.

A lot of Amiga demos use less than 256 colours for their 3D effects (which saves time on the c2p) and use the remaining bitplanes for overlays and other effects.

PCs did not have to do c2p, hence there is nothing to be gained by reducing colours. And historically, the moment they had processors powerful enough to do texture mapping, they already had graphics subsystems that could do 256 colours.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Predseda

Frontier?

Not exactly the best advertisement for texture mapping.

Originally Posted by grond

There just wasn't any market for such feature on the Amiga because of the dreaded 7 MHz 512KB base configuration.

...and the dreaded pirates eager to nip sales in the bud. Some Amiga owners did upgrade their machines to do 3D, but not for games. Knowing the processing power needed and rendering times for true 3D images, the idea of doing a game in 3D seemed silly. In 320x200 the textures looked really rough, not nearly as nice as well-drawn graphics in 2D games.

And historically, the moment they had processors powerful enough to do texture mapping, they already had graphics subsystems that could do 256 colours.

Or to put it another way, they had VGA before they had processors powerful enough to do texture mapping.

However the first texture mapped 3D game for the PC was Catacomb 3-D, and it was EGA - in 1991! As you know, EGA had planar graphics with only 16 colors in 320x200. This shows that texture mapping less than 256 colors was not only possible, it was actually done on the PC.

[saimon69]

Talking about textures and Amiga there was this demo of an unfinished game called Justice that really impressed me made by a former Argonaut member that has a very decent speed even on A500 OCS/ECS(emulated) with partial texture mapping - albeit with reduced horizontal resolution!
[ Show youtube player ]

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by saimon69

Talking about textures and Amiga there was this demo of an unfinished game called Justice that really impressed me made by a former Argonaut member that has a very decent speed even on A500 OCS/ECS(emulated) with partial texture mapping - albeit with reduced horizontal resolution!
[ Show youtube player ]

That does look impressive for the time. And it goes to show: sure they could have done it, but it'd run at 0.5fps