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

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by abu_the_monkey

I know. weird, right

I'll make sure any excess space is removed. Never seen it cause a problem in any version up to 3.9 or even 4.0/4.1

[Karlos]

@samo79

If using UAE, I recommend using one of the RTG builds anyway. Most of the new features are being written in C and haven't had a full assembler-only version written yet.

[abu_the_monkey]

Originally Posted by Karlos

That's weird. It's not as if shell scripts care about whitespace.

Which version(s) of AmigaOS does this happen in?

mine is a mix breed 3.1/3.9 and 3.x

but sometimes when I pull a branch it work fine.
which makes it even more odd

[Karlos]

I'm building and running in UAE, on a minimalist 3.9bb2 with just RTG emulated on top. Never ran into this, even though the drives are mounted directories on the host filesystem.

[Karlos]

The weapon glitch is reproducible with the t17 binary. There are lots of glitches with polygon model rendering. Just add it to the list.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Karlos

It does have the water effect. The only difference is that it doesn't tint what is below the water surface, it just uses glare/shadow shading to colour the surface. It still has all the same refraction effects and audio filtering when submerged. This was a trade off of moving away from the blocky 12-bit RGB copperscreen to an actual 256-colour display.

Did they though? From watching your videos, it seems they literally just have a warping/refracting ripple texture overlay rather than refracting the geometry and textures under the water's surface?

[Karlos]

I got a reproducible "full bright" sector lightup in level N a few rimes today. I think it correlates with the presence of multiple enemies with torches.

[abu_the_monkey]

it could just be some dumb ass patch I am running or something.
the system is a copy of what I run on my real A4000 (when it runs )

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by Dunny

Did they though? From watching your videos, it seems they literally just have a warping/refracting ripple texture overlay rather than refracting the geometry and textures under the water's surface?

That's because I dont stand still in the acid pool long enough to appreciate it. Find the waist deep water flooded area in level C of the mod. You can see the refractions clearly. Even on the submerged vector objects.

[ Show youtube player ]

Around 3 mins 20s in ..

[samo79]

Originally Posted by Karlos

@samo79

If using UAE, I recommend using one of the RTG builds anyway. Most of the new features are being written in C and haven't had a full assembler-only version written yet.

Ok received :-)
By the way, is there a method to quit the game trasparently by turning back to Workbench?
Perhaps a Quit game option in menu could be added

[abu_the_monkey]

try the '*' on the numeric keypad

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Karlos

That's because I dont stand still in the acid pool long enough to appreciate it. Find the waist deep water flooded area in level C of the mod. You can see the refractions clearly. Even on the submerged vector objects.

[ Show youtube player ]

Around 3 mins 20s in ..

Well goodness me you're right. Maybe they should have gone with no texture and just a colour tint , because it definitely looks better in AB3D1!

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by Dunny

Well goodness me you're right. Maybe they should have gone with no texture and just a colour tint , because it definitely looks better in AB3D1!

Unfortunately that wasn't an option because the engine is designed for 1x1 C2P, which at the time meant 256 colours. The colour tint works in AB3D1 because the display was RGB and you can thus blend and mix colours to your (12-bit) heart's content.

AB3D2 has a precomputed lookup of brightness variations for each palette colour, each mapped back to the nearest colour in the palette for that variation. This is used for all the fancy Gouraud shading, glare, smoke and the water surface.

The closest you could get to tinting would be to use the additive transparency routines that you see on the blue plasma bolts. It's pretty hit and miss though.

The solution to this, and some of the other problems, is to go for an RGB render buffer, which is now a possibility thanks to having RTG support. However, it will almost certainly slow down the game on real hardware (apart from PiStorm no doubt) to be shovelling around 32-bit pixels, or even 16-bit ones. It also requires a pretty major rewrite of almost every rendering function to support.

[Karlos]

There might be a fairly simple way to improve the water appearance. Since it uses the glare/shadow code, we might be able to bias it so that anything viewed through the surface is darkened. The actual highlights look too bright anyway.

[abu_the_monkey]

Originally Posted by Karlos

There might be a fairly simple way to improve the water appearance. Since it uses the glare/shadow code, we might be able to bias it so that anything viewed through the surface is darkened. The actual highlights look too bright anyway.

that could be a good compromise