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

[pipper]

Shouldn’t the vertical blank happen at the end of the previous frame (cathode ray starting to travel back from bottom to top of screen)? The docs are not clear on this.

[Karlos]

A bug fixed, performance improved AB3D2? Sign me up! For years I've meant to get to grips with building and fixing it, so I'm really glad someone else has.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by abu_the_monkey

THIS is how ab3d2 could have looked!

Karlos must have spent more time than I can imagine working on this with the rather temperamental tools supplied with the game.
not sure if he ever made it available anywhere but, god dame it's is even more difficult than the original.

I remember having a lot of fun with this. Well, sone of it was fun, some of it was a nightmare. The edit/playtest cycle was brutal and usually involved a reboot. I remember finding a replacement level editor and that really changed things. I reimplemented some of the simple tools for converting assets and such from Amos to C. I used Deluxe Paint and Personal Paint for editing textures, sprites and OctaMED for editing sounds. Without doubt, the biggest challenge was using the vector object editors. I remember thet being a separate editor for defining an object and another for animating them. I intended to write my own replacements but I never did.

The whole thing is a bit unfinished, so later levels will be much more like the vanilla ones. The plan originally was to "remaster" the levels and then move on to reimplementing AB3D 1 as a new set of levels. It's probably for the best that this didn't happen as I'm not sure it would've worked as I'd hoped.

[Karlos]

@pipper

One really annoying bug (IMHO) of the original is that the floor and ceiling texture scaling is off when you change between the 2/3 and fullscreen modes. So a square zone designed to have, for example 2x2 floor tile in it, depending on which screen size you choose, it may fit correctly or not.

The mod I made was running on a 25 MHz 040 and consequently, things like the weapon animation frames are designed for around 10-15 FPS. They'll probably look a bit comically fast under emulation or on faster machines. Maybe it would be possible to set an weapon animation timescale value?

[abu_the_monkey]

@ Karlos



I know what you mean.

I tried using the editors (originals and later leved v303) to varying degrees of success or failure (mostly failure)

never did finish any of the levels I started

[pipper]

copper interrupt occurs at the bottom of the frame
vertical blank occurs at the start of the frame


if you need that time before next frame is displayed, copper interrupt is required.
if you have double buffering and just need to switch frames, I suppose that vblank interrupt is all right...


Also if you need to read joypad buttons, you need to read them in vblank not in copper interrupt where the capacitors are discharged.

Checking with the autodocs, I believe you're right:

Bit 5, VERTB, causes an interrupt at line 0 (start of vertical blank) of
the video display frame. ...

If you find that you still require additional time during vertical
blanking, you can use the Copper to create a level 3 interrupt . This
Copper interrupt would be timed to occur just after the last line of
display on the screen (after the display window stop which you have
defined by using the DIWSTOP register).

This is surprising to me, but I accept the facts :-)

But weirdly, the original copper lists caused the copper interrupt right at the start of the frame:
bigfield:

; Start of our copper list.
				dc.w	dmacon,$8020
				dc.w	intreq,$8011  <<< trigger copper interrupt and "Transmit Buffer Empty"?
				dc.w	$1fc,$f
				dc.w	diwstrt
 ....big copper list...

[pipper]

@Karlos

Please feel free to report bugs and limitations! For instance, if you need more vertices per level (right now the upper limits seems to be 800 vertices).

One really annoying bug (IMHO) of the original is that the floor and ceiling texture scaling is off when you change between the 2/3 and fullscreen modes. So a square zone designed to have, for example 2x2 floor tile in it, depending on which screen size you choose, it may fit correctly or not.

Yes, I am aware of these kind of aspect issues - maybe not all of them. And I think I made it worse when stretching the render area to 320 pixels wide. Feel free to report here or on Github. Ideally, please provide test maps that I can just load up for debugging.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by trixster

The dream for me remains playing AB3D at 1x1 resolution.

https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?t=67666

Not quite what you're after - it's in GZDoom on the PC - but it's a reasonably faithful recreation of AB3D. Some of the levels are slightly altered (IMO to its detriment, but there you have it) and the lighting is improved. You can opt to use original weapon textures too, which are vastly superior to the new ones (again, IMO).

Sorry for the OT.

[Karlos]

I wonder how many CPU cycles are spent performing the dithered 256 colour reduction in TKG. It might actually render faster on a direct RGB display.

[pipper]

I actually find the dithering pretty nice. It’s very subtle. But I didn’t look for how it’s implemented yet.

On a side note, I made the ab3d-rtg repository compile. It starts up and shows a title screen, but wouldn’t do anything else. I made no further attempt to debug this yet.

[Karlos]

Oh, the dithering is definitely nice and looks way better than vanilla 256 colour. Contrast it to the original Doom, for example, where the depth shading produced very conspicuous bands in places. Nevertheless, for RTG purposes I suspect pixels are calculated as RGB values that have to be converted back to a palette match. It may be quicker to try and get the intermediate value into a useful framebuffer RGB format.

[abu_the_monkey]

@pipper

good work

A while back I did to get the ab3d_rtg source to compile and boot to the main menu but the back drop was a mess and when starting the game the level text failed to display and would crash and reboot when trying to actually start the level.
Didn't look any further as yet.
Seem to remember some fonts and maybe a couple of includes not being present in the repo.

[Karlos]

I recall my mod being extra unstable with the RTG patch back in the day. Worked OK with the tkg-turbo patch though. I'm going to have to see if I can find a backup of the editable assets. This whole thread has piqued my nostalgia.

[pipper]

Originally Posted by abu_the_monkey

@pipper

good work

A while back I did to get the ab3d_rtg source to compile and boot to the main menu but the back drop was a mess and when starting the game the level text failed to display and would crash and reboot when trying to actually start the level.
Didn't look any further as yet.
Seem to remember some fonts and maybe a couple of includes not being present in the repo.

Oh that’s sounds like a lead, will use snoop dos to see if it’s opening some font I don’t have.

[abu_the_monkey]

just had a quick look and it was AB3DMenu.font and AB3DSlim.font in setup.s

[pipper]

Let’s just use topaz

[abu_the_monkey]

yep that's what I did, just renamed some other font.

[eXeler0]

I missed this thread, only found it after seeing a recently uploaded youtube clip which pointed to it, but I need to say this: Holy crap Pipper, you did it! All hats off, so many threads about how impossible it was to do something with the sources an 25 years passed… Damn, huge thanx for doing this man.

[Aladin]

How to do in WinUAE parameters to put the key to change 2x1 in 2x2?

[abu_the_monkey]

@Aladin

on the 'input' page in winuae, you can remap keys to do different things, so input source 'numlock [0x45]' points to 'numpad left parenthesis' and 'divide [0xb5]' points to 'numpad right parenthesis' (this may not be the best keys to use but it is positionally where the left and right parenthesis keys are on an amiga). you may or may not need to change the mouse/joystick settings for port 2 on the 'game port' page.