Empire Soccer AGA

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Uridium 2 aga already released by Scoopex this year, the only extra is hard drive installable if Andrew Braybrook releases it otherwise its the same as Scoopex release

So it doesn't add anything to the existing OCS Whdload version ?

[kriz]

But what is the story for this Empire Soccer AGA ? Is there a download coming or is there issues ?

[CodyJarrett]

Andrew Braybrook is having a look in his A1200 for a newer version of Empire Soccer AGA and other games. The version of Empire Soccer that I have is around 90% complete so I'm waiting to see if anything else turns up.

Andrew also posted about it on Twitter recently too: https://twitter.com/UridiumAuthor/st...31468499575277

[kremiso]

How do publishers expect us to survive without releasing our work?

ah, interesting Braybrook rant

[kremiso]

wow, the Braybrook official blog, reached thank to the Cody link, contains a lot of interesting back in the day details, about all his works

this Uridium 2 cut :

Uridium II began. We started with a dual playfield variant, which only gives us 7 colours on the foreground layer. We might have restricted the back layer to 3 colours since mostly it would be behind the main layer. While the parallax scrolling was nice, the 7colour restriction for the backgrounds was limiting. Walls and other collidable background objects needed to be clear. We needed shadows too. Phillip did do a good job, but we decided more colours was more important than a parallax layer. Maybe if we had considered using 16-colour hardware sprites for most of the moving objects then we would have had just enough colours. I had not written my hardware sprite routine yet and didn`t necessarily get how powerful it would be even with only 4 of them as the sprites can be reused down the screen, but there would be no contingency of using a background plot as the colours would not match. I did have that capability with the finished 32-colour version.

I switched to single-playfield 32 colour mode and that gave the graphics artists twice as many colours. I had the colours arranged in pairs: darker then brighter, plus I needed the hardware sprite colours in the first 16, or is that the second 16 to be used for many of the flying meanies. Likely I was using the at least 2 hardware sprites for the backdrop moving stars. The rest of the hardware sprites were 16 colours, and due to there being only 3 remaining hardware sprites, I needed a contingency plan to plot more on a line into the background seamlessly with a contingency plotter. Once again there was a shadow plotter to drop the odd-numbered colours to the even-numbered colour before it.

We had developed an AGA version of Uridium II already. This used 6 bit-planes instead of 5. Hardware sprites were still 16-colour mode, so we needed some input graphics to still support that. Given that hardware sprites go over the bitmap background, and I wanted the Manta to fly under some of the scenery, it was not a hardware sprite. I used the hardware sprites for high-flying craft that would ride over everything. Hardware sprites are great for cheap plotting into the sprite buffers instead of having to plot onto the bitmap, even with the blitter to help as you also have to then unplot the image by restoring the background afterwards. Well worth taking the hit of only having 16 colour graphics.

I wrote some 68000 code to convert RGB colours to HSV. Anyone using art packages will likely be familiar with the HSV wheel, cube or cylinder. Instead of using colours by Red, Green and Blue, noting that this is the only thing 16-bit and beyond computers understand, one can also represent colours by Hue, Saturation, and Voluminousnosity, or the meaningless: Value. Hue is the colour of the rainbow, Saturation is how much white is mixed in, and that big V-word is how bright it is There is some straightforward maths to convert between the two notations. HSV colours do slightly suffer from gimbal-lock as pure white and pure black have no Hue as such, so you lose your hue if you go to those colours and you won`t find your way back. Other than that though; fading the screen through HSV colours gives a more natural flow than just scaling by RGB values. I did use some HSV colour fades and found them a bit smoother as the colours change.

damn, i would have liked to see that dual playfield prototype, badly like

DUAL PLAYFIELD PIC

[7-Zark-7]

If you track down the diary entries of Uridium II from The One Amiga, there was some mentions of the dual-playfield tinkerings...but yep,probably needed an A1200 or more as the target hardware from the get go,& obviously didn't have as bigger install base by the time it released.

Still,at least Graftgold did put in some efforts around CD32/AGA, as much as there were time constraints after the Commodore collapse,& everyone rushing things out or doing some quick console ports for a dying Amiga market shortly thereafter.

[kriz]

Ahh thx for the update, hope the Empire Soccer version is even more than the 90% version.. Fingers crossed !!!

[Octopus66]

Would love this!