Amiga 1942 conversion

[agermose]

Originally Posted by skyzoo73

Nice music on the title screen, I can't wait to be able to try this game. Are you planning to add a music during the game? It would be nice to be able to choose between the arcade one and one improved by DJ METUNE.

Yes we plan to add some music ingame.

[agermose]

Outlines for all 32 stages are done. All the medium/large enemies, and most of the powerup waves are in there. Attack waves of small planes to be done for most stages.
This means the game is now playable from start to finish, but obviously some stages look a bit empty still.

I have added a stage selector to the title screen in debug builds.
Beta release is getting closer.

[manossg]

Originally Posted by agermose

Beta release is getting closer.

Really looking forward to that!

[malko]

You have done an amazing work so far !
I am really eager to be able to test the beta build .

[skyzoo73]

Any news ?

[Pyromania]

Really amazing job agermose, thanx for all the talented hard work. Will there be a separate enhanced A1200 version with more colors and extra music?

[agermose]

Originally Posted by skyzoo73

Any news ?

Internal testing going on at the moment. Found a number of bugs, and missing features that have been fixed and implemented.
Example: extra life at 20k,80k,80k+ was missing, and is now implemented.

I had to make a rewrite of the stage system, to lower the memory usage of the stage files.
That is now complete, and all stages have been converted to use it.
Most stages still only have medium/large enemy patterns defined.

During testing a slowdown to 25fps happened when the screen got really busy, so some optimizations had to be done.

Working fully on this (Outrun on hold) until ready to release beta.

[agermose]

Originally Posted by Pyromania

Really amazing job agermose, thanx for all the talented hard work. Will there be a separate enhanced A1200 version with more colors and extra music?

I don't think we will make an AGA version no.
The only thing that is really less colourful than the arcade is the score panel. I had to loose one or two colour nuances used mainly in backgrounds in later stages, to get it down to 32 colours.

When done with the OCS version, all focus will shift to Outrun.

[nikosidis]

Originally Posted by agermose

I don't think we will make an AGA version no.
The only thing that is really less colourful than the arcade is the score panel. I had to loose one or two colour nuances used mainly in backgrounds in later stages, to get it down to 32 colours.

When done with the OCS version, all focus will shift to Outrun.

Cool that it is OCS so that it runs on all hardware. As you say this game does neither require it. AGA can be nice but mostly the nicest GFX I seen on Amiga is OCS. AGA can be nice if you know what you are doing. Some times less is more

[Pyromania]

I understand guys about a special AGA version not being done. I just thought it might be cool to add some parallax or a few bits and bobs that make it even better than the arcade version.

[agermose]

The chip memory usage is too high, and the optimisations done recently have helped, but we're still somewhat over the target. I will be rewriting the tile system, to store each set of tiles in fast RAM, then swap them to chip RAM as needed. Will take a couple of weeks to get done.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by agermose

When done with the OCS version, all focus will shift to Outrun.

Wow - that's great news man.

Thanks, and keep up the awesome work!

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by agermose

The chip memory usage is too high, and the optimisations done recently have helped, but we're still somewhat over the target. I will be rewriting the tile system, to store each set of tiles in fast RAM, then swap them to chip RAM as needed. Will take a couple of weeks to get done.

For one-axis scrolling games its often enough to copy one tile each frame with the CPU to your backbuffers and don't use chipmem at all.

[agermose]

Originally Posted by pink^abyss

For one-axis scrolling games its often enough to copy one tile each frame with the CPU to your backbuffers and don't use chipmem at all.

I went with a slightly different solution. I copy one line of each set of new tiles per frame, using the CPU, then repeat every frame. Made the move to non-chip mem of the tiles. Got a saving in raster time, compared to the old solution as well.

Need to shave 15-20K more chip mem off. Should be done soon, and then an ADF file for testing on 1Mb A500 will be ready.

Fixed a couple of hard to locate bugs as well.

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by agermose

I went with a slightly different solution. I copy one line of each set of new tiles per frame, using the CPU, then repeat every frame. Made the move to non-chip mem of the tiles. Got a saving in raster time, compared to the old solution as well.

Nice!

Just in case you haven't thought of it yet: You can perhaps save the additional memory by using meta tiles for the tilemaps. So in case you have 8x8 tiles, transform them into virtual 32x32 tiles. This will make your tilemaps 16 times smaller while your 'internal' tiles stay the same.

[roondar]

Now, this won't be a secret or anything - but I can't wait to see and play the result

[agermose]

DJ METUNE reduced the size of the title music. This along with a few other optimisations, got the chip memory usage below the magic 512k.
Internal testing and bug fixing still ongoing.

[agermose]

Originally Posted by pink^abyss

Nice!

Just in case you haven't thought of it yet: You can perhaps save the additional memory by using meta tiles for the tilemaps. So in case you have 8x8 tiles, transform them into virtual 32x32 tiles. This will make your tilemaps 16 times smaller while your 'internal' tiles stay the same.

The tiles are 16x16 on the arcade, and I'm using 16x16 tiles as well. I'm not sure how the "virtual" 32x32 would work. Any 32x32 set of pixel would be unique in the tilemap, and I would end up with a lot more gfx tiles.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by Pyromania

I understand guys about a special AGA version not being done. I just thought it might be cool to add some parallax or a few bits and bobs that make it even better than the arcade version.

For AGA i would like a remake port of 1943 since is more beefy and has already parallax!

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by agermose

The tiles are 16x16 on the arcade, and I'm using 16x16 tiles as well. I'm not sure how the "virtual" 32x32 would work. Any 32x32 set of pixel would be unique in the tilemap, and I would end up with a lot more gfx tiles.

The idea is to have 'virtual' 32x32 that are still build from 16x16 tiles. This won't save tiles but will reduce your tilemap by 75%. I think Turrican2 arranged its tilemaps also this way and also many Gameboy games that had modifieable backgrounds (because Gameboy had only 8kb ram).
Often this allows then also to store the 32x32 tiles offets in 8bit instead of 16bit you maybe needed before. Each 32x32 still needs the original offsets into the 16x16 tiles of course.