Souverän Soccer [WIP]

[Daytona675x]

@Reido
@nikosidis
Thanks guys

@all
New wip video #26 (highly improved crowd, adboard, lots of details and internals).
(A1200 unaccelerated 020, 14 MHz, no Fast RAM, 50 fps).

[ Show youtube player ]

- The city skyline has been removed to make room for more crowd. The tons of previous optimizations made that possible. This has the additional benefit that I don't have to come up with 20+ different skylines for the release...

- The crowd now consists out of multiple layers, each of them zoomed, scrolled and animated seperately. For now there are three such crowd layers. Maybe I'll add even more (they are rather cheap in terms of performance and it's coded to be easily adjustable), but I think three is a pretty good amount.

- The crowd's zooming is now muuuuch (maybe I need more even more "u"s here) smoother than before. Was a bit tricky but eventually I managed to come up with a solution that doesn't eat up all Chip-RAM

- The crowd is more colorful. Well, could be even more colorful but because it's a placeholder gfx I didn't put too much effort into it. Just a proof of concept.

- The formerly blank grey crowd stand is now an adboard. The ad is generated procedurally, the text can be changed at match start.

- The top goal is now lapping over into the grass and isn't cut-off anymore at the raster-line where the grass begins. This might look like not being a big deal but was really tough. The main reason is that once the copper is inside the grass area it's ultra-busy, all available instructions per line are already used up. But with the top-goal being inside the grass now I had to somehow get some extra sprite-color and -priority changes being done there, things that were done outside the grass before, because the top-goal sprites are being reused for the bottom-goal... Eventually I found a hacky way to get away almost for free without extra copper instructions by doing the color changes before for a different color bank and switch to the right bank at the right point en passant, phew.

- All lines and circles are more white now and distance fading is smoother here too. Also, the grass texels shine through those lines now, making it all appear much more natural.

- The crowd / skyline change also implied trashing and redoing the whole stats / message area at the top. All that stuff is now done using hardware-sprites. Was a bit messy because I have to reset and modify those sprites in mid of the crowd-copper-handling now (any other approach would have been even messier). Sprite usage is somewhat tricky here because, well, I don't have too many (5) and I need one for the high-flying ball, so there are 4 sprites remaining. Combined sprites to get 16 colors aren't an option, because I need at least 3 sprites inside the same vertical area (# of goals, time and messages); no, there's not enough room to move the messages down, because the goal is too close if zoomed in. So I ended up using two sprites for the team names + # of goals: one pretty slim one for the team-colors, the other for all the text and numbers. Then one sprite for the match time info. And then two for the messages, one of which is the reused slim team color sprite. The color gradient has been removed (would complicate the copper handling here a lot because we're inside the crowd handling, and the visual gain is questionable anyway), drop shadows have been added.

- Some more love has been put into the replay function. When switching between replay and normal play a quick curtain effect now better indicates this mode change. The crowd's animation is now slowed down too if in slow-motion replay mode.

- Played a bit with the sky colors. I want the game to look friendly, not too serious.

- Lots of internal stuff, e.g. working around some sprite DMA issues, speeding up the scaling function and much more.

Greetings to Johnny Ray Worrall who somewhat talked me into reconsidering the crowd / sky area

Cheers,
Daytona675x

[kriz]

Ah wow it is so impressive !!

[vulture]

very nice!

[saimo]

@Daytona675x

Excellent job!

[jurassicman]

it reminds me of striker, very good work so far!

[jotd]

the 3d effect is really good.

[fluke]

The best I have seen in in-depth Amiga development in years...
That would certainly have been a AAA game title back in the day...
Keep up the awesome work... Happy to see another top notch
soccer game on my beloved girl...

[manossg]

Wow, this looks super cool, keep up the great work!

[nikosidis]

Whow Been waiting for updates. Keep on the great work.

[Adrian Browne]

It's Smoother, the grass textures are much better and the layered crowd effect is very cool indeed; You just need better graphics for the players next!

[jotd]

now let's see if the A.I. will be correct. That's the hardest part in this kind of game.

[Predseda]

As it has been already said: it looks beautiful, but NPCs AI will define how good the game is.

[aros-sg]

Originally Posted by Daytona675x

Sprite usage is somewhat tricky here because, well, I don't have too many (5)

You should be able to have same max. number of sprites available no matter if in 1x, 2x or 4x fetch modes, if you only ever hardware scroll shift from 0 .. 15. Because of 32 pixel or 64 pixel alignment in 2x, 4x modes you would need preshifted gfx for the cases where you would normally need hardware scroll shift 16 .. 31 (2x mode) or 16 .. 63 (4x mode).

But in your game maybe not possible if low on chip ram.

[Daytona675x]

Thanks a lot for the flowers, guys
@fluke
Especially your bunch of flowers

Always nice to hear that you like it, keeps up the motivation!
(repeating latest video link so it doesn't get lost in the comments)
[ Show youtube player ]

@Adrian Browne

You just need better graphics for the players next!

I will improve the player gfx a bit (e.g. right now they have that rather useless black outline at many places which disturbs the scaling) but I think I'll stick with the general simple "Lemmings" look.

@jotd

A.I. ... hardest part in this kind of game

Here in this case, with my self-imposed specs limits, the display engine is much harder to do than the CPU players.

@Preseda

NPCs AI will define how good the game is

Absolutely! This and the controls.

@aros-sg
At some places I'm in FMODE 3 with just 5+2 bits of softscroll, in others I'm in FMODE 1 with 5+2 bits of softscroll.
Therefore I only have 5 DMAable hardware sprites (and non-DMA sprites are useless because I use 64 pixel wide sprites and because the copper is busy doing other stuff).

[DDNI]

nice!!
I think losing the city skyline was a good choice.
Is the active player indicator able to be used to show decreasing player energy level?

[aros-sg]

Originally Posted by Daytona675x

At some places I'm in FMODE 3 with just 5+2 bits of softscroll, in others I'm in FMODE 1 with 5+2 bits of softscroll.
Therefore I only have 5 DMAable hardware sprites (and non-DMA sprites are useless because I use 64 pixel wide sprites and because the copper is busy doing other stuff).

If you only ever hw shift from 0 .. 15 you should be able to use same DDFSTART as in 1x fetch mode (or on OCS chipset) and then don't have the sprite limitations normally coming with 2x or 4x fetch mode.

You still calculate your shift from 0 .. 31 or 0 .. 63 but set hw shift to (result & 15) and the upper bits decide which preshifted/prealigned bitmap to display.

For 2x fetch mode you would have one bitmap aligned to 4 bytes to be used with calculated shift 0 .. 15. And one bitmap aligned to (4 bytes + 2) used with calculated shifts 16 .. 31.

For 4x fetch mode you would have 4 bitmaps. One aligned to 8 bytes to be used with calculated shifts 0.. 15. One aligend to (8 bytes + 2) to be used with calculated shifts 16 .. 31. One aligned to (8 bytes + 4) to be used with calculated shifts 32 .. 47. One aligned to (8 bytes + 6) to be used with calculated shifts 48 .. 63.

[Daytona675x]

@aros-sg
Thanks for sharing the idea! I know what you mean, and in general having sets of differently aligned bitmaps to overcome the DDFSSTART-imposed limitations can be a nice solution.
However, in my case I actually don't need more sprites, with some effort I was able get away with 5 and be just fine. I also don't need FMODE 3 all the time for extra performance, luckily it fits all well together as is now (phew!)
Which is good because, as you correctly guessed, I don't have any Chip-RAM to "waste"


@DDNI
Thanks mate
So far it's just the bar, but yes, it could be used to also indicate stamina or whatever, e.g. yellow card status or player number.

[Adrian Browne]

Originally Posted by Daytona675x

Thanks a lot for the flowers, guys
@fluke
Especially your bunch of flowers

Always nice to hear that you like it, keeps up the motivation!
(repeating latest video link so it doesn't get lost in the comments)
[ Show youtube player ]

@Adrian Browne

I will improve the player gfx a bit (e.g. right now they have that rather useless black outline at many places which disturbs the scaling) but I think I'll stick with the general simple "Lemmings" look.

@jotd

Here in this case, with my self-imposed specs limits, the display engine is much harder to do than the CPU players.

@Preseda

Absolutely! This and the controls.

@aros-sg
At some places I'm in FMODE 3 with just 5+2 bits of softscroll, in others I'm in FMODE 1 with 5+2 bits of softscroll.
Therefore I only have 5 DMAable hardware sprites (and non-DMA sprites are useless because I use 64 pixel wide sprites and because the copper is busy doing other stuff).

Sure- maybe just a bit more graphical detail to add a bit more character to the little chaps.

[PerryRhodan]

Looking really good. Keep up the great work!

[Daytona675x]

@Adrian Browne
I will try my best

@PerryRhodan
Thanks, bro Will do!