H-scroll Amiga shmups that came closest to 1985 Gradius arcade?

[Master484]

This is very interesting, graphically...
I have a weak spot for OCS dual playfield mode.

Would love to create a game for that, but holy shit, it's so difficult to get something working with different color schemes across several levels.

Like shown in this game, explosions using the foreground colors for explosions and having only sprites for shots looks so rough.

I too have tried to solve the dual PF palette issues in my head in many times.

One possible solution might be to copy the techinques that PC Engine shmups use, as many of the tricks used in them should be possible with a combination of Amiga Dual PF mode and sprites.

PC Engine has only a single playfield, yet many of the shmups, such as Gate of Thunder, have very impressive parallax layers. And the way how they are done, is simply that the horizontal background sections are scrolled at different speeds, and then they combine them with sprites to give the impression that those segments are in fact scrolling in front and behind of each other, just like real playfields.

And the way how this would work in the Amiga, is that the Front PF is used for moving game objects only, and then Back PF would have those scrolling segments, and then sprites are shown in between the playfields, to make the back PF scroll layers look like real playfields. Either use all 8 sprites this way, or alternatively use some of the lower numbered sprites for the player ship, so that it is shown in front of the parallax sprites, and that it doesn't have to share the Front PF colors.

With a system like this one could avoid the almost impossible task of trying to make a good looking unifed palette for the level and bobs in 7 colors, or the equally hard task of designing a Front PF with multiple copper colored horizontal segments that are updated as the level scrolls, and where bobs and level graphics cannot be in the same horizontal lines, and so on.

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But going slightly off-topic here, so maybe I'll just mention a shmup that just popped into my head:
Pegasus. Dual PF, runs at 50 FPS. Rarely mentioned anywhere. Is good.

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by DanScott

Best arcade / console style horizontal scrolling shooter (IMHO) is the middle section in Turrican 2.

Feels a lot like the Air Busters coin-op that it was inspired by...

[ Show youtube player ]

The Amiga version does remind me of the MegaDrive classic shmups too, even the instrument samples are very FM sounding and lots of parallax.

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by Tigerskunk

This is very interesting, graphically...
I have a weak spot for OCS dual playfield mode.

Would love to create a game for that, but holy shit, it's so difficult to get something working with different color schemes across several levels.

Like shown in this game, explosions using the foreground colors for explosions and having only sprites for shots looks so rough.

This is a problem I hit with level 1 of Salamander, 8 colours is too much for the background grid (4 colours is enough) and 7 for the second playfield is just not enough.

If I was a top notch Amiga machine code programmer, like top 1%, I suppose I would just do double blits for both bitplanes with deft use of colour zero on top playfield for bobs to make use of the wasted 4 colours on Salamander level 1 in the 8 colours assigned to the bottom playfield. Might be quicker to do blind blits, redraw everything every frame and use a simple 2 bitplane software parallax.

Probably better to just stick with 4 bitplane single playfield and use the sprites to do the 4 colour blue grid pattern for Salamander though, this gives you 4 extra colours than 15 colour dual playfield total as a bonus and sometimes just 2 extra colours makes all the difference. Re-using the sprites per scanline with the copper will give you a massive hit on DMA time left for Bobs I presume?

I don't think anybody mentioned Disposable Hero, I had a coverdisk demo but really can't remember what it was like to play. I'd rather wait until I have a Gotek sorted to write out some ADF cracks to try it with a Zipstik etc.

[Legerdemain]

Originally Posted by lionagony

>It's just really a thread looking for remotely arcade quality, including >gameplay, Amiga H-scroll shmups for people who did play stuff like Gradius all >Summer of 1986 I guess.

After playing Mega Typhoon (vertical) last night for the first time and being blown away by it I was reading an old EAB thread on it and they mentioned Blastar as one of the Amiga's best technical achievements with shmups. It doesn't start off horizontal but it has some very impressive horizontal levels later on. Here's the longplay [ Show youtube player ]

On a technical level Blastar is amazing. Concerning its gameplay it is nothing but a travesty.

The overhead levels are awful, with their endlessly spawning monsters and monotonous layout making it extremely hard to navigate no matter the radar. You just have to accept that your constant loss of energy due to it being almost impossible to avoid enemies and enemy fire is a sort of timer while just flying around not findkng what you want to find.

The upgrade system is useless, since you have to spend ages getting enough money to actually upgrade your ship... and if it is not upgraded some bosses seem to never die. I spent ten minutes on a boss not knowing if I actually did damage to it... even though bits and pieces flashed when shot at.

The side scrolling levels may look the part, but they are horribly uninspired and repeat themselves over and over again on the overhead stage which forces you to go down underground.

Blastar is a pile of shit, packaged in technical marvel. Truly amazingly coded. Too bad that the gameplay nullifies it all.

[gimbal]

Quite the opposite of Amnios which is a unique marvel packaged in a pile of shit

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by Master484

I too have tried to solve the dual PF palette issues in my head in many times.

One possible solution might be to copy the techinques that PC Engine shmups use, as many of the tricks used in them should be possible with a combination of Amiga Dual PF mode and sprites.

PC Engine has only a single playfield, yet many of the shmups, such as Gate of Thunder, have very impressive parallax layers. And the way how they are done, is simply that the horizontal background sections are scrolled at different speeds, and then they combine them with sprites to give the impression that those segments are in fact scrolling in front and behind of each other, just like real playfields.

And the way how this would work in the Amiga, is that the Front PF is used for moving game objects only, and then Back PF would have those scrolling segments, and then sprites are shown in between the playfields, to make the back PF scroll layers look like real playfields. Either use all 8 sprites this way, or alternatively use some of the lower numbered sprites for the player ship, so that it is shown in front of the parallax sprites, and that it doesn't have to share the Front PF colors.

You would only have 128 pixels of moving objects per scanline, though. And a kind of complicated system of creating and moving those objects around, I guess.

[acidbottle]

I really liked Blastar, music was great to. Thats is all.

[Master484]

You would only have 128 pixels of moving objects per scanline, though. And a kind of complicated system of creating and moving those objects around, I guess.

The low amount of sprites on the Amiga wouldn't be a problem. Check out 15:40 at this video:

[ Show youtube player ]

There are only 3 horizontal sections that scroll, and even without any added sprites they create the impression of two playfields. Notice the black gaps in the top and bottom layers, which allow changing wall heights without any sprite tricks. And when the wall sprites appear around 15:48, just a few of them are enough to complete the illusion of two playfields. And most likely they couldn't have even used much more of them, as we can see the sprite wall pieces flicker quite often throughout the level.

The highest amount of sprite walls in this level seems to be around 17:00, where two big walls appear, which seem to be around 64px wide. So our 8 sprites would be just enough without the need of sprite multiplexing.

A system like this would of course be different from the way how levels in Amiga games are normally done, but not necessarily harder. The top and bottom scroll parts can be thought as the "level" where you blit new tiles. And the wall sprite placement would be no different from enemy placement. And because the wall sprites move at the same speed as the top and bottom part scroll does, this means that the horizontal space needed between two sprites that use the same channel is always the same as the screen width. So in a level editor you would just need to make sure that the sprite walls are X amount of tiles apart, and that's it.

So basically the levels would be like scrolling text messages found in almost every Amiga demo, just put on top of each other and scrolled at different speeds, with some sprites added to the mix. The resulting level designs would be somewhat simplistic, but in a shmup this isn't necessary a bad thing.

And one more benefit from a system like this is that when you reach the level boss, you can simply leave the background on an endless loop, and use all 8 sprites to make a 128px wide screen filling boss (or a 64px wide 16 color one), while blitter handles the bullets and player ship.

[saimon69]

There is still the 16 color mode that can do miracles if handled properly: Powder was able to move a huuuuge amount of stuff on screen

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by Master484

The low amount of sprites on the Amiga wouldn't be a problem. Check out 15:40 at this video:

[ Show youtube player ]

There are only 3 horizontal sections that scroll, and even without any added sprites they create the impression of two playfields. Notice the black gaps in the top and bottom layers, which allow changing wall heights without any sprite tricks. And when the wall sprites appear around 15:48, just a few of them are enough to complete the illusion of two playfields. And most likely they couldn't have even used much more of them, as we can see the sprite wall pieces flicker quite often throughout the level.

The highest amount of sprite walls in this level seems to be around 17:00, where two big walls appear, which seem to be around 64px wide. So our 8 sprites would be just enough without the need of sprite multiplexing.

A system like this would of course be different from the way how levels in Amiga games are normally done, but not necessarily harder. The top and bottom scroll parts can be thought as the "level" where you blit new tiles. And the wall sprite placement would be no different from enemy placement. And because the wall sprites move at the same speed as the top and bottom part scroll does, this means that the horizontal space needed between two sprites that use the same channel is always the same as the screen width. So in a level editor you would just need to make sure that the sprite walls are X amount of tiles apart, and that's it.

So basically the levels would be like scrolling text messages found in almost every Amiga demo, just put on top of each other and scrolled at different speeds, with some sprites added to the mix. The resulting level designs would be somewhat simplistic, but in a shmup this isn't necessary a bad thing.

And one more benefit from a system like this is that when you reach the level boss, you can simply leave the background on an endless loop, and use all 8 sprites to make a 128px wide screen filling boss (or a 64px wide 16 color one), while blitter handles the bullets and player ship.

Hmm, yeah I get that, but I guess that's simply not the kind of game I would like to create. But it's perfectly possible to do it that way, I concur (with the exception that for those 16 color moving blocks you'd only have 64 px instead of 128, but that minor niggling).

Still, would love to create a DPF game with a color scheme that works.
I guess using only 4 colors for the parallax background and putting the colors for shots and explosions in the other 4 and blit them in the background playfield would be a good idea here.

That way you'd have explosions and shots that won't need to use the foreground colors, making them independent.

Then use one attached sprite for the player ship to have its own colors, and the other ones for a multiplexer.

[touko]

There are only 3 horizontal sections that scroll

There is also some parallaxes done by tiles swapping, this is common on PCE to do that for faking parallaxes .I doubt amiga can do the same easily .

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by touko

There is also some parallaxes done by tiles swapping, this is common on PCE to do that for faking parallaxes .I doubt amiga can do the same easily .

I just stumbled yesterday on Battle Squadron graphics and found out ground elements explosions are made with tiles swapping, so that makes me think could be possible - that or, if we only focus on that single example at the time in the video - a repeating sprite in the back with the scroll animation

[saimon69]

I want to make a video of Powder Enemy Editor to show all the intricacies of it, is a damn powerful tool - hope have some time this weekend

[Master484]

About tile swapping, the Amiga too can of course easily change tiles on screen anytime, it's called tile blitting, or "drawing the tiles".

It's of course slower than the tilemap based swapping that these consoles use, but not that slow that you couldn't use it.

Everything that doesn't move (or moves with the scroll) can be animated with tiles. And if it moves, the movement can be done with pre-shifting (pre-drawn animation frames).

The first flying level in Turrican 2 is actually doing something like that to make that parallax on a 16 color single playfield. It apparently blits pre-shifted 2 color tiles over copper colored horizontal segments, and this way it manages to create a very impressive looking tile based parallax.

[touko]

I just stumbled yesterday on Battle Squadron graphics and found out ground elements explosions are made with tiles swapping, so that makes me think could be possible

I'am not saying it was impossible,but more difficult, in the sense that amiga display is not tile based, and you have to copy the same graphics each time to several places.
On the other hand,on the PCE you have to copy the new tiles once in VRAM, and the display makes the change for all displayed tiles, so it's way faster and easy .

[ImmortalA1000]

Sometimes you might be better off just double buffering the screen and doing blind blits to redraw everything. Depends on the size of the tiles you use too, blitter setup time vs blitter speed issue.

And of course not all Amiga programmers are remotely of the same expert coding level, a problem console hardware avoids as it is designed around tiles and hardware sprites exclusively.

[ImmortalA1000]

I was looking at Disposable Hero, quite a polished game technically but insanely (i.e. bad game design) levels of difficulty and everything needs about 10-30 hits to be destroyed! There is also some shop mechanism instead of power up system so the overly difficult gameplay is broken up with sessions of poncing about with icons and pointers etc.

[Megalomaniac]

Shop sequences worked quite well for me, normally makes for a greater range of upgrade options and combinations than just collecting tokens and activating them at any time. Though as far as power-up systems go I think Project X and Blood Money have good ones with a hint of strategy to them (in Project-X, should you get the Lazer beams which are lacking power at first but pretty mighty once upgraded a few levels, or start with sideshot and homing missiles? In Blood Money, do you buy upgrades when low on energy, knowing you'll lose them if you die, or save your dosh for later?), whereas Apidya's upgrades seem to do far too little.

[Fiery Phoenix]

I think Disposable Hero is defo one of the most polished shooters out there

[touko]

I agree .