AmiQuake new 68k Quake Port for AGA/RTG

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by tomcat666

Here it is running on AmiQuake and pistorm 900 MIPS (rPIzero2W) Amiga 600 in 640x400 resolution. Noticable slowdowns in places, much more than default Q1 maps... unfortunetly.

[ Show youtube player ]

Thanx for testing, trying to figure out what causes the slowdowns. One theory is that stuff that should be occluded cells are being rendered anyway.

[Edit 2] I activated "r_numedges 1" in WinQuake and I see some weird stuff going on. Seems there are places that hit above 1000 edges and that seems to pretty much kill the framerate on slow systems. I see some places where it should be rendering maybe 70 edges yet its drawing 700 instead...
Could maybe be brushes clipping into other brushes possibly messing up Quake's PVS (Potentially Visible Sets) algorithm. That will probably fix some weird issues, but then there are probably places where detail simply needs to be removed or otherwise occluded.
I'll be back

[abu_the_monkey]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Tried right click, ”save link as”..?

yes that worked

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by tomcat666

Here it is running on AmiQuake and pistorm 900 MIPS (rPIzero2W) Amiga 600 in 640x400 resolution. Noticable slowdowns in places, much more than default Q1 maps... unfortunetly.

Howdy @tomcat666 & abu_the_monkey and others

So I went down the optimization rabbit hole and I can tell it was a frustrating endeavor. I spent way to much time (probably >20h) on chasing better PVS calcs by basically building barriers all over the map wherever there was too much stuff being rendered.
I won't bore you with the details but lets say I needed to jump between several quake engines to get access to the right console commands for different purposes.
Anyhoo... A new map "AmiCastL" (notice the L at the end) is now available at the bottom of the page here
https://www.exretro.com/downloads/qmaps/qmaps_dl.html
It should cause a lot less slowdowns compared to previous version. Feel free to test it in Novas port on PiStorm / Vamp or genuine 060

Cheers

[abu_the_monkey]

cool, I will give it a blast later

[tomcat666]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Howdy @tomcat666 & abu_the_monkey and others

So I went down the optimization rabbit hole and I can tell it was a frustrating endeavor. I spent way to much time (probably >20h) on chasing better PVS calcs by basically building barriers all over the map wherever there was too much stuff being rendered.
I won't bore you with the details but lets say I needed to jump between several quake engines to get access to the right console commands for different purposes.
Anyhoo... A new map "AmiCastL" (notice the L at the end) is now available at the bottom of the page here
https://www.exretro.com/downloads/qmaps/qmaps_dl.html
It should cause a lot less slowdowns compared to previous version. Feel free to test it in Novas port on PiStorm / Vamp or genuine 060

Cheers

Still get huge slowdowns in the red lava section :

[ Show youtube player ]

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by tomcat666

Still get huge slowdowns in the red lava section :

[ Show youtube player ]

Howdy, thanx for testing. How's the rest of the map running? Its a pretty big map.
Here's a shot of the PVS:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/2zph191kcg...room1.jpg?dl=0
Here the engine throws a wrench in your face by rendering monsters even though they shouldn't be visible. Toying with the idea to add spawn triggers to get around this..

Next shot is the edgecount of that exact area you showed in your video.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4zmr37eikk...es_p1.jpg?dl=0
It doesn't stand out as particularly high, there are definitely more edges than that in many places in original maps, so question if its something else..

[tomcat666]

The rest of the map feels ok, slowdowns here and there, but the worst is this scene...
On original Q1 map I havent seen any slowdowns, it is smooth sailing all the way when playing. Thats whats most strange.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by tomcat666

The rest of the map feels ok, slowdowns here and there, but the worst is this scene...
On original Q1 map I havent seen any slowdowns, it is smooth sailing all the way when playing. Thats whats most strange.

Yea, I’d be lying if I said I knew what the hell is going on sometimes. In certain locations the numbers the engine shows/returns make no god damn sense to me. ;-)

Btw, saw a Romero Quake post mortem video the other day. He says their dev target was a P90 +8MB RAM. (And at that point in time Pentium had the best FPU. )
On top of that, they brought in Mike Abrash to code all the critical stuff in x86 assembly.
So looking at ports to Amiga, its actually only fair to expect you need something like a 100 Mhz 060 + RTG to have a fighting chance.

Question to @Novacoder —-> As an optimization to help poor Amiga, would it be possible to disable rendering for all stuff thats outside the PVS?

[NovaCoder]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Yea, I’d be lying if I said I knew what the hell is going on sometimes. In certain locations the numbers the engine shows/returns make no god damn sense to me. ;-)

Btw, saw a Romero Quake post mortem video the other day. He says their dev target was a P90 +8MB RAM. (And at that point in time Pentium had the best FPU. )
On top of that, they brought in Mike Abrash to code all the critical stuff in x86 assembly.
So looking at ports to Amiga, its actually only fair to expect you need something like a 100 Mhz 060 + RTG to have a fighting chance.

Question to @Novacoder —-> As an optimization to help poor Amiga, would it be possible to disable rendering for all stuff thats outside the PVS?

I thought that that the Quake engine did that anyway? Isn't that the whole point of a wad/pak file, that the visibility is all precalculated.

I do remember some strange visibility code in Quake that didn't look right (finished) in the WinQuake source that Amiquake is based on but I can't remember where it was these days.

[James]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

I thought that that the Quake engine did that anyway? Isn't that the whole point of a wad/pak file, that the visibility is all precalculated.

No, map makers are required to do a "Full Vis" on their map to achieve that.

https://quakewiki.org/wiki/Vis

Originally Posted by tomcat666

Still get huge slowdowns in the red lava section :

[ Show youtube player ]

Does using this progs.dat make any difference?

https://aminet.net/package/game/patch/FastPatchQuake

[tomcat666]

Originally Posted by James

Does using this progs.dat make any difference?

https://aminet.net/package/game/patch/FastPatchQuake

Nope, pretty much the same. (note: in my startup script for quake I already had -game fast before )

stack 300000
amiquake -game fast -noipx -nojoy +nocdaudio -fpu +d_subdiv16 17 -fov 70 -safe -usemode 0
quit

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by James

No, map makers are required to do a "Full Vis" on their map to achieve that.

https://quakewiki.org/wiki/Vis

Yea, for sure any mapper knows you can't have leaks in the map or no VISing will be performed by the map compiler. If there's a leak, a .pts file will be generated and most editors allow you to read the pts to see where the leak is.
But, as you could see from the screenshot I posted previously, VIS removes wall geometry just fine, but for some reasons other stuff like monster's are not always removed from rendering even though they are completely inside a non visible set. You might think that any monsters that can be heard because they are nearby are kept, but really, there is 0 need to render the graphics of the monsters. You only need to keep track of the coordinates for a point source and play its audio for that..

Another thing probably not known by everyone is that Quake slices up geometry in ways you may not think. You can draw up low "poly" geometry with the brushes, but the actual geometry rendered will be sliced up in a completely different way. For example,. if you do stairs touch a flat wall, the engine will slice up that flat wall into strips at every edge that touches the stairs creating lots more "unnecessary" geometry.
Example:
Screenshot from editor, notice one brush next to the stairs:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ncgdpg5rsq...tairs.jpg?dl=0

Same place in the engine, ok this is QuakeSpasm engine, not WinQuake, but not all engine have the same console commands available. This command used there is "r_drawflat 1" and shows all the surfaces the engine renders.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/q3wt7d5nh3...tairs.jpg?dl=0

This is the reason "r_numedges 1" so often shows much higher numbers than you'd expect from just looking at the brushes used in the map/ editor.

[trixster]

@Bruce Abbot @photon

Can you take this shit to another thread?

[Reido]

Absolutely agree with you. Too many interesting threads are being derailed by these types of long winded back-and-forths. These off topic exchanges need to be moderated.

[grelbfarlk]

I want to build a Coldfire accelerator with attached RTG that is superfast, the RTG is so fast it's called TAGA or Total AGA, and when it can't run things that Novacoder builds, I will say "YOU NEED TO SUPPORT IT, IT BOOTS WORKBENCH AND SYSINFO RUNS!" Aside from the fact that GCC has a Coldfire target and I could just say hey adjust your build options, I will insist "THAT YOU ARE TAKING THE FUTURE AWAY FROM US AMIGLIOBROS, NOVACODER, THERE ARE BILLIONS OF PEOPLE WHO WOULD BUY MY COLDFIRE ACCELERATOR IF YOU DIDN'T GIVE THE IMPRESSION THAT IT DOESN'T RUN YOUR STUFF!" Again, I could just say use a GCC compatible Coldfire target, but that isn't exactly what I want. I want him to say he spent an afternoon optimizing it in assembly to run better than anything else. I think this is pretty reasonable. And he just uses the Coldfire build options and it runs but it's not really much faster, it does run however.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by tomcat666

The rest of the map feels ok, slowdowns here and there, but the worst is this scene...
On original Q1 map I havent seen any slowdowns, it is smooth sailing all the way when playing. Thats whats most strange.

Howdy,
uploaded what is probably the final fix / release of AmiCastL map
https://www.exretro.com/downloads/qmaps/qmaps_dl.html
It's mostly playable on 060 if you shrink the screen a bit but I've realized its way too time consuming to fix old maps, instead, my next map will be an Amiga map made from scratch to be very lightweight (+lessons learned from optimizations) and should run fine on 060 (well... as fine as Quake can run on AGA + 50Mhz 060 ;-)).

[Estrayk]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Howdy,
uploaded what is probably the final fix / release of AmiCastL map
https://www.exretro.com/downloads/qmaps/qmaps_dl.html
It's mostly playable on 060 if you shrink the screen a bit but I've realized its way too time consuming to fix old maps, instead, my next map will be an Amiga map made from scratch to be very lightweight (+lessons learned from optimizations) and should run fine on 060 (well... as fine as Quake can run on AGA + 50Mhz 060 ;-)).

Map 2 (Lightweight version for retro systems): AmiCastL
Not Found
The requested URL was not found on this server.



btw, I do a quick capture from AmiQuake AGA. I get 16,7fps in 320x200 with 060 100Mhz in real A1200. it is quite playable.

[ Show youtube player ]

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by Estrayk

Map 2 (Lightweight version for retro systems): AmiCastL
Not Found
The requested URL was not found on this server.

Shouild be fixed now, I even changed so its https, so no more warnings...
https://exretro.com/downloads/qmaps/qmaps_dl.html

Originally Posted by Estrayk

btw, I do a quick capture from AmiQuake AGA. I get 16,7fps in 320x200 with 060 100Mhz in real A1200. it is quite playable.

[ Show youtube player ]

That's nice, 100MHz definitely does a lot of difference.

[TCD]

Hi, I know this is not for the NovaCoder version but could somebody take a screenshot of the title screen and one ingame for the Clickboom version? I would like to replace the 'not really ingame' version that is currently on HOL: https://hol.abime.net/2256

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by TCD

Hi, I know this is not for the NovaCoder version but could somebody take a screenshot of the title screen and one ingame for the Clickboom version? I would like to replace the 'not really ingame' version that is currently on HOL: https://hol.abime.net/2256

i have the real Clickboom CD somewhere and I could run it on a real Amiga, but for screengrabs it should probably be done in WinUAE