Supercars 2 AGA

[jotd]

maybe playing music steals DMA to the blitter, which has more work to do (blitting 7 planes instead of 6).

But code is running in fastmem now. The video is okay (first easy race is sluggish no matter what). If you want to see if it's slow, try the harder levels

[Neil79]

Awesome

[Superman]

Tried the harder level and level one at least has very good speed

[ Show youtube player ]

[jotd]

don't use your phone and drive at the same time

thanks for the vids!! glad to see that it runs properly for you.

[Superman]

Originally Posted by jotd

don't use your phone and drive at the same time

I don't have a phone holder but its ok for a quick test


Game is running great

[saimon69]

Looking at what is going on in the game made me realize that the original sound effects allocation is dynamic and not limited to first two channels, guess nothing could be done

[jotd]

no I have used phx ptplayer and used music mask to prevent sound effects to cut the music. So it's dynamic but should not use channels 3 & 4. Unless I made a mistake using the API.

the ptplayer library is used to play music and also sfx, only when music is active. Original sfx player is enabled when music is off so engine sound can be played.

[rare_j]

Game looks really good now with the new car colours.
Looking forward to playing through this again

[jotd]

I tried this on a real amiga, and where there are a lot of cars, it's true the speed is not that good (with music on). The game slows down, then is super smooth when there's only 2 or 3 cars shown...

I haven't tested more. Next I'll try "NOVBRMOVE" with whdload, and also without music.

[h0ffman]

Originally Posted by jotd

wtf how can a game behave so differently with whdload running it... I never witnessed this issue.

I have decrunched the files and uploaded them again yesterday in the zone. Is that this version that you're using?

Could well be a cache issue. Whdload doesn't turn them off by default and any unpacking of data needs a cache flush after it. Try adding NoCache to the whdload config or a full cache disable in your game startup.

[jotd]

any unpacking of data needs a cache flush after it

okay but 1) this isn't code and 2) whdload decrunch routine flushes the caches.

no, that's probably wrong RNC packer (I'm using a re-made windows version) that fails for some data or encodes differently than whdload unpacker expects.

[tomcat666]

Whoa, great stuff there jotd. Loving the game so far, the 8.1 version working perfectly fine with in game musics and everything on this A1200 with Blizz 030 III .

I must say I like the lighter version of the water better, the dark one makes the game a bit too gloomy

[jotd]

Whoa, great stuff there jotd. Loving the game so far, the 8.1 version working perfectly fine with in game musics and everything on this A1200 with Blizz 030 III .

thanks. If it runs fine for you that's good. the video that Superman posted looked all right too. It seems that not all accelerator boards are performant to handle interrupts. A 060 is slow with code in chipmem, I knew that. But interrupts? unless my ageing capacitors also get in the way.

the game uses parallel programming: the CPU prepares the clips/computes the blits, and a chain of blitter interrupts do the blitting. This is fast but I read in this forum that handling interrupts is costly. And now I understand because handling vblank is one thing every 20ms but those blitter interrupts happen much more frequently.

We need to blit all cars (4 planes) + the scenery (6 planes) + the shade (1 plane) at least (not talking about gates and trains & weapons). Each plane of each object is a blitter interrupt...

It avoids busy blitter waits which are also very costly too... but it's not free. Plus the whdload handling of interrupts (without novbmove). For some who have problems, try with NOVBRMOVE to avoid interrupt redirection. The game has a quitkey now, so that's not a problem.

I must say I like the lighter version of the water better, the dark one makes the game a bit too gloomy

yeah, i think I'll go for a bright water pattern. Yesterday almost shot myself with git and gradients, but finally I won. But it cost me the evening...

I tried to create the SuperCarsII logo with gradients, but when converting to 4096 color palette even with AGA, it just sucked because the colors are too close, so I think it's time for ... 16 million color mode for static images at least.

[jotd]

okay, gave up the gradients. Too much work for static images...

Went back and worked on water. What about this pattern?

[rare_j]

I think it looks good!

[tomcat666]

Very nice indeed.

[turrican3]

It looks good for me.

[jotd]

sold then. Did a slight change yesterday: changed the blue car to yellow. So more colors on screen, blue was repeating the water pattern at least for this scenery (and possibly ice scenery).

Still looking for a way to add more colors to "rock" scenery which hasn't any lakes or easy parts to enhance.

[daxb]

I always missed the information what car has what race position. So I know it is worth to fire a car or not. If this is to much work what about static car numbers on the cars?

[CFou!]

Originally Posted by jotd

okay, gave up the gradients. Too much work for static images...

Went back and worked on water. What about this pattern?

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