Vampire Flatshading Experimenting

[VladR]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Well.. you're not wrong.. but that logic can be applied to a lot of things in Amigaland :-)
Vampire, impressive as it is, is still basically PC performance from the mid 90s. So it would still be a "fun challenge" for the properly motivated programmer.

It would appear, I am such "properly motivated programmer".
I spent last few years creating fast 3D engine and a game (very similar in scene complexity to StunRunner - e.g. flatshading) on Atari Jaguar (in pure Assembler) and while I was ready to start my pre-order campaign on Jan-01, I discovered Vampire and that has changed my plans. With 4,000 Vampires out there, it's a viable market for digital download (no expensive carts, shipping, etc.) that will allow for easy patching (impossible with carts). Pleas understand, this is not a weekend hobby for me - I do this full-time, completely self-financed.


On Jaguar, I'm running at 60 fps at HiRes 640x240, 65536 colors, so I'm extremely curious what kind of scene complexity is possible at Vampire performance level.


While Jaguar was a gaming console, thus limited to 60fps output, Vampire isn't. I've done lots of benchmarks where my game+render loop internally ran at over 100 fps (a simpler 3D scene, but full screen redraw nonetheless), so I'd be very curious to see what can Vampire pull off at 100 fps (assuming you have a working CRT monitor that can handle this refresh rate).


Wouldn't it be great to have a gfx detail option that would somewhat reduce the details, yet allow you to play at 100 fps ?


Speaking of OutRun, about a year ago, I created a separate project where I had an OutRun-style road (with hills)+environment on Jaguar, so it shouldn't take much effort once I port everything to 68080.


Same with Road Rash (full road + building texturing) - though that was a bit taxing for Jag and was dropping to 30 fps often. But, it should handle 60 fps just fine on Vampire, especially if I wrote an AMMX-codepath.




We can completely avoid any licensing issues since the game is written from scratch and would have different art assets.


I'm waiting for confirmation if I got in line for the January batch of Vampires.


At the moment, during last week, I got the basic WinUAE coding/deployment set-up and today am working on creating chunky video mode via Cybergraphx. Then, I can start porting all the 68000 code from Jaguar.

[malko]

@VladR: The Vampire needs cool games as well !

[Amigajay]

Would be interesting to see some games made for the Vampire, from what i can gather there is no original games made for it yet.

[VladR]

This is what I love about YT. You can instantly see how much interest is in the thing - not based on some local forum, but world-wide.

[ Show youtube player ]

21,000 views ! It would appear that there is some interest in Vampire-specific racing game

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by VladR

This is what I love about YT. You can instantly see how much interest is in the thing - not based on some local forum, but world-wide.

[ Show youtube player ]

21,000 views ! It would appear that there is some interest in Vampire-specific racing game

It's and old wish I had that until now didnt make much sense, but to do a low/medium poly 3d racing for high end Amigas (040 or better) where you can let users mod it to change trace tracks and cars so basically ppl would be able to mod it into a poly version of OutRun :-) just sayn

[trixster]

I’m guessing that’s an old version of the canonball engine in that video, but the frame rate is pretty terrible as soon as there’s more than just a few cars of trees on screen.

[VladR]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

It's and old wish I had that until now didnt make much sense, but to do a low/medium poly 3d racing for high end Amigas (040 or better) where you can let users mod it to change trace tracks and cars so basically ppl would be able to mod it into a poly version of OutRun :-) just sayn

Well, a fully polygonal textured version of OutRun is basically NeedForSpeed-level 3D scene complexity


Performance would be abysmall even on Vampire (for racing game, that is - where anything below 30 fps is unacceptable, unless you personally choose that high level of detail).


That being said, from my experimenting on Jaguar with that scene set-up, if you ensure the following:
- no traffic, no other cars
- car interior view


Then the performance becomes very good, as the primary driver of performance is number of scanlines the engine has to process and with interior view, that number has been shredded to about 40%


So, you could, comfortably, cruise alongside the track even on 060.

[VladR]

Originally Posted by trixster

I’m guessing that’s an old version of the canonball engine in that video, but the frame rate is pretty terrible as soon as there’s more than just a few cars of trees on screen.

I haven't watched it that long so only noticed the stage with the pillars (lots of overdraw there).


Does the Vampire build have a lot of inner loop rendering rewritten in ASM ?

[VladR]

Originally Posted by trixster

but the frame rate is pretty terrible as soon as there’s more than just a few cars of trees on screen.

One of the hard decisions while coding racing game is to artificially limit it to 20 fps, even though most sections could run at 60 fps.


But because some sections drop the framerate to 20 fps, the end result is perceived as 'terrible', even though nobody would complain about framerate if it was rock-solid 20 fps, 100% of the time.


For example almost nobody knows OutRun is 30 fps, it is a universal understanding it runs at 60 fps, even if it's not true - just because it doesn't suffer frequent framedrops. Well, technically it does, internally (no way around that - each frame is different number of cycles), it's just not visible to the player.




I'm pretty sure that if its driving speed was slightly lowered (to accommodate lower fps), and the game ran at rock-solid 20 fps, nobody would complain either, because - well - that would be the OutRun that everybody grew up with and played...

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by VladR

I haven't watched it that long so only noticed the stage with the pillars (lots of overdraw there).


Does the Vampire build have a lot of inner loop rendering rewritten in ASM ?

I do get the impression that people are largely overestimating the power inside the Vampire. At the end of the day, it's still less than half a GHz of CPU in there regardless of extensions. My old RasPi is faster than a Vampire.

It's still the fastest accelerator there is for the Miggy, but it's not fast by today's standards by any means.

[Samurai_Crow]

The Vampire v2 is 78 MHz on a x11 core and the v4 is around 100 MHz. It isn't as fast as a RasPi but is about 4 times more efficient per clock cycle.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by VladR

Well, a fully polygonal textured version of OutRun is basically NeedForSpeed-level 3D scene complexity


Performance would be abysmall even on Vampire (for racing game, that is - where anything below 30 fps is unacceptable, unless you personally choose that high level of detail).


That being said, from my experimenting on Jaguar with that scene set-up, if you ensure the following:
- no traffic, no other cars
- car interior view


Then the performance becomes very good, as the primary driver of performance is number of scanlines the engine has to process and with interior view, that number has been shredded to about 40%


So, you could, comfortably, cruise alongside the track even on 060.

Well, I didn't actually say textured polys ;-) Think Virtua Racing on Sega Saturn. But then you can adjust draw distance (Far Clip plane) and the distance at which LOD levels are drawn to make it playable on the lowest system (say 040) maybe tweaked to run nicely on 060 and if you have Vamp you could crank up the resolution, draw distance etc..

[lmimmfn]

Originally Posted by VladR

One of the hard decisions while coding racing game is to artificially limit it to 20 fps, even though most sections could run at 60 fps.


But because some sections drop the framerate to 20 fps, the end result is perceived as 'terrible', even though nobody would complain about framerate if it was rock-solid 20 fps, 100% of the time.


For example almost nobody knows OutRun is 30 fps, it is a universal understanding it runs at 60 fps, even if it's not true - just because it doesn't suffer frequent framedrops. Well, technically it does, internally (no way around that - each frame is different number of cycles), it's just not visible to the player.




I'm pretty sure that if its driving speed was slightly lowered (to accommodate lower fps), and the game ran at rock-solid 20 fps, nobody would complain either, because - well - that would be the OutRun that everybody grew up with and played...

What you speak of is frame pacing, it's better to have a consistent 20fps than a fluctuating 15-30fps.

Pretty sure outrun is 60 fps, but I could be wrong.

[VladR]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Well, I didn't actually say textured polys ;-) Think Virtua Racing on Sega Saturn. But then you can adjust draw distance (Far Clip plane) and the distance at which LOD levels are drawn to make it playable on the lowest system (say 040) maybe tweaked to run nicely on 060 and if you have Vamp you could crank up the resolution, draw distance etc..

Yeah, Virtua Racing would be really nice but I'm afraid it's too high poly even for Vampire at 60 fps. For sure at 640x480, as that's way too many scanlines to process...

[Samurai_Crow]

Reolygon racer
320x180 using the 16:9 aspect ratio hack could hit 30 FPS using the blitter unless you back it off to 16 colors max. The blitter is that slow guys. Fortunately the Vampire has a faster one. Forget the 040 too.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by lmimmfn

What you speak of is frame pacing, it's better to have a consistent 20fps than a fluctuating 15-30fps.

Pretty sure outrun is 60 fps, but I could be wrong.

Actually I think you are mistaken here. OutRun arcade was 30fps, but then the Japanese version of Sega Ages for Saturn featured a "secret" (-ish) 60Hz mode.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by VladR

Yeah, Virtua Racing would be really nice but I'm afraid it's too high poly even for Vampire at 60 fps. For sure at 640x480, as that's way too many scanlines to process...

Maybe as some pointed out conistent framerate is more important than hitting 60 fps. Amiga ppl are used to lower FPS in many games :-) We used to think doom clones were perfectly playable at 15 fps

Btw, did you ever see Paulo Cattanis work on Amiga?
He did some pretty impressive stuff in the late 90s when the Amiga was already on life support.
Here is his most famous game, VirtuaGP:
[ Show youtube player ]
Its almost hard to belive he did that on the Amiga.

[VladR]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Maybe as some pointed out conistent framerate is more important than hitting 60 fps.

Yeah. That right there is going to be the problem with Virtua Racing. The environment polycount is all over the place. You know the spot with the animated rides on first track ? That's, like, 3x more polys than at other spots.


To drop to only 30 fps there, the other places would have to be running at around 60-75 fps. The arcade HW was pretty impressive - I don't recall how many CPUs it had, but it was a lot (it should be on wikipedia somewhere).


Especially on a single CPU - say like Vampire.


For sure, once my engine is ported to V4 and running, this will be one of the early tests - I do have a primarily-racing 3D engine working already (with a recent support of direct import from 3dsmax) so I will be very curious myself.

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Amiga ppl are used to lower FPS in many games :-) We used to think doom clones were perfectly playable at 15 fps

Golden days, eh I don't think my Wolfenstein ran at 15 fps other than perhaps main menu


Unfortunately, we now all experienced 60 fps+ on recent consoles and PCs, so it is now painfully obvious if something is running below 15 fps...

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Btw, did you ever see Paulo Cattanis work on Amiga?
He did some pretty impressive stuff in the late 90s when the Amiga was already on life support.
Here is his most famous game, VirtuaGP:
[ Show youtube player ]
Its almost hard to belive he did that on the Amiga.

Sure looks awesome. But what kind of framerate was it at that level of detail on 030 ? I couldn't play F1GP on PC for years because formula in simulation mode is virtually unplayable in anything other than 60 fps. It's hard enough to play *properly* at 60 fps, let alone with random and frequent framedrops. It took many upgrades till framedrops in F1 became thing of the past and by that time, I believe we already had first 3dfx accelerators...


I think it was NFS1 that made me realize that even though I could play classic singleplayer just fine at 640x480 at <15 fps, to beat friend's record times, we had to lower the res to 320x200 and it took another month to notice what he said when he mentioned that it stutters even at 320x200 on my Pentium 100.


It did, I just didn't see it at the time, as it was much better framerate than 640x480.


But to achieve great times, you need precise control in curves, and 25 fps is nowhere near enough for that...


I just don't see how 030 could pull this off in 30 fps. Maybe it had options to turn texturing and details off ?

[skan]

Originally Posted by VladR

This is what I love about YT. You can instantly see how much interest is in the thing - not based on some local forum, but world-wide.

21,000 views ! It would appear that there is some interest in Vampire-specific racing game

Not really. For instance, I watched that video out of curiosity just because it popped up in my facebook feed somehow and the world "vampire" wasn't mentioned anywhere.

I'd never buy a vampire, pretty happy with my 060. And I'd never buy a vampire-only game as well, I think there are way more plain vanilla 1200's / 030 / whatever than vampires out there, so limiting a game to a amiga-(almost)-compatible card/standalone it's a pretty dumb business decision IMHO.

Back on topic, I think an unexpanded 1200 could be more than enough for a decent port.

[VladR]

Originally Posted by skan

Not really. For instance, I watched that video out of curiosity just because it popped up in my facebook feed somehow and the world "vampire" wasn't mentioned anywhere.

I'd never buy a vampire, pretty happy with my 060. And I'd never buy a vampire-only game as well, I think there are way more plain vanilla 1200's / 030 / whatever than vampires out there, so limiting a game to a amiga-(almost)-compatible card/standalone it's a pretty dumb business decision IMHO.

Awww, that's so cute