KarlosTKG now on GitHub

[Karlos]

Hi,

As some of you know I joined after @abu_the_monkey contacted me asking if he could share an old Alien Breed 3D2 mod of mine because @pipper had gotten the game buildable again.

This tickled all the right nostalgia places and being able to replay it again after all these years has been a treat.

Tearing through a DD image of my A1200's hard drive, I found my mods editor directory, with all the various assets and things, along with the version of the game being worked on. I've cleaned the pair up a bit and put them on GitHub here: https://github.com/0xABADCAFE/karlos-tkg

I've not included leveled303 as it's still on aminet (see readme)

Just to confirm it actually works, I even made my first level edit in 25 years or so, making The Docking Ring slightly fairer.

[abu_the_monkey]

[Karlos]

When I replayed for real, I realised that starting level B with anything less than 150 health and having found both the shotgun and assault rifle and all the ammo, you'd get slaughtered by the time you get the red key. Largely because killing one of the red dogs opens a door unleashing half a dozen more and a couple of plasmagunners literally round the corner. So now, you can find a pair of mines to booby trap them and some more pickups have been added in their room and at the far end of the ring. Also the rifle to reward exploring.

[pipper]

Thanks for sharing! This is definitely a labor of love.

[Karlos]

No, thanks to you for making it playable again.

[eXeler0]

Big thanx to all of you who are involved in this resurrection. As you know, some ppl have been waiting for this moment for 25 years ;-)

[Karlos]

I suppose I'd better try and finish it then...

[eXeler0]

@Karlos in your readme, you estimate it needs 16MB RAM, do you have a good idea about what specifically increases the memory needs?
A long time ago I was looking at the 1997 Amiga Format CD with the sources and remember considering recreating all the textures (including monsters) at a higher resolution. Doubling the X/Y would obviously increase total size 4x, what other factors impact size? An do you know how the engine loads textures if you have a lot of fastmem?

[Karlos]

I say 16 because that's what I had when I was developing it. It could be less, but it's definitely more than 4.

The additional memory is in providing more textures. For instance, many of the basic grey metal textures now have blue and red tinted versions that I've used to try and fake coloured lighting in places. There are entirely new sets of wall texture also. Then, there are more monsters, more objects, more sound effects, etc.

[Karlos]

You can't just double the size of the textures because the game engine as it stands just assumes they are a certain height.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by Karlos

You can't just double the size of the textures because the game engine as it stands just assumes they are a certain height.

Yea, but now we have a chance to start poking around, no?

[Karlos]

Ok, yes, there is that, but I think the most important thing is to get the game engine stable and system friendly as possible first. Based on what I've seen of the changes so far though making these sorts of modifications won't be that simple though. The basic wall texture size will probably not be just a simple single value somewhere in the code, rather it's likely to be in many different places and present in different ways, e.g. as a power, length of a lookup table, etc. There's also the tooling that generates the textures from IFF images, many of which are written in AMOS.

The current texture size will likely only become a real issue once some RTG version allows higher overall resolution on UAE or something.

[Karlos]

I was rereading some of the old how-to documents that came with the game editors originally. One thing that I noticed, that I'd forgotten, is that wall, floor and object texture images are created in 32 colours. I'm pretty sure the end data isn't planar and is probably 8-bit. I'm inclined to believe that this is a limitation of using AMOS for the original code, perhaps an IFF ILBM loading limitation. If that's true, then I may look into replacing some of the conversion tools with quick C utilities that can use 256 colour source assets, maybe with data types. At least PNG would be good.

[Karlos]

Quick playthrough of level B, this time having gotten more used to the newer WASD layout...

[ Show youtube player ]

[malko]

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by Karlos

I was rereading some of the old how-to documents that came with the game editors originally. One thing that I noticed, that I'd forgotten, is that wall, floor and object texture images are created in 32 colours. I'm pretty sure the end data isn't planar and is probably 8-bit. I'm inclined to believe that this is a limitation of using AMOS for the original code, perhaps an IFF ILBM loading limitation. If that's true, then I may look into replacing some of the conversion tools with quick C utilities that can use 256 colour source assets, maybe with data types. At least PNG would be good.

Btw, when looking at the Sources CD (Amiga Format) the image and audio assets are also very messy. Is there an easy way to look at it from the code`perspecitve, meaning, sort out all the assets that the game *actually* uses as opposed to looking at several duplicate folders with repeated stuff and some obvious test-assets..?

[abu_the_monkey]

@eXeler0

in short, no.
I could supply a list ripped from the source code ,but, the list of assets in the source code refer to the converted objects.
i.e. mikegreen is the name of the attached picture, but, I believe it is called ashnarg by the game.
unless there is a utility to convert them back to .iff files that I am unaware of?
which there may well be.

edit: actually I think it's greenclaw or something, not ashnarg in the game.

[Karlos]

The sound effects are defined in the game link file. You can replace them as you wish when modding. I don't advise using the Fibonacci compressor, since the game wil happily load IFF 8SVX samples.

However, there are some limits, which are strongly reminiscent of old OctaMED 8 channel mode. Samples should be 7 bit (half volume), a multiple of 200 bytes and 8kHz.

[Karlos]

Right I guess I missed the point of your question. Yes the assets are a bit of a mess. They are all there though.

[Karlos]

I just replayed the original two levels and realised I'd changed more than I thought.