new amiga 500 doom like !

[matburton]

Can I just say a big thanks for the continued quality YouTube videos!

I simply love seeing the progress, twists, turns and even the bugs.

They're pitched at just the right level I think, so that everyone can understand the complexity and marvel at the solutions and artistry.

They're so good I watch them more than once

[manossg]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Errr... I have to react here and highly disagree (although, I agree to all your other points).
There's a plenty of nice 3D games for A500.
First of all - Frontier - a masterpiece of the game... then there is a bunch of others, and all of them are great games:
- Elite
- Wing Commander
- FA18/Interceptor
- Legends of Valor
- Birds of Pray
- Gunship 2000
- No Second Prize (the engine on that one is still beyond amazing)
- Zeewolf 1 and 2
- Ambermoon
- Vroom
- Behind the iron gates

...etc... etc..

+1

And let's not forget the following gems:
-Carrier command
-Midwinter (and the second one)
-Hunter
-the Mercenary trilogy
-Starglider 2
-Stunt car racer
-F1 Grand Prix

etc, etc.

[LongLifeA1200]

I think it was yesterday I was thinking about how I miss seeing the odd post from Hewitson. (He hasn't been here since February. I worry for him.)

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Secondly what might have been done on an Atari ST is irrelevant to those of us --

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

-- who (sensibly) don't own one.

[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by utri007

He just used 2041 word to say "don't do it", "if you try, you woun't finnish it", "it is bad", "I'm very intelligen" and "all the critics to me, are because of fan boys".

Boring.

Well said!

[KK/Altair]

Thank you all for all the kind comments.
As well as for those not so kind, too.

https://wearaltair.com/

ROTFL

No, not that Altair. The demoscene group.
https://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=703

This is really great! Will the demo include the Dreadtool to play around with creating maps?

Not yet. The tool is a complete mess, driven by a text file, and generating C and asm files to be directly compiled into the Dread exe.
I already have a private Discord server, which I eventually will be opening up for interested creators to get the dirty versions of the toolset, but don't expect to be able to make a map and play it on Amiga already.

Some feedback then, sky texture looks nice and (probably pretty easy to swap for different levels) i wonder if the high scroll speed is the best.

I don't think we need to dwell on the sky or scrolling speed (but I might be reducing that anyway). I'll definitely want to be able to change the sky texture and scrolling per-map, so ultimately it will be up to level designer's taste.

Moon, space, etc?

We already have imagined a really cool setting for the game, so the two mentioned won't be our immediate choice (but aren't excluded either).

Depends on the state of the tool when the Demo will be out. I'll let KK answer this one.

It's not a matter of the tool, but rather lack of proper map file format support, both in the tool and the engine. But we'll eventually get there.

It looks impressive - I didn't really think this would be feasible with Amiga 500.

However...

Sorry I'm late to "the party". Vacation stuff (incl. lack of Internet connection).
Having said that:

1) Multiple heights are planned. Textured floors and ceilings are doable, but would slow the game to a crawl, so using solid colors is a sane choice. My idea is to convey the Doom's look and feel, gameplay and the fun factor, not clone the thing.

2) That's more a level design thing, because we would like to allow swapping palettes and textures per-level. Feel free to propose your own palette along with a set of textures, as all suggestions are welcome.

3) Doom engine is very rigid as far as moving vertexes goes. When Hexen came out, rotating doors and sliding walls were welcomed as a truly innovative feature.

4) Well... you certainly fail to get the spirit here. The point is to get further than anyone has been, given the set of restrictions. You aren't going to tell the team, that made the first K2 summit winter climb (on January 2021), that K2 was already reached in summer...

5) ... or are you?

6) I'm fully aware of it. That's why I decided to take the shortest path (e.g. omitting the floor height support for now, using FreeDoom conversions, or not promising a "boxed version" but rather an engine for community modding) and start making videos to get the motivational support. On the way, two amazing artists found and joined me, and we are definitively keeping the motivation going on our private Discord.

7) Have you seen the framerate on that ST wolf 3D?


TL;DR: I've seen a chance of making an undoubtedly best* FPS game for Amiga 500 ever. It would be a pity not to go for it.

(* counter-points welcome)

Furthermore, KK always stated that it is a "-like/clone". This suffix is enough already to point out that it is not a 1:1 copy of the original.

Copying is not creative, hence not fun for me.
Also I'm using kind of language that Polish press used in 90's, where every FPS shooter of the area (until Q1) came out, was called a "Doom clone".

Btw, from my knowledge KK never had a plan to make a complete game, but a demo and engine... but now, with very talented Tsak and Pixek Shade, I hope that will change, and we will get full game at some point.
But I'd personally love to have demo and creation tools ASAP, so I can try and play with level creation myself.

And I'm hoping for more people with such attitude (you included) coming to Discord at one point to create the game together.

[rothers]

I have a small request, which you were probably going to do anyway, could you dim the sprite palette when the player is standing on a shadow? I think it would look really cool.

[Mathesar]

Originally Posted by rothers

I have a small request, which you were probably going to do anyway, could you dim the sprite palette when the player is standing on a shadow? I think it would look really cool.

Another thing I was thinking of: in one of the earlier demo's we saw of dread there was an outside map with ground area's that looked like water.
That would be real cool and maybe relatively easy to add (although all these many small "easy" thing do add up I know from my own humble experience). Just a "blue" shadow area and when the player walks through it shift the whole screen a bit up (so that it looks like the player is wading through it), slow down the motions a bit, some splashy sounds....
But I am sure KK already thought of this

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by rothers

I have a small request, which you were probably going to do anyway, could you dim the sprite palette when the player is standing on a shadow? I think it would look really cool.

You mean when the enemies are in shadow (bellow some structure), not playable character?
Why would enemies get shadows on them, if character enter the shadow?

I like the idea (if it's the first thing I pointed), although keep in mind that, because of "readability", many professional looking games tends to make characters a bit brighter then BG.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YTFtAilantU/maxresdefault.jpg

Rough example.
If the character here would be "realistically" lighted (with only environment lights), the image would be much harder to read, and it would look much worse (in the terms of artistic direction).

I guess Tsak or Pixel Shade could elaborate this much better them me, because they have so much more experience.

[rothers]

The only sprite is the player sprite.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

I like the idea (if it's the first thing I pointed), although keep in mind that, because of "readability", many professional looking games tends to make characters a bit brighter then BG.

True, but horror games tend to skip that rule because they want to have the element of surprise, making things harder to see is a very helpful tool in that department.

I don't claim that FPS games are all horror games, but they do like to have that element of surprise. Dark areas in FPS games tend to be actually properly dark, no accentuation of any kind. Instead more is done with sound.

[ESC]

Yeah, like the gun and stuff, would be a cool minor change that would add a bit to the game

[Tsak]

Yup. it would be relatively trivial to darken the sprite/gun palettes for such a case I guess.
On a similar topic we are also considering cases where we'd do dynamic palette swaps (in regards to the in-game palette) for specific parts of a level.

[Photon]

This is a long thread for what is an extremely simple and dumb game (Doom).

The first attempts at textured 3D or semi 2D were indeed slow on PC. Those who forget played it years after release. This is not bad code, just low performance hardware in your $1500 PC and devs trusting to users upgrading.

As for chunky, it seemed obvious when I talked to Commodore Sweden telling me about AGA that it should have had it.

But chunky alone doesn't help with a slow CPU. The ways in which resolution is reduced with the bitplane tricks makes us accept it, and in fact without bitplanes, it might not be possible. As in, you don't no longer have to process 8bpp bandwidth.

It can certainly be appreciated, especially if you make a solution that looks good.

[rothers]

Originally Posted by Photon

This is a long thread for what is an extremely simple and dumb game (Doom).

Compared to what exactly?

Doom is a fucking work of art. One of the most famous games ever made and one of the best.

[Photon]

Originally Posted by rothers

Compared to what exactly?

Doom is a fucking work of art. One of the most famous games ever made and one of the best.

Any game designer worth their salt will tell you that Doom is a barren game with minimal gameplay. Apart from that, it's a fact that the gameplay consists of clicking to kill and bumping into switches.

Compared to hundreds of games that came before it had more ideas, were more enjoyable, and certainly were more complex, involving, emotional, or storytelling. Doom offers none of that - for two reasons: Id was new to making games, and the action left no time for extras like that.

Now you might not want a game that involves you. You might want a game that's just point and click or destroy, like previously a shooter or beat'em up, with no story, puzzles, development, etc.

That's different. But it's not the same as being a good game. If you see what I mean, we can agree to disagree. I'm passionate about this. Doom is the bare minimum requirement for a game. Move and click to shoot. And this is offered in all game engines as a template today, but nobody would play your game if you added graphics to your template and released.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Photon

This is a long thread for what is an extremely simple and dumb game (Doom).

It's not Doom. Whether it will be 'extremely simple and dumb' depends on the level design. I like 3D games with more exploration and puzzles than shooting, but 'simple and dumb' can be good too if well executed.

The first attempts at textured 3D or semi 2D were indeed slow on PC. Those who forget played it years after release. This is not bad code, just low performance hardware in your $1500 PC and devs trusting to users upgrading.

That's right. Coding for a machine that nobody has (because it's far too expensive or doesn't exist yet) isn't bad, it's the user's fault for buying the game and expecting it to run at a reasonable speed on his (soon to be) outdated hardware! This game I wrote for the Amiga in 1987 with full raytraced 3D isn't badly coded, it's just waiting for a powerful enough machine to run it!

But chunky alone doesn't help with a slow CPU. The ways in which resolution is reduced with the bitplane tricks makes us accept it, and in fact without bitplanes, it might not be possible. As in, you don't no longer have to process 8bpp bandwidth.

That's the main idea behind bitplanes - you can fine tune the color depth and memory requirements to suit the application. Most other home computers had ad hoc display modes that used various combinations of sub-byte chunky pixels, character-based tiled graphics with attribute color, NTSC chrominance tricks etc., often with peculiar limitations. The Amiga did away with all that and gave us a clean, flexible and expandable bitmap system with higher performance which was easier to work with.

Bitplanes do have the disadvantage of having to do several writes to change the color of one pixel, but this doesn't become a major handicap until you have a large number of bitplanes and want to set one pixel at a time (a technique that most game programmers avoided like the plague due to high overhead on graphics that weren't mapped 1 byte per pixel).

It's understandable therefore that the Amiga's designers didn't consider adding a chunky mode, and stuck to that philosophy for AGA as well (remembering that chunky textured-mapped 3D games were not a thing when it was designed!). Still, it's a pity that Commodore's engineers didn't think ahead enough to put a chunky mode in AGA. And now that real-time fully raytraced games are a thing, we can say it was a pity they didn't implement that too!

[Photon]

Bruce, this was more towards what I meant. Maybe it was wrong of me to jumble the two aspects, the 'visuals' and what kind of actual game is in there.

With regards to the game part, there were tons of games with more involved levels long before Doom, the term 'levels' were already coming from a very old place compared to all non-arcade titles at the time and 7 years before with no 'levels' at all, and even in Quake years later the levels were at the um same level. And the gameplay not changed at all.

I guess you joke at the end, but bitmap is more difficult to do in hardware than chunky. Bitmap was because RAM was super expensive when Amiga prototypes were made. In 1993 it wasn't, and unlike realtime raytracing, it was easy to do.

It was even easier than for users to wait for CPU upgrades and GPU _acceleration_, which is not the same as "a graphics card" with a very slow bus. Hell, PCs in 1993 couldn't even sync a horizontal scrolling shooter, that's the whole reason for giving up the arcade competition and turning to point and click gameplay. And in this came semi 3D, even though there were already flight sims on the PC. Eliminate number of objects moving at full framerate. A concession.

The PC crowd had spent $1500 on crap that couldn't game, and they were willing to wait years and years and spend $1000 more. And skipped on consoles, too. I've given up analyzing that waste of money. A specific type of madness.

[freehand]

Originally Posted by Photon

The PC crowd had spent $1500 on crap that couldn't game, and they were willing to wait years and years and spend $1000 more. And skipped on consoles, too. I've given up analyzing that waste of money. A specific type of madness.

I am guessing you was drunk when making the silly post above bless ya.

For the first time owning a computer I made money when I moved to the PC many opportunities available so all hardware was paid for from said jobs it was money for old rope no one had to be rich just a little savvy.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Tsak

Yup. it would be relatively trivial to darken the sprite/gun palettes for such a case I guess.
On a similar topic we are also considering cases where we'd do dynamic palette swaps (in regards to the in-game palette) for specific parts of a level.

That kind of thing can add a lot of immersion, so it's certainly something to consider. Would be interesting to see how that would look in Dread.
Not that the game needs much to be visually impressive, it already is

[KK/Altair]

I have a small request, which you were probably going to do anyway, could you dim the sprite palette when the player is standing on a shadow? I think it would look really cool.

We'll do it definitely, eventually. I just don't want to mess with Johns graphics at the moment, and all weapon frames use different palettes. We would have to make sure first, that they all look good under low light conditions.

and when the player walks through it shift the whole screen a bit up

If I could move the camera up and down in this engine state, I would already do it. Moving camera up/down is the same as moving floors and ceilings smoothly up and down. Which we'll eventually get to, but not immediately.

You mean when the enemies are in shadow (bellow some structure), not playable character?

I guess he meant dimming the player weapon.
As far as the game objects go, I can't do anything unless I keep separate copy of all the graphics. The world palette is limited and I don't even have lighting support in the texturing engine.
But sprite weapons use their own palettes, so dimming that would be simple.

If the character here would be "realistically" lighted (with only environment lights), the image would be much harder to read, and it would look much worse (in the terms of artistic direction).

Doom didn't care. It just used 32 or 33 light levels internally and applied them to literally everything depending on sector light level and distance (and angle, for vertical walls). It was part of the look & feel of the game.

Yup. it would be relatively trivial to darken the sprite/gun palettes for such a case I guess.

So, would you like to do it?
E.g. push another copy of all the weapon sprites with only palettes changed (pixel data staying the same and using the same indexes).

This is a long thread for what is an extremely simple and dumb game (Doom).

The gameplay loop might be simple.
The tech involved - definitely isn't.

Id was new to making games, and the action left no time for extras like that.

Well, they had it all envisioned. They just opted for simplicity and gameplay.
https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doom_Bible

(remembering that chunky textured-mapped 3D games were not a thing when it was designed!)

Atari XL/XE already had chunky mode. Considering it was designed by Jay Miner, the idea was definitely floating out there.