Squeezing Aga Power

[sandruzzo]

When we talk about exploiting all from Aga, what are your expectations? Besides games genre, what would you like to see from Aga: CP2 games, 2d games, racing games, a lot of parallax and moving objects and a lot of colors, 50-60hz?

To me base machine should be A1200 +fastmem

[Samurai_Crow]

Besides games genre? The ability to use those huge 64 pixel sprites as floating toolboxes in the operating system would be nice. Oh! You mean capabilities rather than the genre of the games! :-)

I agree about fastmem too.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

what would you like to see from Aga:.. a lot of parallax and moving objects and a lot of colors, 50-60hz?

This is a backwards way of looking at it. What I want are games that are fun and enjoyable to play, with nice graphics and sound etc. I don't care how much they 'exploit' AGA - I won't be counting the number of colors or measuring the frame rate while I'm playing the game.

The biggest hurdle in producing a game is not the hardware - an A1200 with FastRAM is plenty good enough for most genres if used wisely. Game design is far more important, and should take up most of the developer's time. It's also the area that most often lets the game down or causes 'burnout', resulting in poor quality or unfinished games.

So what I would like to see is the power of AGA being used to reduce development workload by not having to compromise or use tricky techniques that require more effort. AGA should help developers realize their vision without getting bogged down in technical aspects.

As for specific features of AGA that I would like to see exploited more, perhaps a greater use of HAM8 along with those huge sprites. Take a racing game for example. Wouldn't it be nice if the background looked like an actual photo rather than crudely drawn hills etc.? This wouldn't tax the system much if it was just a strip of HAM8. Cars and other objects in front of it would be sprites, so you don't have to worry about fringing.

[grelbfarlk]

Make it in HAM8. I don't know what kind of game but it should include these things: Flashing lights, lots of lightning, lightning bolts, lightning balls, thunderclaps, speed skating with jumps, powerups, desert levels, swamp levels, mountain levels, sewer levels, first person scenes where you're waiting 8 hours real time for dawn with a revolver aimed by the mouse and the other mouse button has a bottle of holy water, an action scene where you control a large foot stomping smaller things like soldiers and gazebos, and panthers.

[grelbfarlk]

As far as sound goes, AHI audio and surround sound supported and used, also hardware midi, and a CD soundtrack by Taylor Swifts. Voice actors as well.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

As far as sound goes, AHI audio and surround sound supported and used, also hardware midi, and a CD soundtrack by Taylor Swifts. Voice actors as well.

No Brian May guitar solo?

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

When we talk about exploiting all from Aga, what are your expectations? Besides games genre, what would you like to see from Aga: CP2 games, 2d games, racing games, a lot of parallax and moving objects and a lot of colors, 50-60hz?

To me base machine should be A1200 +fastmem

After taking some time with the AGA chipset, I'd say something a bit below what a SNES can bring to the table.

Those 16 color 64px wide sprites are better than the shit you have to put up with on OCS, but not being able to set a palette per attached sprite is the biggest roadblock to being competitive with the 16/32 bit consoles.

[coder76]

I'm not sure how it works, but it seems that it is possible to make games on AGA with 2 independent scroll layers, and thousands of colors. This is not a copper effect. This Kang-Fu game somehow does it, and the game runs in even hires 640x256, which wouldnt be possible on SNES or Sega Megadrive. The enemy sprites are buggy though in game, when they overlap other objects, and flicker.

It is said that dual playfield is used together with HAM-mode in Kang-Fu, but this shouldn't be possible, as even a single HAM8-layer needs 8 bitplanes. And they got two layers there. The game also runs in 50 FPS, so I think the other layer cant simply have been copied on it with blitter or CPU as that takes a lot bandwidth.

[ Show youtube player ]

Also on 68030-based systems, blitter objects should not be used for everything, but rather use CPU to plot out sprites.

[donnie]

Why would you want your game in a jpeg-mode?

Instead of proper pixel art?

More colors are not always better imho.

[gimbal]

256 colors, 2D. You can do the same with less as many have proven, but it'd be great if you don't need to be a game design genius and a programming god to make a nice looking and performing game.

I would have liked AGA to lower the bar for game development on the Amiga.

[saimon69]

I proposed a superscaler game; while surely not moving hundreds of sprites like the custom SEGA hardware, a 1200 could do a convincing job since even the OCS powerdrift becomes usable

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by saimon69

I proposed a superscaler game; while surely not moving hundreds of sprites like the custom SEGA hardware, a 1200 could do a convincing job since even the OCS powerdrift becomes usable

any examples?

[saimon69]

Well one example may be a game like the 3D section of Unreal; having 64px 16 color sprites, 16 color per plane dual playfield, 24 bit copper shades and a EC020 should provide a better 3D experience; then we have the aforementioned Power Drift, rail shooters like Jurassic Park, Line of Fire, After Burner. Of course not using a real scaling but the usual pre-rendered assets

[kremiso]

atm i'm testing an interesting Polish game, UBEK

UBEK HOL

i like how you can change the gfx output, from a standard AGA Copper mode, to an imo better HAM6 mode, both lo and hi resolution

i am reading here of an HAM8 possibility too, for the AGA chipset
what's the difference between HAM6 and HAM8?

[Photon]

If it's a game, you want it to be fun to play. That's down to the game idea, but the audiovisuals are part of the reward and replayability too.

Now the technical stuff is not as important for games, but if it hurts playability it's sometimes a reason to not play or to upgrade.

Now AGA+Fastmem is a pretty sweet platform, it could improve over stock AGA quite a bit. It's not difficult to bless an A1200 with a bit of Fastmem. <3

I think OCS 1MB and AGA+Fastmem are pretty sweet release platforms like AGA/030/CD32. AGA/060 is legit but not all can have it as we know.

[grelbfarlk]

You just make a lot of fun scenes with interactive things. Also make it look good:

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Photon

If it's a game, you want it to be fun to play. That's down to the game idea, but the audiovisuals are part of the reward and replayability too.

Now the technical stuff is not as important for games, but if it hurts playability it's sometimes a reason to not play or to upgrade.

Now AGA+Fastmem is a pretty sweet platform, it could improve over stock AGA quite a bit. It's not difficult to bless an A1200 with a bit of Fastmem. <3

I think OCS 1MB and AGA+Fastmem are pretty sweet release platforms like AGA/030/CD32. AGA/060 is legit but not all can have it as we know.

I agree. Most game genres are quite achievable on an A500 or A1200 (perhaps with bit of FastRAM and a hard drive) if you don't set your sights too high. Playability is more important than looks, but audiovisuals as a 'reward' are also important. That's what's missing in many otherwise competent games IMO. Too many games start out looking great and then lose it as the artists and level designers run out of inspiration.

The technical prowess of the machine is almost irrelevant. A good artist can do amazing things with 32 or even 16 colors. Having too much can actually make the artists lazy. Here's an example I found while researching for another thread:- in King's Quest V, Sierra 'upgraded' from 16 color EGA to 256 color VGA graphics. To make the job easier they drew the backgrounds on paper and scanned the images. This looked pretty poor on VGA, bad on Amiga OCS, and awful on EGA. However it looks like they 'touched up' the EGA graphics to compensate, but left the Amiga graphics in their poorly digitized state. No wonder it suffered in comparison to the PC! (compare the castle scene below to eg. Defender of the Crown to see what a difference well drawn computer art can make).

The older EGA Sierra adventure games had nicely drawn computer art, which achieved an effective resolution and meaning beyond what scanned images can provide because every pixel counted. After a while you get used to the characters having bright red skin etc., and with the addition of a few atmospheric sound effects the game comes alive. I am playing the The Colenel's Bequest on the Amiga again, and the gaudy low res EGA graphics don't disturb me at all.

[malko]

^ agree : hand drawn graphics also have a better "personality". I find most of the photorealistic games boring as most of the time visual is put over others aspects of the game(play). A good mix between all the aspects of a game does not requires 24+ bits colours.

[donnie]

Mockup of dawnbringers 16 color palette:



dawnbringers 16color palette

https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=12795

Mockup of dawnbringers 8 color palette



https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=26050

[TEG]

Originally Posted by TCD

No Brian May guitar solo?

ROM encoded Freddie Mercury sprite would have been an huge breakout

Make me wonder if the 1200 ROM have free space.

Originally Posted by gimbal

I would have liked AGA to lower the bar for game development on the Amiga.

Exactly, an API to hide all the tricky settings you have to do to use AGA. AGA is a nightmare to learn.