Why was Z never ported to the Amiga?

[Mr_Horizon]

Hello everyone,

sorry if this topic has already been handled in the past 20+ years... the game title just makes it a bit difficult to search existing forum threads.

The Bitmap Brothers made many famous Amiga games, and in 1996 released their last title on our beloved platform: "Chaos Engine 2".

But in the same year, "Z" came out, which by now has been ported on many consoles and mobile platforms. And while the bitmap brothers from that year onwards used 3D graphics which were beyond the capability of 90s Amiga Computers, Z is as retro 2D as it gets. No one would believe it to be a graphical standout - pretty & well designed, sure... but it won't have sold any graphics accelerator cards.

Now to the title question - why has it never been ported to the Amiga?

Not just by some dedicated fan in the past 20 years, but really back in the mid/late 90s?

I cannot believe that Z is beneath the abilities of a standard Amiga 1200, when we had games like Dune 2, Syndicate or Cannon Fodder dealing with scrolling maps and many different enemies... on an A500.

Does anyone have insights what made Z so difficult to port, or did the bitmap brothers just not want to put in the effort as they considered the platform lost?

Z, 1996:


Dune 2, 1993:


Napalm, 1998:

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by Mr_Horizon

or did the bitmap brothers just not want to put in the effort as they considered the platform lost?

This.
The 1200 could have easily done a game like that.

[Korban]

There's absolutely zero chance a stock a1200 would have coped. Dont judge by the screenshots. They give no indication of the sort of specs the game requires. There are times during the game it appears a low end Amiga would be up to it, but a system needs to be up to the task of coping with a game at its most intensive, not least intensive.
It's a lot heavier than something like Napalm, and even that really needs an '040 and rtg to approach how it's meant to be.
There can be a heck of a lot of objects flying around the screen at times and it makes heavy use of animated cut scenes.
I'd hazard a guess they just didnt bother doing a port for the tiny number of Amiga users that would have a system up to the task.
It'd have been lucky to have sold a few thousand copies.

Zod Engine exist though, so if it hasnt been ported yet there's the possibility for a port that would work on Amithlon/UAE/pistorm and maybe even Vampire/Apollo derivatives. An overclocked '060 + RTG might even get away with it.

[Gzegzolka]

I believe at that time Bitmap Brotherhood try rather than focus all team members on one game finish few smaller games in smaller teams. There might be no one to made vode for amiga version because some people were working on Chaos Engine2 and some on Z. I wonder were there any other not announced internal projects. I belive it would be hard to code Z for Amiga and it would require at least amiga with more ram and hardware acceleration.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by Mr_Horizon

Does anyone have insights what made Z so difficult to port, or did the bitmap brothers just not want to put in the effort as they considered the platform lost?

This.
Also could be applied to game Master of Magic, for example.
I don't see anything in that game that A1200 couldn't pull out (or even A500), but, unfortunately, it was never ported to Amiga.
Same goes to Master Of Orion... and probably Master of Orion 2, Civilization 2, Warcraft 1 and 2, Heroes of might and Magic series.. etc

Developers simply considered Amiga as a dead platform.

[jotd]

as a measure of retaliation, I never bothered to play that game, even if I love Bitmap Bros games in general.

I think I tried it once, but the fact that it is on PC deterred me. Maybe I could fire up dosbox again... well, it's not the same...

also: not porting that to the amiga...

[Reynolds]

Well, from a certain point of view this isn't 100% true.

http://os4depot.net/?function=module...ay&fileid=8099

But yes, a game like this wwould have been amazing way back on a 68K system, even with 040+ specs. Nowadays it wouldn't be an issue as we have several powerful solutions.

[TCD]

There are a few games that would have been technically possible on an Amiga 1200 in 1993 or 1994 but weren't ported because they would have been a loss for the company that made the game. Dark Sun: Shattered Lands or Shadow of the Comet spring to mind. Z came out in 1996 when the Amiga was commercially dead, so no wonder there was never a port for it.

[Galahad/FLT]

Pretty sure Z started out on Amiga, scope of project got too ambitious where fitting it onto A1200 would have been a struggle, and then the failure of the Amiga market pretty much sealed the deal.

[Retro-Nerd]

Yep, sadly 1-2 years too late.

[crazyc]

I really did like Z on the PC - would have loved it on Amiga.

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Pretty sure Z started out on Amiga, scope of project got too ambitious where fitting it onto A1200 would have been a struggle, and then the failure of the Amiga market pretty much sealed the deal.

The German Wikipedia entry for the game even states this:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_(Computerspiel)

Das Spiel wurde ursprünglich für den Amiga entwickelt und nach sinkender Popularität auf PC portiert.

"Game was initially developed on the Amiga, but with its demise ported unto the PC..

There's absolutely zero chance a stock a1200 would have coped. Dont judge by the screenshots. They give no indication of the sort of specs the game requires. There are times during the game it appears a low end Amiga would be up to it, but a system needs to be up to the task of coping with a game at its most intensive, not least intensive.

You severely underestimate the 1200 and its capabilities there, imo.

Watched a Youtube video of this game, and I think there is nothing in there a naked 1200 couldn't do, graphics wise. Obviously for FMVs you'd need a hard disk or CD Rom to get the amount of data to display unto the screen.

Also, most of what I have seen in that video isn't even 50fps. So you'd have two or more frames for AI and to blit everything into a buffer.

Plus, a lot of the gfx moving around is like 16x16pixels in size.

No idea what Napalm is doing with its raster time and DMA budget, but I don't see the problems with these kind of games to run on a 1200.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Tigerskunk

You severely underestimate the 1200 and its capabilities there, imo.

Watched a Youtube video of this game, and I think there is nothing in there a naked 1200 couldn't do, graphics wise. Obviously for FMVs you'd need a hard disk or CD Rom to get the amount of data to display unto the screen.

Also, most of what I have seen in that video isn't even 50fps. So you'd have two or more frames for AI and to blit everything into a buffer.

Plus, a lot of the gfx moving around is like 16x16pixels in size.

No idea what Napalm is doing with its raster time and DMA budget, but I don't see the problems with these kind of games to run on a 1200.

It is as if there is no such thing as a CPU. There is no point comparing graphics capabilities, Z requires raw horse power. It required a flipping DX2 66 at the time, I couldn't even play it on my PC :/

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by gimbal

It is as if there is no such thing as a CPU. There is no point comparing graphics capabilities, Z requires raw horse power. It required a flipping DX2 66 at the time, I couldn't even play it on my PC :/

Good point. Would be interesting for me, though, what all that CPU power is used for.

From what I have seen on Youtube, there are not that many units around doing stuff, and not all of them are doing wayfinding maths all the time.

[Galahad/FLT]

Pretty sure Napalm is in a higher resolution than Z was

[jotd]

wayfinding math is A* / djikistra algorithm, it's not that CPU hungry. It's been designed to avoid computing all possible paths from A to B (which is a recursive algorithm that takes forever) and keep the best ones.

If they started it on the amiga, it's pretty sure that it would have ran on an amiga. But the bros never did a AGA only game (CE2 is ECS & AGA and is also from 1996). Certainly wouldn't run on a A500. Or slowly... Well, Dune 2 runs on a A500. It's slow but it works.

[skan]

Pretty sure they had a playable demo working on Amiga (1200 I suppose) before the PC version IIRC - according to the excellent book The Bitmap Brothers: Universe at least.
But they hit a (lack of) memory wall pretty soon, so I think that a bit of FastRAM would have been mandatory anyway.

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by jotd

wayfinding math is A* / djikistra algorithm, it's not that CPU hungry. It's been designed to avoid computing all possible paths from A to B (which is a recursive algorithm that takes forever) and keep the best ones.

If they started it on the amiga, it's pretty sure that it would have ran on an amiga. But the bros never did a AGA only game (CE2 is ECS & AGA and is also from 1996). Certainly wouldn't run on a A500. Or slowly... Well, Dune 2 runs on a A500. It's slow but it works.

Thanks for clearing that up, mate. Was really unsure about how computationally intensive that stuff is.

But then, I wonder why games like this took a 66 Pentium to run properly.

I remember playing Red Alert on my P75, and it was getting slow as molasses if it had to draw a lot of graphics, but I think I don't really remember it getting slow if there were a lot of objects in the map. The computations for these must have been the same, regardless if shown or not.

But maybe I completely remember it wrong. It's been a long time.

[masteries]

Z for PC, talking about the DOS version;
was marketed as a 486 DX2 oriented game,

but even is you played it at 320x240
(is possible for the DOS version of Z,
but graphics are "giant", a zoomed gameplay area),
the game runs very slow, such a short of bullet-time frame rate xD

You need at least a Pentium 100 MHz or 120 MHz to play it smoothly at 640x480

Probably, the IA and pathfinding consumes a lot in this great game.



Pathfinding in Z game is continously updated,

I remember that sometimes, the computer AI moves
the units step by step, in a very rare manner to avoid
your units range... while the AI is being distracting you
in another part of the map (in order to avoid human player scanning the map,
due to this game doesn´t have fog of war feature, all the enemy actions are visible from start)
sometimes the computer movements
mimic human actions,



As well there is a strange contrast between brilliant AI actions
and very ordinary ones in this game.


The number of units at each team reaches up to 50
(an unit of soldiers consists of 3 or 4 soldiers that are treated as a single unit,
but each member movements are independent);

and your own units (and AI ones) can take actions and move by themselves,
via their range detection, or via a combination of range detection
and random walk; the units can be "bored" if they are static and
move some steps to left, up... right... or they shoot at wild animals
when they are bored, these sort of actions imply automatic
movements of your units, and in little time, a disaster can arise xD

such your units engaging an unexpected battle against a "some time ago"
distant enemy heavy tank

[Daedalus]

Probably one of those games where it's big and complex enough that it simply wasn't worth the developer time to do the extreme optimisations necessary to get it running on satisfactorily on stock machines. Sure, the algorithms might be simple in themselves, but when you've got lots of other considerations like elaborate weapons, sound and graphics to deal with, and multiplied by potentially hundreds of units, and extra colours meaning your chip RAM bandwidth is already reduced (and CPU throughput if there's no fast RAM), it all quickly adds up to reduce the viability of a game. Added of course to the rapidly dwindling market, and the fact that so many people didn't upgrade their Amigas meaning targeting an expanded Amiga would further greatly limit the market, it's no wonder it was abandoned. At the time, it was niche publishers that could justify releases for expanded Amigas. ClickBOOM were working on a port to the Amiga at the time, so I'm not entirely sure why it didn't happen but I suspect because it would have cannibalised the (already small) market for their Napalm release.

Holding up Dune as an example is interesting. Of course it required a much lower spec, given the relative simplicity and lower colour depth of the graphics, the lower resolution, the sparse sound effects, the simpler controls and pathfinding / AI algorithms and so on. But even Dune reached points where the gameplay was affected negatively by the lack of power of the stock A1200 (let alone the A500). Once battles started getting intense, you got slowdowns and lack of responsiveness (we're talking *seconds* here, not just a couple of dropped frames), precisely at the moments where you need your units to react instantly. A faster CPU certainly helped this situation - I found it far more playable with an '030.

Once you expand an Amiga, it's of course perfectly capable of playing such games. Napalm is the example above, running it on AGA is a little clunky and a graphics card and fast CPU are highly recommended. And of course there's Earth 2140, which *requires* a graphics card and is just about playable on an '060. So yes, it could have happened, but not on a stock A1200, so the even smaller market of expanded machines meant it made even less viable commercially.