[Brainstorming] Power Drift and pseudo 3D circuit games

[VladR]

Originally Posted by saimon69

Is bordering on Rad Mobile now

Not quite there yet, but let me fix some textures first

Rad Mobile has some really good texture work coupled with fog and a nice view distance (from what I recall).

[VladR]

Originally Posted by saimon69

Is bordering on Rad Mobile now

Slightly closer to Rad Mobile now
I had to implement 2 procedural textures and switching between them (darker with lines and brighter without), but that was a quick fix. Also had to adjust width and depth of the road and spacing between the segments.

I am definitely noticing texture quantization artifacts despite using source textures of 1024x1024, so I suspect I have some cumulative precision issue between the bitshifting somewhere there...

[VladR]

I fixed the precision issue and now the full texture res gets applied vertically.

Turns out, 32 bits ain't a whole lot, so it wasn't just a question of adding few bitshifts or converting coords to fixed point, as the precision got lost in the middle of the 3D transform, but it's all good now.

Funny that I didn't run into this before...

[VladR]

Slight visual quality bump. I implemented a 3x1 kernel blur horizontally within the scanline of the procedurally generated tile.

It's somewhat subtle on a screenshot, but looks much better in movement. Either way, it's a loading-time CPU cost, so there's no performance penalty for using it filtered at run-time.

I have few other filters already implemented in other parts of the engine, so it's very easy to have additional different levels of filtering/blur (just copy/paste/refactor the existing code).

I also moved the road markings to the top of the texture as they were getting somewhat occluded when they were in the center. That explains why Powerdrift had them at the top of the tile too

[VladR]

I implemented a 3x3 Kernel Filter with all kinds of special casing to make sure the transparent texels aren't filtered and it's much smoother this way.

Of course, all such effects are tied to a boolean variable so that I can at any time enable/disable any FX.

[VladR]

I think this was a great experiment and it proved to me that this type of game is a very good candidate for a next game of mine (whenever that might be) as it also substantially visually differentiates [from what I have now].

Now I can get back to working on my primary game

[saimon69]

And i still have my questions - think will pester Sandruzzo to make a prototype for OCS/ECS :P

[VladR]

Originally Posted by saimon69

And i still have my questions - think will pester Sandruzzo to make a prototype for OCS/ECS :P

Yes, I guess you'll have to

There's no way I would sink so much resources into OCS version of something like this - I'd much rather use that time to make my flatshader as fast as possible on OCS, as that could be used in dozen different games (while this rasterizer is really only useful for this particular subgenre of racing).

[saimon69]

Was playing around with Hoot and i decided to try to grab all instruments from the Arcade Soundtrack and reconstruct Course C - i made it in three channels 'game ready' therefore had to sacrifice some minor pieces; since i did it last night i expect might need some extra tweak

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[saimon69]

Getting back on topic, i wonder: what is the maximum amount and size of vectorballs (because at the end a super scaler IS a vectorballs engine) that an Amiga 500 can move at a playable speed? (12, 17, 25, 50 FPS using PAL timing)
[and have another song cooking]

[saimon69]

Have two more Power Drift songs in the oven but am concerned about sizes, song A and B seems to want at least 150k each, hence is REALLY suitable for one meg machines...

[saimon69]

An interesting video that deconstruct the rendering on Power Drift ST - i wonder if using only 8 colors only for road elements might accelerate stuff
- i also wonder if flat shaded tiles are faster to render than dithered ones, maybe marginally
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[gimbal]

Nice, I find those deconstruction videos fascinating. Thanks for sharing.

[saimon69]

Same guy posted other deconstruction videos, included one of Lotus 1 on ST and STE

[saimon69]

Course A! Still some tweak to do on sample loops and finetune of the song but the loop is complete!
Same as before, samples were taken from Hoot - sorry for the choppy audio, am using the xbox game bar on my win 10 laptop and despite i closed almost everything still is choppy

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[rothers]

It would surely be way quicker to code this type of game as a raycaster sort of engine?

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by rothers

It would surely be way quicker to code this type of game as a raycaster sort of engine?

I thought so too, however KK/Altair engine is limited on height and depth if applied to A500

[saimon69]

In the topic of 3d worlds made using vectorballs - which in short Power Drift is, an interesting megadrive game that plots map blocks into a sphere called Miniplanets

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[saimon69]

Here is the High Scores music, in four channel since there is no game sound in that part
I consider it a WIP due to the fact that chimes does not echo good like in the arcade yet
[ Show youtube player ]

[mcgeezer]

Look, I love the SEGA arcade stuff just as much as anyone.
I was brought up on Outrun, Space Harrier, After Burner and Galaxy Force.
But put simply... an Amiga cannot do them games real justice because they simply don't have the hardware to do it.

What you have to put into perspective is that them SEGA programmers just didn't have to worry about 90% of the stuff an Amiga programmer needs to worry about because the game designers had already blue printed the requirements from a hardware and software perspective.

Making games like Power Drift, their software engineers simply didn't need to worry about performance... taking on a SEGA (I can't remember the board name exactly) game with that sprite scaling hardware would be just pure madness.

Go for it if you think you can though, i know some people have a few things in the pipeline but you must be realistic about what an Amiga can produce.