Would the Amiga be able to handle Angry Birds?

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by saimon69

Well, come to my attention that AB is however a "fire and forget" game, where the player interaction is only to the moment of firing, a bit like Worms or the older scorched tanks games: we can REALLY do some kind of animation or similar while CPU is calcolating results

Not really, there are birds which have post-launch actions that the player can trigger mid-flight (such as dropping an egg) which is pretty crucial to the gameplay. And getting real time feedback so that you can see exactly the effects of your attack (i.e. I didn't quite hit that brick high enough to topple it etc) is pretty important to the gameplay.

To be fun, it has to be real time and have the full physics. You could maybe make something like that NES "port" but I doubt anyone would want to play it, in the same way that you could probably technically make Doom as an 80's text adventure, but it wouldn't be the same.

[robinsonb5]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

in the same way that you could probably technically make Doom as an 80's text adventure, but it wouldn't be the same.

Probably? https://doomwiki.org/wiki/FooM

[Tsak]

I'm pretty sure I've seen a similar physics based game (or demo/engine?) running on stock Amiga a couple months ago. If I recall correctly it was single screen and had various object shapes included. It might have been some old PD thing or perhaps something more new. Memory is fuzzy unfortunately.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

Not really, there are birds which have post-launch actions that the player can trigger mid-flight (such as dropping an egg) which is pretty crucial to the gameplay. And getting real time feedback so that you can see exactly the effects of your attack (i.e. I didn't quite hit that brick high enough to topple it etc) is pretty important to the gameplay.

Doesn't Worms allows exactly the same thing ? Like post launch action that you can trigger after shooting ?

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

To be fun, it has to be real time and have the full physics.

That's a strange and very definitive sentence. Worms seems quite fun to me even if it doesn't have the hyper complicated but necessary full physics it takes to AB to be funny.

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

You could maybe make something like that NES "port" but I doubt anyone would want to play it, in the same way that you could probably technically make Doom as an 80's text adventure, but it wouldn't be the same.

Is it absolutely impossible to imagine that the Amiga could do a better port than the NES one ? There is maybe a way between a 1.1 pixel perfect port and the NES one ?

[Reynolds]

Yeah, Worms is kinda similar in terms of action and also in visuals. I mean, screen handling (withouth the zooming in-out) and the dynamic movements are kinda similar. Maybe the rotation of the objects (stones and wood) could be pre-drawn if that would be a bottleneck albeit I can imagine them rotated, if I remember well that effect was used in old OCS/ECS demos way back...

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Doesn't Worms allows exactly the same thing ? Like post launch action that you can trigger after shooting ?

Yes. But the suggestion was that Angry Birds is just "fire and forget" so you could pause the game when the bird is released, calculate all the physics, then just run it as some sort of animation. That doesn't work when the player can have influence at any point.

Originally Posted by sokolovic

That's a strange and very definitive sentence. Worms seems quite fun to me even if it doesn't have the hyper complicated but necessary full physics it takes to AB to be funny.

Worms is a great game, I absolutely love it (less so the many tired sequels but that's another story). However it isn't Angry Birds and is really only superficially similar. If you took all the physics puzzles out of Angry Birds, you have something like a very boring version of Worms.

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Is it absolutely impossible to imagine that the Amiga could do a better port than the NES one ? There is maybe a way between a 1.1 pixel perfect port and the NES one ?

It's not about being 1:1 pixel perfect. If you could degrade the graphics to Atari 2600 level, but keep all the physics there would still be a fun game in there.

But the Amiga just doesn't have the kind of CPU grunt necessary to handle the complex physics involved. You can easily store pre-rotated versions of all the objects (they're pretty small, mostly symmetrical etc) but the drawing part accounts for only a tiny fraction of what the game has to do.

And you just can't precalculate that. You can't even cut corners with things like fixed point arithmetic because the numerical ranges involved tend to have too much variance. It's not really something where you can do a cut down version either.

[sokolovic]

You made me wants trying this game.
Indeed it would be almost impossible to convert without a massive cut down.

[rothers]

Loads of Amiga conversions were cut down. I think the fun of angry birds is totally possible with much more simple physics.

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by rothers

Loads of Amiga conversions were cut down. I think the fun of angry birds is totally possible with much more simple physics.

The tools exist. Fame and fortune awaits anyone who can prove that wrong.

(Note neither fame nor fortune actually awaits, but you would look like a hero to a very small corner of the internet, which counts tight?)

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

The tools exist. Fame and fortune awaits anyone who can prove that wrong.

(Note neither fame nor fortune actually awaits, but you would look like a hero to a very small corner of the internet, which counts tight?)

Thats a fair disclaimer ;-)

Btw, these days we could produce the graphics using midjourney 5 or Stable Diffusion together with the ”Control” -tool. Mostly needing conversions down to appropriate Amiga formats and color palettes.

Next, we need to train a LLM with all Amiga demo-physics code ever written, then we’ll get the physics-coding part sorted out too