Sholud something like this have been the Amiga's gaming future?

[bloodline]

I think there are a lot of iphone games / ipad games that rely on gameplay more so than graphics!
 
Angry birds being one of them and would love a port of that to the Amiga, no reason why an Amiga 500 couldn't run it!

All the big selling iPhone games are so simple they could all have come directly from the 8bit era

[AmigaNG]

I think the closest thing we have to that game on the Amiga is Leading Lap, which I think is not that bad, using the same engine and making it more arcadee and more for aga and high spec amiga's I seen no reason why something like that could'nt be made.

leadinglap video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CilB8OBvsOY

also Hunter I think is a good example of how much could be done, very first GTA stly game I played where you could get into car, tank, bike, boat, etc all in 3d and gfx and animation where pritty soild for their time
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3KNeckjgfs

I think Agry Birds could be done on Amiga, the gravity/physic part is only thing questioning but I'm sure I played a Worms rip off PD game that you could shoot tree over or somthing like that, it be nice if we could get a port or a clone made on the Amiga.

[gertsy]

Yep great colours.  It looks like it could have been a hit A7000 game for 1998.
If only that alternate reality was real.

[Amiga_Nut]

Yep great colours.  It looks like it could have been a hit A7000 game for 1998.
If only that alternate reality was real.

HP PA-RISC based A5000 rumourware machine running WinNT?

[Khephren]

Yep great colours.  It looks like it could have been a hit A7000 game for 1998.
If only that alternate reality was real.

I don't think it's far off what an fast 030 or perhaps an 040 could manage. At 320x256 of course. Maybe drop the vertex shading (which would be a shame).
  Nothing wrong with talking alternate realities, or even giving some game coders future food for thought.
  There's a lot of retro style stuff out there these days, that I think our old girls would be more than capable of giving it a good shot at.

I was hoping some demo coders would chime in and tell us a bit about polygon throughput and gourard shading on expanded amigas, and I wonder if an FPU would be of any help.

[Amiga_Nut]

That game is massively CPU intensive, so unless Commodore had a secret 3D GPU project at half the cost of Orchid/Matrox/PowerVR OR suddenly the price of 50mhz 060 CPUs were half that of 60Mhz Pentium CPUs then never would have happened IMO.

No I don't see the problem. I have a machine here that's 10mips vs A500's .75. A lot of us have them. I can't see  a good reason why my machine can't throw around a lot more untextured polys, with more colours using a c2p routine? Perhaps we won't reach this quality, certainly not this resolution.

Perhaps I misnamed the thread, perhaps i'm just thinking that we could have stuff not a million miles away from this. I was thinking that 'flying high' for example would have been better if they'd concentrated on what the amiga could do, rather than what it wasn't built for.

Although would we have accepted it? I love looking at 'old school' graphics now...but when we were younger, would we have wanted this over something that attempted textures?

Well by the time it was even viable on a mass market Amiga, say the 3rd generation A1200 with 50mhz 060 we would be on Dreamcast gaming with Sega Rally 2 visuals so it would have been nice but not a killer app to bring people back to the Amiga from the consoles they gamers had migrated to (PC was too expensive for a long time compared to something like £99 Dreamcast).

Remember that without a 3D GPU textured or untexture, polygons are crazy CPU time, and with scenery like that and cars like that and Gourad/Phong shading it is no way possible below 50mhz 040 because a 486DX22 66 may only just manage that sort of detail. Try playing Fatal Racing/Whiplash on a 25mhz 486 and you get the idea.

[yssing]

AmigaNG >> I have never ever heard of hunter.. But I have to try it out.. looks great..

The amiga was good at handling 3D games.. not texture mapped though.

[bloodline]

AmigaNG >> I have never ever heard of hunter.. But I have to try it out.. looks great..

The amiga was good at handling 3D games.. not texture mapped though.

That's true, even AMOS 3D was able to produce some really quite dramatic 3D gfx!

[Khephren]

@Amiga_nut

Fatal racing is a bad example. It's fully textured. Texture maps are far harder computationally than either plain shaded polys of gouraud shading. Phong shading is nothing like gourard shading, it's far harder to do as well.

I'm not so much interested in what what came out when, or some hyperthetical A7000 etc. I'm talking about what the limits of our machines actually are. That's why i'm hoping to get some coder input, i'm sure there's some demo coders who know whats what.

yeti3D on a 16.8mhz arm on the GBA manages texture mapping and gouraud. And i'm not even talking about texturemapping.

[Khephren]

I think the closest thing we have to that game on the Amiga is Leading Lap, which I think is not that bad, using the same engine and making it more arcadee and more for aga and high spec amiga's I seen no reason why something like that could'nt be made.

Yeah, up the colours to get rid of the dither patterns, increase the poly count by perhaps a factor of four. Maybe add a shading option for higher end machines, and perhaps options to up the rez. I don't see what would be so out of this world for a fast 030, with plenty of ram.

Leading lap runs ok on an base A1200. Most 030/50's are 8x faster than that, and many have FPU's.

[Amiga_Nut]

@Amiga_nut

Fatal racing is a bad example. It's fully textured. Texture maps are far harder computationally than either plain shaded polys of gouraud shading. Phong shading is nothing like gourard shading, it's far harder to do as well.

I'm not so much interested in what what came out when, or some hyperthetical A7000 etc. I'm talking about what the limits of our machines actually are. That's why i'm hoping to get some coder input, i'm sure there's some demo coders who know whats what.

yeti3D on a 16.8mhz arm on the GBA manages texture mapping and gouraud. And i'm not even talking about texturemapping.

16mhz ARM 32bit RISC CPU and 1/4 the Amiga low resolution = 3D rally games on GBA. If anything remotely like that was possible we would have seen it on A1200 with Fast RAM configs then. GBA is not a good example.

Zeewolf is probably the fastest basic 3D routines we have on Amiga, so I guess if you run that on 030/50, 040/25 and 060/50 it's a good guide.

Gourad shading requires lots of colours, lots of colours = lots of bitplanes = slow down of chipset with many writes to chip ram per pixel coloured. I don't know if it would go beyond 32 colour flat shaded polygons really without GPU assist.

Another test is F1GP. No textures and low colour count. Again I used that on a 486SX 25 and it was quite fast. Never tried it on my 030/25 A4000 I had briefly in the mid 90s so maybe someone else can try that for us.

edit: 8mhz first generation ARM CPU as seen in the Archimedes A3xx and A4xx models in 1987 had the same CPU power as an 030/25 Motorola CPU. So probably 060/33mhz performance in the GBA version coupled with 75% less pixels to write to the screen.

[Amiga_Nut]

Yeah, up the colours to get rid of the dither patterns, increase the poly count by perhaps a factor of four. Maybe add a shading option for higher end machines, and perhaps options to up the rez. I don't see what would be so out of this world for a fast 030, with plenty of ram.

Leading lap runs ok on an base A1200. Most 030/50's are 8x faster than that, and many have FPU's.

FPU is not used in these kind of games, they're not ray tracing.

And Leading Lap is about 1/100th the complexity of 3D world detail being rendered. Actually Leading Lap looks like AMOS 3D AGA product

I think Zeewolf is more advanced and efficient technically.

[fishy_fiz]

FPU could absolutely make a big difference for a polygonal game. Additionally the amigas blitter can be used as well for fill patterns. Another pro for this type of game on the amiga is that it could operate largely inside fast ram and chip be reserved for the actual displaying of the polygons + sound. Again I use Segas 32x as a good point of reference. It was all software rendered and it's graphics fill rates are possibly even inferior to that of the Amiga.

Edit: those gba and archimedes specs are very far from accurate. A GBA resolution is 240x160 = 38400 pixels vs 320x200/320x256 (64000/81920), which is between 45 and 60 percent of the pixel count. A massive difference to the 25% quoted. As for the 8mhz cpu in early archimedes, its probably closer to 2x raw performance of the 68000 cpu in an a500, not to mention the fact that risc architectures often require more instructions for same end result as a cisc cpu.

[Khephren]

FPU may not be used, but they SHOULD be used if available. How do you expect to do perspective correction in fixed point? Why do you think so many PC games made use of DX not SX processors on the PC? Do you honestly think FPU's are only good for Ray Tracing?

FPU are used heavily in games on other platforms, the reason they were not on ours, is because they were not a standard feature of the low end, for whom games were generally produced. So most of us have a second processor, that could be used to off load some of the grunt work, doing bugger all most of the time. Again any coder input woud be cool.

Leading lap may look a bit..erm...shit  but it moves at quite a clip. Which I guess was the point.

Zeewolf was cool, short draw distance though. and very few colours. I'm sure with what we now know about c2p, and the systems most of us have, it could be improved on a lot.

[Franko]

Indianapolis 500 for the Amiga is a good example of how much better a game can be with an accelerator board & fpu on the Amiga...

[yssing]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkqFOwqca4A <- was really cool.. Ran perfectly on a stock A500 AFAIR

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4T9h3P8xtgA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMXL6rCltzY&feature=related