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Author Topic: Alien Breed 3D  (Read 5641 times)

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Offline AndyFC

Re: Alien Breed 3D
« Reply #14 on: July 16, 2004, 10:22:07 AM »
I got AB3D for my unexpanded CD32 for the Christamas it came out and played it loads, but got stuck on level 4. I have played it on WinUAE and on my A1200 ('050 processor, 32 MB Fast RAM) but don't seem to remember any improvement over playing it on the CD32.

There was something in the manual about pressing a joypad button if you had FastRAM installed and it would improve performance, but I never found this option, so assumed it got left out of final game.

I got AB3DII when I bought my Blizzard '030 from Gordon Harwoods. I enjoyed playing it but couldn't get past the second level.

I have managed to install and run AB3DII on WINUAE/AIAB using the retarg patch off Aminet. It seems quite stable.
A1200 in DIY Tower. 3.2 ROMs (softkicking 3.2.2), OS 3.2.2 with ClassicWB, CF card, CD RW and IDE to SD adapter running off the internal IDE port (using the A4000 4-port IDE adapter from Amigakit), Pistorm 32 lite with Pi4/2GB/Emu68 or Blizzard 1230-IV, with 32MB 60ns RAM and 50MHz 68882 FPU. 3COM PCMCIA Network card running with Miami DX.
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Offline AndyFC

Re: Alien Breed 3D
« Reply #15 on: July 16, 2004, 10:23:17 AM »
Is there an RTG patch for AB3d 1?
A1200 in DIY Tower. 3.2 ROMs (softkicking 3.2.2), OS 3.2.2 with ClassicWB, CF card, CD RW and IDE to SD adapter running off the internal IDE port (using the A4000 4-port IDE adapter from Amigakit), Pistorm 32 lite with Pi4/2GB/Emu68 or Blizzard 1230-IV, with 32MB 60ns RAM and 50MHz 68882 FPU. 3COM PCMCIA Network card running with Miami DX.
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Offline Karlos

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Re: Alien Breed 3D
« Reply #16 on: July 16, 2004, 10:56:56 AM »
Quote

Hyperspeed wrote:

The main problem with an '060 in an A1200 is the AGA chipset. There is an imbalance of CPU/GFX power and really we needed an integrated accelerator/GFX card long before the still not-so-compact PPC+BVision combo.



Actually, whilst you are true in saying the AGA chipset is slow, as far as Doom style games go, once you get to 040, C2P is throttled by the chip ram bus. Even if the chipset could do chunky pixels directly, you just couldn't write the data any faster.

This shows up in later games. If you compare Doom and clickbooms' Quake conversion running on a good 060/AGA setup you will instantly see that the AGA chipset wasn't really responsible for TKG's slow performance.

The problem with TKG's engine is that it was effectively the rushed out work of one man. I'm sure if he had been given more time and better still someone else to share the workload, TKG could have been a lot more polished.

The source code was released but unfortunately it's a mess - again hinting at the above issues.
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Offline stefcep

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Re: Alien Breed 3D
« Reply #17 on: July 16, 2004, 01:35:53 PM »
I often wondered why Doom on my 060 and CV64 flew in full screen, but AB3D2 was slow, as was Breathless( i think this has soemthing to do with the 060) and Gloom even rtg Gloom.  The Glom vs Doom thing makes me think that C2p routines arent as well optomized in Gloom as in rtg Doom as they both use the same hardware.  I thought that Nemac IV had the best and fastes graphics though.
 

Offline jonssonj

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Re: Alien Breed 3D
« Reply #18 on: July 16, 2004, 02:29:52 PM »
I played Breathless hours after hours on my Blizzard 1230/50MHz. I loved this game. But I had to shrink the window a lot to make it playable.

Maybe I should try it now, on my new BPPC with 060. Anyway, I thought this game was very good at the time.

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Offline The_Power_of_the_Ginger

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Re: Alien Breed 3D
« Reply #19 on: July 16, 2004, 02:47:48 PM »
AB3D 1 is also groovy on WinUAE. AB3D 2 still doesn't work correctly, and perhaps that's for the best.

Using the sacred Bible (well, it is to me) that is Amiga Power (they gave Rise of the Robots the lowest mark of the Amiga magazines, thanks), AB3D gets 91%, simply put at the end: "Doom, but on the amiga. My word."

AB3D 2, reviewed in the last issue, got a slightly confusing range of score from 54% to 'somewhere in the mid-60s, if you have an Amiga fast enough to run it.' So there you go. Sister magazine Amiga Format got excited and gave it 96%...
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Offline Karlos

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Re: Alien Breed 3D
« Reply #20 on: July 16, 2004, 03:11:53 PM »
@TPOTG

AB3D2 is actually very good *if* you have a fast enough system to play it. I tried it on a friend's CSMK3 060 equipped Micronik Z3 A1200 tower setup. Anything less than a fast 060 just doesn't cut it :-(
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Offline Karlos

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Re: Alien Breed 3D
« Reply #22 on: July 16, 2004, 05:43:17 PM »
@itix

Well, they are poor in hindsight, but at the time, all amiga doom clones were hell bent on using chunky copperscreen trickery for their display. The 2x2 pixels were an artifact of that. It was also designed to work in a 2MB chip only A1200, so the visuals are bound to be a bit stunted.

However, consider also that this game ran in 4096 colours (12 bit RGB as opposed to 256 colours), complete with goraud shading, transparent, tinted and bumpmapped water at an playable speed on a basic A1200 with 2Mb additional fast RAM. With any kind of accelerator, it gets very smooth.

Not a bad achievement ;-)

AB3D2 had much more impressive visuals. 1x1 pixels in 256 colours, goraud shading, realtime lighting, colour dithering (I kid you not - view on a monitor) bumpmapped lightsourcable sprites, different types of transparency, vector objects etc. It was, IMHO considerably more advanced than either AB3D or DooM. It also suffered performance wise as a result.
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Offline Cluke

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Re: Alien Breed 3D
« Reply #23 on: July 16, 2004, 05:43:20 PM »
Oh yeah, and we all know that graphics are everything, right?

The first AB3D was an AMAZING game. Amazing technically (despite the crude graphics, they were technically very impressive for such a low powered machine), but most of all, incredible gameplay. It had loads of atmosphere, and great level design. Pity about the sequel.
 

Offline Karlos

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Re: Alien Breed 3D
« Reply #24 on: July 16, 2004, 05:47:04 PM »
Quote

Cluke wrote:
...but most of all, incredible gameplay. It had loads of atmosphere, and great level design.


Agreed. I even completed it on a stock A1200, then after I got my first accelerator (an apollo 1240 @ 25MHz) played it again :-D

Quote
Pity about the sequel.


People always slate it, but IMHO it was good, just crippled by the rush to get it out ASAP so as not to lose ground to all the other clones appearing at the time.

I wonder why nobody thought to recreate the original AB3D levels in TKG? There is absolutely no reason it couldn't be done, as far as I can see.
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Offline Cluke

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Re: Alien Breed 3D
« Reply #25 on: July 16, 2004, 05:51:17 PM »
I wonder why nobody thought to recreate the original AB3D levels in TKG? There is absolutely no reason it couldn't be done, as far as I can see.

Because the level designer was horrendously unusable? ;-)

To be fair, I agree with you that TKG wasn't that bad, but the levels design was all over the place. Some of the early levels were impossible, and some the later ones were a pushover.
 

Offline Karlos

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Re: Alien Breed 3D
« Reply #26 on: July 16, 2004, 05:59:26 PM »
Quote

Cluke wrote:

Because the level designer was horrendously unusable? ;-)



Fair point. I installed something called LevelEd 303, which was far better. Still written in AMOS (urk) but with a normal intuition front end and also many of the functions of the other editors built in.

I still hated the vector editor though. What a nightmare. Still, I mastered it in the end tho ;-)

I've been recently pimping some screenshots on amigaworld.net of a partial mod I made and recently got running again, so I'll put them here too :-)

First set
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Third set
Fourth set
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Offline itix

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Re: Alien Breed 3D
« Reply #27 on: July 16, 2004, 06:11:03 PM »
Quote
It was, IMHO considerably more advanced than either AB3D or DooM.

Maybe more advanced in some areas, but DOOM had better level design. And DOOM multitasks nicely. No need to shutdown IRC or other stuff to play few rounds.
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Offline HopperJF

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Re: Alien Breed 3D
« Reply #28 on: July 16, 2004, 06:29:48 PM »
The only thing that lets TKG down is the speed of the thing. You really need a powerful Amiga for it to be truly playable.

The graphics on the 4 meg version are superb, a LOT better than the graphics off the first AB3D.
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Offline JaXanim

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Re: Alien Breed 3D
« Reply #29 from previous page: July 16, 2004, 07:14:16 PM »
Hmmm...I remember when the 1260s were six hundred quid apiece and AB3D needed one to really crackle.

Apart from Harwood's AB3D freebee with any 1260 purchased, Amiga Format ran a competition to win one (a 1260 that is).

You had about three months to prepare the overview and strategy for a new game. That was really some big prize and I guess a lot of people, like me, submitted a game scenario.

I remember working for at least a month writing the overview and creating water colour images of the characters, weapons, etc. And what happened?

Zilch, as far as I can tell. I bought AF every month and I never saw the results of the compo. It simply vanished.

I often wonder if anyone actually won that 1260, or whether they simply chickened out on the prize. Anybody know the answer?

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