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Author Topic: Cinemaware's Wings Remastered coming to Amiga NG platforms  (Read 20017 times)

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Offline Acill

Re: Cinemaware's Wings Remastered coming to Amiga NG platforms
« Reply #44 from previous page: February 03, 2018, 11:34:05 PM »
So between the money spend on this, defender of the crown and Rocket Ranger I am out a lot of cash for three items that never got sent. Whats the story on these titles??
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Offline LoadWB

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Re: Cinemaware's Wings Remastered coming to Amiga NG platforms
« Reply #45 on: February 04, 2018, 01:40:56 AM »
Quote from: Acill;835727
So between the money spend on this, defender of the crown and Rocket Ranger I am out a lot of cash for three items that never got sent. Whats the story on these titles??


http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=835735&postcount=20
 

Offline Acill

Re: Cinemaware's Wings Remastered coming to Amiga NG platforms
« Reply #46 on: February 04, 2018, 03:40:53 AM »
And nothing ever shipped.
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Offline LoadWB

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Re: Cinemaware's Wings Remastered coming to Amiga NG platforms
« Reply #47 on: February 04, 2018, 06:19:01 AM »
That appears to be the unfortunate case.  And it's too late now to get money back from PayPal or credit card, however the purchase was made.
 

Offline Niding

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Re: Cinemaware's Wings Remastered coming to Amiga NG platforms
« Reply #48 on: February 04, 2018, 08:36:31 AM »
It appears that Daniel is focusing on completing Tower57 for Amiga;

https://www.facebook.com/daniel.mussener?lst=740715618%3A100000493701258%3A1517732994

And I do remember him saying; if we dont reach 300+ pre-orders on Wings, he would develop on it "as time allows". Should be a familiar story in the amiga scene.

Honestly, I think Daniel is accepting too much work. There are limits to what 1 man can do in x amount of time. Espesially when it doesnt yield any cash back to him personally.

THAT said, Cinemaware should communicate with people at the VERY least, letting the customers know the progress pace and plans.

Jeroen Tel has the same issue with his campaign; it fell short on his target dollarwise, and to offset this, the time it has taken to complete his work has faaar exceeded what he initially hoped.
For a while he didnt communicate much, and people went sour. Now he communicates again, and people are quite understanding as long as they find the reasons for any delays belivable.
Plus we got 100s of Jeroens wonderful C64 AND Soundcloud soundtracks to keep us happy while we wait!
 

Offline Daytona675x

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Re: Cinemaware's Wings Remastered coming to Amiga NG platforms
« Reply #49 on: February 04, 2018, 09:04:54 AM »
Hi guys,

I was just informed of this thread and asked by somebody via FB, "I'd  like to know why my order for Defender of the crown has been on hold  since Nov 2016. Also will I ever get wings?? Its a bit crazy to not get a  reply back on these things."

Here's my reply:
 I have nothing to do with Defender or Rocket Ranger or Wings-PC, I am only the programmer of the Wings-Amiga port. So for anything related to the other stuff you have to ask Cinemaware Retro.

Wings-Amiga-Port:
Yes, unfortunately it takes muuuuch longer than initially thought. No,  it's not done yet and anyone claiming anything different spreads fake  news.

However, CinemawareRetro sends boxes to some people who reserved it.  Those boxes only contain a recent unfinished dev-build. Those people  know what they get, of course.
It's meant for people who explicitely asked for it because  apparently for them it's more important to have the box already instead  of the finished game (pure collectors it seems).

Anyway:
note that Wings-Amiga is no Kickstarter or whatever. By paying you  simply reserved your copy. If you are tired of waiting you can simply  cancel it and get your money back.
The money was not touched. I have not seen / spent a single dime.

Wings-Amiga will still require some more time to finish. I won't do  any further estimation though. Right now it's completely on hold until  Tower57 is done. After that I will continue and hopefully be done soon.

@Niding
Quote
I think Daniel is accepting too much work. There are limits to what 1  man can do in x amount of time. Espesially when it doesnt yield any cash  back to him personally.
That turned out to be true, unfortunately. It was hard to forsee though:

1.  the work required for Wings turned out to be much higher than initially  thought. This has all kinds of reasons but mostly it's due to the  extreme degree of asset optimizations required plus the high amount of  large levels which have to be checked over and over again, whenever  applying a more heavier optimization or whatever. Simply strongly  underestimated this.

2. Tower57: bad luck. When I agreed to do  those ports I asumed that what I was told was right: that it's simple  basic OpenGL etc. That's why the Kickstarter-stretch-goal was that low  and why I thought that it would be a straight simple some-weekends-port  like e.g. BattleSquadron Deluxe was.
Unfortunately it turned out that  the game's code was running so extremely slow (or not at all due to RAM  requirements) on even mediocre NG-Amiga-hardware that I essentially had  to insanely optimize / rewrite huge parts of the game completely to get  decent performance. And on top of that I had to go the  software-rendering route because many NG-Amigas couldn't handle the huge  textures / huge VRAM requirements. And also come up with a  hicolor-version for systems with < = 512 MB RAM like the 440ep or old  PowerMacs.
So the point is: I asumed that this would only allocate  very few of my time and it turned out to be a nightmare consuming  man-month over man-month.
FYI: I did performance comparisons recently and it turned out that my optimized code runs more than 13-17 (!!!!!!!!!!!) times faster than the original code... And that was just enough to make it *playable* on 440ep and such... Just to give you an idea about the amount / quality of work (at most likely about 1 EUR per hour, at the end :) ).

Anyway, for T57 we have a release  candidate, my testers are very happy so this will be done very soon. And  then back to the other nightmare, Wings :P

Cheers,
Daniel
« Last Edit: February 04, 2018, 09:10:28 AM by Daytona675x »
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Offline kamelito

Re: Cinemaware's Wings Remastered coming to Amiga NG platforms
« Reply #50 on: February 04, 2018, 09:54:29 AM »
Why using a software renderer even on high end AmigaNG?
 

Offline Dr_Procton

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Re: Cinemaware's Wings Remastered coming to Amiga NG platforms
« Reply #51 on: February 04, 2018, 10:07:50 AM »
I just posted this in amigaworld..Beware of that guy (Sven of Cinemaware retro).
I had a very baad experience with that guy Sven of Cinemaware Retro.
I ordered AND PAID more than one year ago for a copy of Defender of the Crown collection. Never received the game. I sent him a ton of mail. He replied some of my mail, promised a tracking number, a next week shipping week after week..pathetic excuses.
Now the game is set as not available.But he didn't refund me for not receiving a copy of that product.
Stay away from that guy Sven..
 

Offline eliyahuTopic starter

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Re: Cinemaware's Wings Remastered coming to Amiga NG platforms
« Reply #52 on: February 04, 2018, 03:53:15 PM »
@Daytona675x

a huge thanks for your update, daniel. it's much appreciated! :)

on a side note, would you have any other way of getting in touch with cinemaware retro besides the public email addresses they sent to backers? it looks like we have several members wanting to contact them, and being unable to.

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Offline gunni

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Re: Cinemaware's Wings Remastered coming to Amiga NG platforms
« Reply #53 on: February 04, 2018, 04:25:36 PM »
@Daytona675x thanks for the update! :)
 

Offline Daytona675x

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Re: Cinemaware's Wings Remastered coming to Amiga NG platforms
« Reply #54 on: February 04, 2018, 05:10:02 PM »
@Kamelito:

Regarding your question on Tower57 (but let's stop it then with T57 here).
Quote
Why using a software renderer even on high end AmigaNG?
Because it's the only option that makes sense ;)

1. my software renderer is faster than the original game's hw-renderer anyway (which suffers from e.g. no batching, at least one texture update per frame for the lighting, temporary textures for every line of text output, etc.). There are many many dedicated highly optimized blitting functions for all different purposes.

2. the software-renderer allowed me some optimizations and other improvements in the game's render-system which wouldn't work with hw-rendering in a nice way (some simple examples are the dithering in the hicolor-version and the lighting which I do manually procedurally (it actually is of higher quality than in the PC version while also being faster), but there are many other things actually).

3. as being said, the way the original game implements the hw-rendering doesn't work on actually most NG-Amigas (e.g. too large / too many textures; and there's no way around that, and texture-compression is a no-go for pixel-art anyway).

4. the exception to (3) are AOS4 systems with an SI card installed. For others with somewhat enough VRAM I could have worked around the texture-size issue in theory. But this would have resulted in other issues (see (2) and wouldn't have helped with low end systems like the 440ep or my own old PowerMac G4 here.

5. since I have to support systems where (4) doesn't apply and because of (1), even optional hw-rendering makes no sense. Especially because the game runs "too fast" on big machines by now anyway ;) So the big systems, which could handle hw-acceleration in this case here with all its drawbacks, are the systems that don't need it at all ;)
Besides that, even if going the 3D route would have been a working option: that would have meant "nay" to all those users with a RadeonHD 4xxx, 5xxx, 6xxx (while some things could have been done with Compositing, many drawing-styles of the game can't; actually the game's current lighting equation would require W3D Nova / OGLES2 if done via hw on NG-Amigas)

Please visit my public FB profile for more information on the game's state and also some benchmarks (there you'll also find my speed comparison with my Sony Vaio i5 running the official Steam build... :biglaugh: )


@eliyahu
@gunni

I wish I had better news like "it is done" for you, but it is as it is :(
« Last Edit: February 05, 2018, 08:13:24 AM by Daytona675x »
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Offline klx300r

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Re: Cinemaware's Wings Remastered coming to Amiga NG platforms
« Reply #55 on: February 04, 2018, 10:00:52 PM »
@ Daytona675x

thanks for the update Daniel ! we wouldn't be playing any of these games (especially not Towe57) on our miggies if it weren't for you so please keep rockin on for us whenever you can :hammer:

@ ALL AMIGANS WHO APPRECIATE OUR DEVELOPERS

why not send Daniel a small donation for coffee/beer while he works away on these games for us:)
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Offline kamelito

Re: Cinemaware's Wings Remastered coming to Amiga NG platforms
« Reply #56 on: February 06, 2018, 06:55:58 AM »
@Daytona
I have seen that you are using C++ isn t plain C faster?
Code generation and datas alignement aren t optimal in C++ except if you know your compiler and check what is produced no?
« Last Edit: February 06, 2018, 07:04:22 AM by kamelito »
 

guest11527

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Re: Cinemaware's Wings Remastered coming to Amiga NG platforms
« Reply #57 on: February 06, 2018, 07:43:09 AM »
Quote from: kamelito;835811
@Daytona
I have seen that you are using C++ isn t plain C faster?
Hardly. C++ allows certain tricks that are considerably harder to do in C.

Quote from: kamelito;835811
Code generation and datas alignement aren t optimal in C++ except if you know your compiler and check what is produced no?
No. Data alignment is exactly the same as in C: "It depends on the compiler". A good compiler will align "correctly". On the Amiga, alignment rules enforced by the Os are "align to 16-bit boundaries", except for UBYTE/BYTE/char.

The quality of the code generator depends on the compiler. There is no reason why C++ code should be worse than C code - quite the reverse. By using templates, one can use a C++ compiler as a "code generator" itself, generating better code.
 

Offline kamelito

Re: Cinemaware's Wings Remastered coming to Amiga NG platforms
« Reply #58 on: February 06, 2018, 11:11:11 AM »
Using C++ as a better C or going the OOP road?
 

Offline Vlabguy1

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Re: Cinemaware's Wings Remastered coming to Amiga NG platforms
« Reply #59 on: February 06, 2018, 04:43:39 PM »
Quote from: Acill;835742
And nothing ever shipped.



I have been sooo close to ordering from them and now I’m glad I hesitated..