AmiQuake 2 - new 68k Quake 2 Port

[ChaosLord]

I investigated making the animated parts of my games use HAM8 mode but... it would either not work or be really really complicated and a ton of work... for that much work I could just rewrite the game to use 16.7 million TrueColor gfx cards so I just kinda gave up on HAM8.

When you start going into HAM8 it conflicts with traditional color cycling techniques that I get to use in normal 256 color mode.

You have to avoid fringing.

Its way more complicated.

More coding.  More work.

In the end I settled for 256 color mode because I can do superfast multilayer blitting. Colorcycling the way I want it.  Never have to worry about fringing.

I just use HAM8 for TitleScreens and such.

I would not mind displaying movies in HAM8.  But I could not work out how to use/adapt CDXL video format for HAM8 purposes.  It did not exactly have user-friendly documentation.  I could have figured it all out if I was willing to devote my whole life to it for 30 solid days.  I didn't feel like it was worth 30 days of my life just to play HAM8 CDXL32 movies in my game.  So I passed on it.

[Crumb]

Anyway it appears that rendering HAM8 (via C2P) is not really any slower than normal 8 bit C2P, the real overheard is generating the color values to  be used (which is very slow to do dynamically).    I guess this is the reason that HAM8 C2P hasn't been used in any games, for the demos that used HAM8 (eg the awesome Push), I assume they just pre-calculate the palette entries.

In some demos the screen is configured as SuperHiRes, grouping 3/4 pixels and drawing R/G/B separately, the palette is fixed and the c2p  changes the colour to the nearer, if it's in the 64 colour palette you draw it, if it's not you modify the previous one. You can simply avoid using the palette and just modify the value of the previous pixel :-)

[Britelite]

Anyway it appears that rendering HAM8 (via C2P) is not really any slower than normal 8 bit C2P, the real overheard is generating the color values to  be used (which is very slow to do dynamically).

And most demos used a 160x100 HAM-mode instead of 320x200, as a 320x200 HAM8 c2p-mode would require a superhires mode and 4x the amount of bytes written to chipmem, making it pretty useless.

[NovaCoder]

AmiQuake 2 AGA - BETA6

[utri007]

To make it playable you really need to reduce visual effects, dynamic lights, shadows etc. or are configurable through ini?

[NovaCoder]

BETA 7 - 68k + AGA only

Still needs some more work to increase the speed but it's getting there.

[Hattig]

That's looking pretty impressive now! What frame rates are you seeing?

Would you get a speed up with an option for double width pixels, or even 2x2 pixels like in Alien Breed? If so, would that be enough for a less speedy '060?

[NovaCoder]

I can easily can make it faster of course, but only with a loss of graphical quality and effects.   The really hard thing to do is to make if a faster with minimal loss of visual quality.

If you turn off dynamic lighting, transparencies etc etc, you just end up with something that looks like Quake

Quake 2 AGA obviously pushes the original hardware to the max, this is only going to playable for people with very fast classic Amiga's.

[NovaCoder]

Finally got it running at a good speed on my A1200, a lot of people didn't this would even be possible on AGA 68k!

BETA 10

Should be able to release in a few days to AmiNet.

[XDelusion]

finally got it running at a good speed on my a1200, a lot of people didn't this would even be possible on aga 68k!

beta 10

should be able to release in a few days to aminet.

mad skillz!

[NovaCoder]

My signature just got updated

[AmigaClassicRule]

My signature just got updated

Do I really, really, really need 64 MB of RAM? If I have 32 MB of RAM I would not be able to play the game? If so, that means I will be forced to tower my A1200 to extend another 32 MB of RAM LOL!

[yssing]

I have to try it on my A1200 setup later.
I just tried it on winUAE, it ran waaay to fast.

[paul1981]

My signature just got updated

64MB ram required? If this isn't desktop Apollo discrimination then I don't know what is! :lol:

[yssing]

It takes forever to load on my A1200

And it crashed after 10 seconds

[AmigaClassicRule]

64MB ram required? If this isn't desktop Apollo discrimination then I don't know what is! :lol:

LOL! Tell me about