Lets talk: Alien Breed

[Karlos]

Alienbreed 3D was a pile of s**t. It reminded me of why commodore went bankrupt because their products couldn't compete with the PC equivalent - DOOM! :madashell:

Alienbreed 3D - worst amiga game ever  :pissed:

Well you can just go and boil your head because I thought it was a great game. Sure it was very low res, but it had far better and more tense atmosphere than Doom and all of the other amiga "doom clones" put together.

Oh, and whilst were at it, despite the resolution, engine-feature wise it was more than a match for Doom. Split level zones, transparency, refraction effects, shaded lighting, pseudo 12-bit RGB (4096 colours) etc. At the same resolution as Doom it could have looked awesome, but alas it was not to be.

Getting all this out of a basic A1200 with FastRAM at a playable speed (and I played it on that config) was seriously impressive.

[Karlos]

To say Alien breed 3D has low res is an understatement. What about ultra low res?

I tried to finish the game but failed. The res is so bad half the time i couldn't tell the difference between the bad guys and the walls behind them! It's hard to finish a game when you can't see the bad guys   :madashell:

It was no lower resolution than existing doom clones of the same period, most of which were far less polished.

I originally finished that game on a basic A1200. Whilst some of the later levels had moments that were interactive slide shows*, a bit of tenacity goes a long way. Maybe you just sucked at playing it :lol:

*when I got my first accelerator card, it was a completely different story. Completely fluid at all times.

[Karlos]

Think you need to re-read the post. Doom CLONES

Quite.

I'm sorry but for me Alien Breed 3D will always be the game that put the nails in the coffin for amiga. This is the game that made me sell my cd32 for next to nothing in 1996 and buy a playstation one and ironically introduced me to doom

Ironic indeed, since after the release of AB3D1, suddenly every man and his dog was out to better it on the platform. AB3D1 showed that fully textured 3D FPS games are possible on a modest amiga, despite the long running belief that a lack of chunky pixel mode made it impossible. It ran on 14MHz 020; Doom, OTOH doesn't even get out of bed on a 16MHz 386. After it's release, we started to see games that actually required accelerator cards to run respectably since people were interested in pushing the envelope. With a bit more CPU power, C2P was possible and with it, full screen 1x1 Doom clones. Eventually, doom itself, the game that John Carmack himself insisted was "impossible" on the Amiga was ported (but not until Quake already had been).

Of course, these wouldn't have ran on your CD32, not without a CPU upgrade at least. IIRC, DoomAttack runs very respectibly on CD32+SX32.

[Karlos]

I would be interested to know two things.

What is the best Amiga specific FPS, is it actually AB 3D v1?

Personally, I'd say it was one of the most ground breaking of the "first generation" of amiga "chunky copperscreen" doom clones (said games all used various copper tricks to fake a chunky pixel display, later games just used chunky to planar conversion which by the time you get to 68040 takes no more time than plain writing data to chip RAM). Pitted against the likes of gloom and fears, it stands right out, both technically and in terms of atmopshere.

Technical highlights of AB3D1 included (but are not limited to):

Arbitrarily angled zones
Contrast with Fears, which was largely "rectangular" (even later titles like Breathless and Genetic Species followed the simpler wolfenstein-esque "by blocks" method of laying out maps).

Variable height zones, with lifts, stairs etc.
Contrast with Gloom (and later, Genetic Species) in which each level was completely flat.

Vertically split zones
Allowed for two levels in the same zone. Doom itself didn't have this. I think only Duke Nukem 3D had a similar feature.

Shaded texture mapping
Of all contemporary amiga doom clones, this was pretty much unique to AB3D1 and improved in AB3D2. As well as being textured, walls and floors were Gouraud shaded from vertex to vertex to produce smoother lighting effects. Doom-style sharp changes in lighting between zones were still possible.

Transparent water / refraction
As above, no other amiga doom clone had water effects to match. It was a shame that the water ripple texture animated per frame, which made it look a bit too fast on quicker machines, but overall the effect was very nice indeed. To be honest, it's only since the advent of "refraction shaders" in modern 3D that I've seen it done significantly better. A nice touch was that once you went under the water, the palette was subtly modified and the audio filter enabled. The liquid effects in Doom were frankly rubbish in comparison, nothing more than animated floor textures that you didn't even sink into to any depth. Quake's were better, but still lacked any transparency (pre OpenGL at least) and while the screen-space refraction effects under water were cool, they were totally unrealistic. Refraction only happens at the interface between materials like air and water.

Polygon models
Like Doom and the various amiga doom clones, the game mostly 2D used sprites for enemies, collectables etc. However, it was capable of using models too, though the only examples to be seen are the various wall lights and the mid-game boss, a grenade lobbing robot walker.


Pseudo RGB rendering
Probably not unique to AB3D1 as a "chunky copperscreen" engine, the hardware banging display code allowed it to basically render all the visuals using 4096 colours, essentially giving you a pseudo RGB 12-bit mode. The benefits of this are a bit subjective as the colour resolution is only 12 bits but no doubt it helped with the shading effects.

Beyond all these, it just had the right atmosphere. Tense and uneasy with the prospect of a sudden and violent death round the next bend...

I should point out that you can't criticise Gloom for it's gameplay however, it was enormous fun, especially in two player mode.

AB3D2 was likewise technically very impressive. As a 1x1 pixelmode capable C2P based renderer, it went back to 256 colours only but thanks to a careful palette selection (and the fact the palette entries are 24-bit) and the use of dithering (which I never noticed until getting a proper monitor), it looked very nice. The shading had been improved allowing for realtime lighting effects from weapon shots, explosions etc. Polygon models featured a lot more, including all weapons and several enemies. Even the 2D sprites were given light maps to make them fit better. There was also a greater freedom of view using the same sort of look up/down technique that was used by Duke Nukem 3D.

Unfortunately, the game seemed somewhat rushed. It probably didn't help that not enough people were working on it. Frankly you need a 68060 (or emulator) to play it to it's full potential, on my 040 it had moments where it was very slow. A lot of the sprites seemed hurried and didn't really have enough animation or directional views. Unlike sprites in Doom, which typically had up to 8 unique views for each animation frame (for viewing at different rotational angles), there were only 4 views. The level design just wasn't as interesting as the first, either.

For all the technical feats, there was a definite sense of let down. I still enjoyed it but felt a bit sad that it could have been that much better as a game too.

What is the best Doom engine to run Doom WAD files on Amiga A1200?

I haven't played in a long time but on my old 68040, DoomAttack was easily one of the most fully featured, including a lot of features not present in the original version of Doom, such as being able to look up and down with manual aim (as opposed to simply facing the general direction of the enemy and firing), jump etc.

[Karlos]

Has anyone ever played with the AB3D2:TKG editors ? Would be fun to recreate some AB3D1 levels with the sequels engine.
Also, has anyone tried any of the various patches for AB3d2 ? I've used the RTG one, but no others. Do the speedup patches for custom chipset amigas make much of a difference ?
It seems there's a bit of potential there for inclined people to have a bit of amiga specific fps creative fun, but Ive seen very few attempts. I assume there's a reason for this ?

I have, but they're not terribly friendly. I did make some weapon/pickup models, reintroduced some of the sprites that were left out and modified the existing levels a bit. I did think about redoing the original game but never got around to it.

If I can find that old mod, I might upload it somewhere. For some reason, it crashes the RTG patch badly though.

[Karlos]

Another nice touch in AB3D is that the sound of your foot steps varies depending on the surface you walk on.

True, that was a nice touch. I always felt the underwater "walking" was a bit silly though, should have swam, instead.

AB3D is also true 3D in its maps. You can walk under walkways and platforms etc, which is not possible in the Doom engine.

Well, that's not actually true. It's very much a 2D map extruded vertically into 3D (like Doom etc) but walkways and multilevel stairs were achieved with the "vertically split zones" I mentioned above. Basically, every zone had the option of a lower room / upper room combination.

Suppose you had 3 adjoining zones, A, B and C, as seen from above:

Code: [Select]


+-----+---+-----+    
|     |   |     |
|  A  | B |  C  |
|     |   |     |
+-----+---+-----+


Imagine zones A and C have lower rooms only, starting at height 0 and are 200 units tall. Imagine that zone B has lower and upper rooms. The lower room starts at 0 has height 95, the upper room starts at 105 and also has height 95. The end result is that the entire space from A to C appears to be crossed by a central walkway 10 units thick (where zone B is) which crosses the room midway along and halfway up the walls.

Hope that makes sense

[Karlos]

That does make sense, thanks!

From the players perspective it was still pretty cool though Like a whole new world had opened.

It was used to good effect in several levels in the game, as I recall. The computer core level (level 5 IIRC) used it quite a lot.

I remember experimenting with a third party level editor for AB3D2 and made a level that had many gantries. By placing faux "support" columns (self contained zones) in strategic places, such as where gantries may cross, you could create the illusion of many stacked vertical layers, since the column actually raised the floor of the zone it defined to a gantry either side but left the upper room area free to be the crossing point for a tangental walkway even higher up:

Code: [Select]


+-------+---+-------+
|       |   |       |
|   A   | B |   C   |
|       |   |       |
+-------+---+-------+
|   D   | E |   F   |
+-------+---+-------+
|       |   |       |
|   G   | H |   I   |
|       |   |       |
+-------+---+-------+


Imagine that zones A, C, G and I are all lower rooms with their floor 0 and ceiling at 300 units. B and H also have a lower room with their floor at 0 and ceiling at 95 units but also an upper room starting at say 105 all the way up to 300, thus defining a walkway similar to the earlier example. Likewise, D and F have a lower room with a floor at 0 and a ceiling at 195. They also have an upper room with a floor at 205 and a ceiling at 300, thus creating a walkway even further up at right angles to the one made by B and H. To complete it, zone E has a lower room with a floor at 105 and ceiling at 195. It then has an upper room with a floor at 205 and ceiling at 300.

The end result is that you get the effect of one walkway crossing another, the cheat is that the lower walkway just happens to have a support strut where they cross.

Of course, the above is just one such junction, the actual level had lots of them. I got really ambitious and tried to design ones where the support column appeared to run all the way up to the ceiling with access holes cut though it. If you imagine four smaller zones immediately on each corner of E, which simply are solid from floor to ceiling, you get the effect.

Unfortunately, I never could get the hang of proper AI path layout in the editor, so the level was never populated with any nasties.

[Karlos]

Is there not a PPC port of Doom the same as quake ?

More than one, in fact. There was ADoomPPC, ZhaDoom and at least one or two others IIRC.

[Karlos]

Tought there was.  But from memory Franko has PPC not GPU.

GPU isn't used as the rendering is entirely software driven (note there are GL ports, not sure if any are available on Amiga). The only advantage you get on RTG here is a faster bus speed and no need to do C2P.

 So will a ppc version make much difference.

Yes. Further to the above, at the default resolution of 320x200 on the PPC, even the most basic C2P routines tend to hit the chip ram "write speed" wall long before any issues caused by their lack of optimisation. However, the C2P routines used were at least as optimal as most 68K versions.

ADoomPPC was actually very playable at a variety of resolutions higher than the default 320x200 on my BlizzPPC. The determining factor was more to do with whether or not the current column being rendered would fit comfortably in the cache.
 

Do the PPC ports have support for AGA

ADoomPPC certainly does.

[Karlos]

If anybody is interested, I found my old AB3D 2 mod. Not sure it is complete, but here it is regardless:
http://extropia.co.uk/projects/KarlosTKG.lzx

Extract it somewhere (it creates KarlosTKG as a directory), put a copy of your tkg executable from your original game in there and run it from the KarlosTKG icon, which should set up all the assigns.

What you get are slightly modified / reskinned levels (a few new secret areas here and there), reworked weapon models (alas some of the animations are too fast in UAE), new monsters, effects etc.

I was rather pleased with the models (reworked the shotgun, assualt rifle has ejecting brass, muzzle flash, grenade launcher has rotating circular clip, also added a chain gun), making them with the provided editors was a complete bitch.

Due to extra models, sprites and textures, I think it may need more RAM than the original. It has never been tested with less than 68040 / 16MB. For some reason, the mod really does not like the RTG patch and will crash fairly quickly.

Have fun, all bug reports to /dev/null

[Karlos]

Some screenshots added to gallery (click for gallery entry)

[Karlos]

Just tried to download your file but all I got was a window full of text...

Someone once told me here how to get round this but now I can't remember how...

Try right-click and "save as", or whatever your browser's equivalent is...

[Karlos]

That did the trick... Cheers Karlos...

Just need to dig out AB3D 2 now (for some reason I don't seem to have it installed on my HD just AB3D 1)...

It'll be nice to try out new levels someone else has created as when you make your own there's not much point in playing them, as you already know all the secrets...

I didn't really make new levels, just modified/reskinned a few of them

[Karlos]

That'll do for me...

A few more images in the gallery:


A few unused assets from the TKG source have been included and if you know your FPS games, you should recognise various textures that have been borrowed (with various degrees of modification) from Doom, Doom 2, Quake and even Quake 2

[Karlos]

@ Karlos

Gonna give it a try tomorrow, need to finish of a few other things first, cos I know once I start playing it again with your new update every other project will get put on hold until I discover all it's secrets...

You might want to use TKGTurboPatch with it as it will certainly help speed up the game a bit.

I actually had a mechanism to switch data files in the current installation by using various assign add / remove so that I could have multiple sets of levels / data. My original goal with that was to recreate the original AB3D 1 as one set, have a "revamped" AB3D 2 as a second and a collection of death match levels. Unfortunately, I've no idea what state all of that was in, so all I have included is the AB3D 2 only stuff, but you should certainly notice plenty of little differences from the original AB3D 2 (it's probably even less stable for a start LOL!)...