Cinemaware's Wings Remastered coming to Amiga NG platforms

[Daytona675x]

@TheMagicM

Are you going to change the bullets to something more realistic?

Which ones do you mean?
If you're talking about the strafing bullets in the demo version: those were placeholders, in the original those look different and will be changed accordingly.
Generally speaking: I'm not going to do significant changes to the game. With one exception maybe: the explosions sometimes have weird colors and way too much sparks etc. that make it look pretty ugly IMHO.
But in general I don't mess with the artwork other than to technically adjust it to match my needs.

[Daytona675x]

Hi all,

fresh stuff in the dev-diary: progress and madness with the level-conversion

Have fun,
Daniel

[Daytona675x]

@Aegis
on WinUAE with Wazp3D? You're crazy
Well, I don't know the detailed latest limitations of such a setup right now, but AFAIK there's still that VRAM limit. And the game requires quite some VRAM (otherwise you get your missing gfx). Maybe Wazp3D could get around that if doing pure software rendering. Although that's certainly not one of the target systems, it's fun nevertheless. I have an OS4 Classic licence here, so out of curiosity I'll give it a try myself.
Although you're certainly better off by using the PC version on a PC

[Daytona675x]

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

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

Cheers,
Daniel

[Daytona675x]

@Kamelito:

Regarding your question on Tower57 (but let's stop it then with T57 here).

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

[Daytona675x]

@kamelito

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?

That's all myth and nothing of this is true. Thomas already said most, but let me add some more:

1. C++ has much more features to tell the compiler more closely what you actually want to achieve, which in turn helps the compiler to produce better code.

2. there are certain C++ features that are considered to be "slow". But in general, if you want to achieve the same in plain C you'd actually have to come up with sth. similar to what the C++ compiler would create for you automatically - and in 99% it is much more likely that the C++ compiler is better than you.

3. some C++ "special" features may result in significant overhead (e.g. RTTI or exceptions). But then again, see (2). I usually don't need those beforementioned two features and tell the compiler not to create support-code for them (original T57 uses RTTI, but it's actually unnecessary there, so I got rid of it for the Amiga versions).

4. Regarding alignment Thomas already said pretty much everything. However (and all of the following is true for both C and C++) it's often worth to take a closer look at what the compiler creates when it comes to your structures. Bit-fields, for example, may, depending on compiler, not be lay out as you probably hoped they would (which is why I usually implement those "manually").

Anyway, those are facts. C++ is without doubt the superior language and the generated code is in no way slower than a C equivalent would be, actually it is likely that the contrary is true if you use the features C++ offers wisely.
If you like C++ is a different question. Certainly you'll find lots of devs who dislike it. And you will find lots of devs who like it.

But who cares what others like or dislike.
I like it and I know how to use it to get real fast code.

Using C++ as a better C or going the OOP road?

C++ gives you the freedom to do chose any of those paths or just mix them.

[Daytona675x]

@Pgovotsos
@all

Only regarding Wings Remastered Amiga, of course:
Please read my previous statement .
To sum it up (and add some more for even more clarity):

- the current box contains an unfinished dev-build.
- it is meant for people who explicitly asked for it, which means they read and agreed to the text below which they should have received before (likely it will be inside the next update mail if you weren't contacted directly).
- if you did not get or not agree to that then you won't get such a box. When I gave that dev-build iso to Sven he had to promise me that he won't just send it out.
- it's no Kickstarter, it's a reservation and the money wasn't touched (at least I can say so for me, all time / work has been invested unpaid for now). If you don't want to wait any longer (and it will take some more time) then cancel your reservation.
- naturally you can't cancel anymore if you are one of those who agreed and got the dev-build-box.
- there are demo builds available that reflect the latest dev-state. Those builds are identical to the iso-builds with the difference that they are stripped down to 10 levels or so.
- forget my blog, I didn't update it for ages and most likely won't do in the future. It doesn't reflect the current state. Better check out the videos, Facebook-page or the demo-builds.

Here's the mentioned important.txt's english version:

IMPORTANT:

This is NOT the final game!
This is a in-development snapshot from 2018-01-05.
It is buggy and it is not done!
The AOS4 Compositing version is missing on this CD!
The respective renderer is being fully reworked right now.

This version is only meant to be some sort of pre-release
for fans and people who pre-ordered, who explitely asked
for it and who definitely know that what they get is not
the finished game.

However the game contains an online update mechanism which
will take care that you get the real final version
automatically once it's done.

Sorry that this project has become some sort of apparently
neverending story. But well, it is as it is. At least this
version should show you that not too much is missing
anymore.

Best regards,
Daytona675x

The game will be done when it's done. And this will be when I say so.
Really, further speculations won't accelerate that process or change anything.
It is as it is, I'm sorry for underestimating the workload that massively.

Cheers,
Daniel