I have been thinking long and hard about the prospects of AmigaOne gaming in this day and age for quite some time now, and I really need to offer food for thought to us remaining Amigans. My greatest fear being that no one really knows how to approach amiga gaming for this day and age or which direction it is to take. Do we even know what amiga gaming means these days? What is representative of the Amiga gaming scene in the 21st century? Do we really need to clone everything that moves in PeeCee land? Have we really become this insecure as Amigans gamers of late? Have we indeed lost our way?
Well this is one of many propositions floating around in my crazy head of late....
We all know that AmigaOS4 will be coming out sometime this quarter, and PC gaming is now stepping into yet another level (ie DirectX 9 gaming heralded by the new 3Dmark2003 today and Doom III later this year) Can't future amiga game devs try to focus on making vertex and pixel shading support for all games a bare minimum.
If you look at it from the perspective of attracting future game devs and gamers alike, AmigaOS4 really has to make Amiga gaming, compelling enough as it was in the late 80s early 90s. Now there is a lot involved with trying to set gaming standards in a platform that hasn't even been established yet. But given that the support for video cards will be somewhat limited to but a few brands, namely Matrox and ATi, it would be really wonderful to see DirectX 8 level of games, as the trend and standard for AmigaOne titles.
Amiga h/w won't be dragged behind by a large customer base still clinging onto old and ageing nVidia DX6 or DX7 h/w. There will be no GeForce MX support in the short term or even long term. And really, anyone getting these cards in the interest of eventual support on OS4, should be wary of wanting anything more than basic 2D functions.
PC gamers in general are very conscious of the fact that PC games take upto 18 months to catch up to new h/w technology and this usually only amounts to less than a dozen titles in a given year actually incorporating full support of the new features. Amiga should capitalise on this and try to release games supporting newer h/w technology quicker albeit on a smaller scale. ATi is a wonderful company for Amiga to embrace in its campaign to lure gamers and potential users back to its platform (heck, just look at it giving nVidia a nightmare as the undisputed king in gfx with the up and coming 9900 Pro). I would hazard a guess that most A1 buyers aren't getting anything less than an ATi 8500 for their Amiga systems. Its only natural, amigans always want the very best. And making ATi 8500 level of gfx the presumed entry level, could work wonders in the gaming potential for each A1 machine.
It can be little factors like this that would make Amiga a platform to consider. If enough "Amiga only games" are released that are making full use of ATi's pixel and vertex shaders, in a clever way (meaning in a very efficient low overhead manner) then gaming could be very viable and attractive. You need only look at the Nintendo gamecube, which runs at approx 300mhz and utlises 40mb RAM, or less? yet it can render gfx quite beautifully, due to its efficient use of its flipper gfx chipset and RISC architecture.
Another advantage of A1 systems is the almost uniform architecture across the board, software devs won't have to account for a multitude of configurations and architectures when designing software. We can cut out the 2 or 3 generations of h/w that PC devs still have to account for. Also DirectX9 ATi cards could be supported and implemented into the next gen amiga games presumably much sooner than its PeeCee counterparts, and at greater frequency (meaning that many small devs can jump on the Nova 5 bandwagon as soon as support for 9500/9700/9900 series arrives to amiga). Hopefully Warp 3D Nova 5 will be Amiga's holy grail into getting back on track and current.
One last thing that I can't stress enough, is that being Amiga, we don't have to abide by the very rigid and unimaginative gaming genres that are deeply entrenched in the PeeCee gaming scene. I mean c'mon guys, as Amigans we are naturally more creative and inherent risktakers right? I'm sure that being a much smaller community, we can risk making completely new and innovative genres that might even challenge the long standing genres that are so bland and lacking in soul this day and age in PeeCeeland. Well, we can only hope. But I still dream of a day when we can break away from the shackles of uninspiring FPS, RTS and RPGs, which have been played to death. It's like someone releasing pong and there being 50 different variants, each with nothing more to add, except a different set of colors or sounds, well thats PeeCee's for ya I guess. Where is the Amiga inspired Lemmings of the 21st century? lol!
I welcome all your thoughts on this matter. Let us as Amigans shape our gaming future on this new A1/OS4 platform. We really must incorporate the latest technologies to our advantage and shock the world with our ingenuity as in 84 (A1000s launch - were so little did so much). We can't afford to be considered a has-been system with dated software and games, even before being given a chance. Now I hope there is enough incentive to roll out NOVA 5 quicker now.
Thankyou if you read that whole rant from yours truly, I really needed to get that off my chest, I hope you feel a similar yearning to making Amiga a serious contender again - as Amigans the very least we can do is give our ideas out freely and hopefully throw a spanner in the works for those dedicated OS4 Hyperion guys to think about
/end rant
