Why we dont have GAME development contests

[Crumb]

@Cammy

just ignore the troll :-)

@skurk

In my opinion, one of the problems is that the Amiga is too easy to program.  Compared to the C64, you don't need double interrupts to get a stable raster, and you don't need to time the hell out of a loop to open the borders or multiplex a few sprites.  Coding the Amiga is in fact so easy, it's no fun making "ordinary things" on it anymore.  That's one of the reasons I'm sticking to the demoscene, to push the hardware instead of just scrolling playfields and checking for sprite collisions.

That's what I was hinting about in my previous post, find a way to attract idiots like me.  Introduce limitations, and I'm all in.

I don't agree with you completely. I think that making Amiga games may be easy but making high quality amiga games may be quite hard. E.g. you can count the games with AGA quarter-pixel scrolling with the fingers of one hand.

Of course you can do a smooth scroll game with a few sprites with just 4 colours that don't look pretty. Or you can do a smooth scroll with microscopic sprites. Or a jerky scroll with big sprites. But you won't see many games with smooth scroll, big and colourful sprites that take almost full screen and also move with quarter pixel scrolling.

What about colours? I don't see many games with ham8 sprites/backgrounds.

What about the frames of animation? Having decent big animations could require hundreds of different images being decompressed realtime to chipram.

What about special effects like neogeo-like zooming done with some help of blitter help perhaps (like the author of brian the lion did with the rotozoom)? And transparency? Perhaps adding some textures to the floor like streetfighterII did?

You are probably assuming the use of lo-res but why not make a hires or hires-laced game? With hi-res you could still make half pixel scrolling. You would have to be careful writting to chipram when the screen is not being drawn to gain chipmem speed and

I think that if your set quality level to 8bit standards it may be easy to make a game but making a quality amiga game can be very hard if you want to make something more than scroll a pityful small sprite jerking at 2 frames.


I think that even with a 060 accelerator you would have hard time making hires-laced games.

-making a 640x480 diablo clone. You could have basic tiles in chipram and apply a mask to make darker or lighter the sections and copy the tiles with the blitter but it would still be a challenge due to the high number of frames from the main characters.

-making a neogeo like fighting game with a decent number of colours fullscreen zooming, animated background, a texture in the floor, parallax scrolls and lots of animations would need decent coding skills. All moving with quarter pixel scrolling, not just the background.

-making a good horizontal scrolling game with lots of parallax, transparency for smoke, big sprites that take the entire screen with animation... with 256colours and/or ham8. And quarter pixel scrolling!

-making strategy games like starcraft run at 640x480 and 256colours/ham8 with smooth scrolling, fog...

I think that coding for >= 16bits requires breaking some limits. 8bit games are quite simpler than >=16bit ones and you can't content yourself making a scroll that would be hard to do on a c64 and saying "oh I have made a scroll that is hard to do on a c64 so my game is done". Making high quality amiga games takes more than a single-pixel scroll with 2 diminute 4-colour sprites jerking at 2 frames.

[Crumb]

Doing isometric tile scrolling requires transparent blitting ability for the blitter.  The blitter has very, VERY poor performance doing transparent blits.  We'd need a CPU-blit routine like GameSmith used.

You can use the blitter to draw just the pair or odd tiles and draw the middle ones using the cpu.

Fullscreen zooming often requires chunky-pixel graphics.  Quarter-pixel scrolling requires it be done in low-resolution graphics.

I think it's possible to do half-pixel horizontal scrolling with 640x480. Anyway I was thinking about lo-res for that kind of game, for diablo or strategy games hi-res is more useful than for these.

I could live with low res if other features are implemented.

Alpha-blending for fog requires chunky-pixel graphics at the very least (if not hardware accelerated alpha), AGA sprites aren't that wide (only 64-pixels maximum and 16 colors shared between them), parallax requires dual-playfield mode (which limits the display to 15 foreground and 16 background colors), and HAM8 doesn't support horizontal scrolling (if you try it gives you weird color fringes at the edges).

The fun is about making something exciting regardless of these well known limits. Ham8 games were released like Olofight. You can do parallax without using dual-playfield mode. You don't have to draw everything using hardware sprites.

4-color sprites are more numerous than 16-color sprites.  Doing chunky-to-HAM8 requires at least a PowerPC accelerator.  Doing 640x480 with sprites requires interlaced sprite support which is not available in AmigaOS 3.9 or earlier.

I know the sprite limits but you can draw more "sprites" with the blitter or the cpu. You can also reuse the sprites. You don't need PPC to make chunky2ham8, lots of modern scene demos use HAM8 for the graphics (lo-res for 3d scenes and super-hires interlaced for static ones). Even 680x0 Mac emus could use Ham8 for display (although not very fast for hi-res).

Almost all of the special effects you have named would work better on a graphics card than on AGA or would require a 500+ MHz PowerPC to implement.  IMHO, if you need a 500+ MHz machine to implement those features, you're better off using something other than an Amiga.

I don't think you got my point. It's possible to make better amiga games and you don't have to include all that special effects but you can include some of them.

BTW, the fun is about breaking the limits, otherwise we wouldn't have seen desert dream on c64 or any amiga doom clone. Brian The Lion AGA coder would have never done his rotozoom using the blitter despiting all people thought it was impossible