50/50 about posting this here the way this place has disintegrated...

[Amiga_Nut]

But I am staring to work on my new game I promised I would early this year. It came to a point where I could no longer work for the company I worked for due to their incompetence/racism/foul language unprofessionalism.

I am doing the full game I most want to finish. And when finished it will be distributed free to everyone. Please respect my copyright though as it is NOT PD software.

The game is going to be re-imagining of Buck Rogers, Planet of Zoom. Now before you fall asleep I am hoping to do for this excellent game what Stardust did for Asteroids The start point for this game is not actually going to be the arcade or the 8 bit home computer versions.....but the Coleco Adam Super Buck Rogers game.

I have to warn you though, this may be a PAL only game, because of the look I am going for the extra 56 pixels in low res PAL makes quite a difference.

What I plan to have is......

Ambitious not very Amiga looking extra large size/quantities of graphics on screen.
Use of the unique features Amiga gives you whilst avoiding the chipset limitations.
The planet surface you fly over will be highly detailed and textured.
Power ups/Bonus features not found in the original game.
Will run in atleast 2mb of RAM.
Will have silky smooth shmup action.
Will include sprites based on rendered graphics from my 3D models
Samples, scenes and textures straight out of the 80s TV show.

I will start in earnest when I have all the Amiga equipment to enable me to develop the game, an A1000 with a floppy drive is not really going to cut it so I need either an A2000 motherboard or an A1000 HD interface etc etc. I am not going to dev on an A600 or A1200 because their keyboards are only good for hammering the space bar whilst playing games sorry

I have already worked out the basic meat and potatoes of gameplay and am now working on making the graphics (which I don't need an Amiga for just yet) which I can then hopefully plug straight into a game engine to run performance tests. I also have two completely different methods of achieving the the kind of look to the terrain which I need to code. The game should work on Amiga 1000 and 2mb RAM so it's an OCS project. Whether I do an AGA version depends on how fast the game engine works in 640x512 resolution.

People seem a bit indifferent to such classic Amiga projects on here which is why this post is quite short on details or examples. And when I tell you it is going to be pretty much Blitz Basic coded I can see a lot of people being underwhelmed already.

If you have any suggestions please feel free to offer/ask for more details.

[Amiga_Nut]

Seems a little hypocritical.

It means mention where you got it from if you copy it for a friend sort of thing seeing as it's free

I will be using a laser blast sample and possibly an engine sample. I decided to go with the 70s BSG "Launch when ready" voice instead now

Textures as in a bit of desert floor texture (possibly) and I don't think NBC Universal owns the desert they filmed episode 3-4!

[Amiga_Nut]

Just to reply to the seperate comments in one thread...

The A600/A1200 comment relates to the feel of the keyboard. I really don't like it so it will just annoy me typing 100s of Kb of code on them. They are fantastic machines (A600 is very portable and A1200 is a nice machine) but the A1000/2000/3000 has a much better keyboard.

The 2mb is required to hold all the graphics data. I am going to have quite a lot of images just for the starfighter alone and the ground effect is pre-calculated data so it all goes over 1mb. I can't scale the images realtime via hardware sadly and this way saves a bit of time. I have however recently saved quite a lot of memory for the textured floor with cunning use of the copper (if I have to use textured floor engine A the is..see below).

Right now I am quantizing the graphics down to an Amiga palette using PC software and the 3D models are realtime (flatshaded) rendered on my PC otherwise it would not really allow a creative process and I don't want to wait until a reasonably priced A2000 m/b turns up on ebay uk to fix one of my A2000s to dev on

Don't think I will be able to do a significantly different version for Natami given it is being coded in Blitz. Might consider a version for PC/Mac using Blitz for those machines but am told they are not really similar to the Amiga version.

The ground effect is going to be one of two ways. A) Something like mode 7 of Mario Kart ie a dried up desert/lake bed kind of scene scrolled in 3D in that sort of 'flat' fashion or B) Made up of lots of component parts and scaled as a whole a bit like the floor of Afterburner. B) is not likely to work fast enough on an OCS/ECS machine so probably A)

There is a thread about it on the scene section of EAB for anyone who is interested. (Immortal A1000) and there is a lot of dev blog style waffle in there if you're really bored :roflmao:

It probably won't be started properly until next year seeing as my projector has just died tonight half an hour ago and funds for expansion kit for my A1000 to make a dev/test machine or new A2000 purchase are now on the back burner as I need to find a new DLP project  Also it's been over a decade since I last used Blitz and there are a few pages missing from my Blitz 2.1 filofax style manual which I need to write down as someone has offered to scan these pages (they just happen to be related to using Blitz mode grrrr)

The reason I am doing it now is because I left my job as my health is more important than their pittance wages and also I will have the time to do it. I will admit it will be the first sort of commercial style project (and game) I have ever completed and I hope it's finished before the end of the world in December 2012!! I will make a website for it when I have more substantial things to show than a couple of pics of graphics layout/target render example etc.

I am also hoping to do a little demo game sort of thing of the Sega Genesis/Megadrive's Mickey Mouse Castle of Illusion. Specifically level 1 section 3 (bouncing round the parallax leaves and spiders webs bit to you and me)

PS It has to run on an A1000 with 1.5mb fast and 512kb chip obviously, I am writing this game really for all A1000 owners out there, especially those mad enough like me to buy one in the mid 80s after working like a dog through my 4 month summer break at the end of college :roflmao:

[Amiga_Nut]

Did have a quick look at that demo you mentioned, it's very similar to an old Hewson Amiga game, the name eludes me now but it was a very fast sort of Trailblazer meets shoot em up. Or Mastertronic's arcade game Road Blasters...sort of.

I'm not calculating anything in realtime, it will be a looped sequence of pre-calculated graphics for the textured 'flat' floor a la Stardust tunnel walls, hence I can use Blitz for that with enough memory.

Although I'll probably be blitting about 200% of actual screen memory size so nothing is guaranteed yet really. Currently I am not happy with quite how it looks but still to apply copper effects and try other tricks I have up my sleeve. It's getting there slowly, once I am happy with it I just need to optimize it for the Amiga.

@ Commodore John - I missed the comment about Asteroids btw. Not at all, Asteroids is a fine game and many a 10 pence was spent playing the deluxe version in my local chippy as a school kid. I just think Super Stardust is the best example of an update of a classic game that has ever happened in the history of gaming (helps if you like that style and that kind of music mind!). They both have an emphasis on smooth as silk engine and awesome sounds.

[Amiga_Nut]

Yes Eliminator, wasn't sure of the name.

My version will look more like a complete floor edge to edge as in Space Harrier, but with a texture not just checker board pattern

I may compress it more so you get one new floor texture per level and if I use 1 disk per level this should be OK.

[Amiga_Nut]

OCS with over 128 colours on screen yes.

[Amiga_Nut]

Have been working quite hard on my textured floor graphics last few days, so far this is what I have for two different texture styles for the desert. Sand dunes and dry desert lake bed. I have also uploaded a sand dune texture without the copperlist on which simulates the depth cueing to a sandy yellow haze at the horizon. The non copperlist image has the palette exaggerated for contrast spread and the final image is unlikely to have those 4 specific colours.

Still a huge amount of work to do before I can get going on a basic engine but the first steps are done at last and I am happy with my source graphics for the texture rendering routines. Creating the seamless textures had to be done by hand and this took me a lot of time. Now it's just graphic artist donkey working to push out 2 lots of 32 frames or something that I can start building a basic flight engine around. The size of the graphics mean the first engine will be in 320x256 PAL dimensions, the NTSC engine will be re-written to to tilt the graphics at a more shallow angle so I can save 40 odd pixels in screen height to make it workable on 320x200 NTSC mode.