Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Author Topic: Why we dont have GAME development contests  (Read 18347 times)

Description:

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline SamuraiCrow

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Feb 2002
  • Posts: 2281
  • Country: us
  • Gender: Male
    • Show all replies
Re: Why we dont have GAME development contests
« on: December 09, 2009, 12:49:35 PM »
Quote from: Crumb;533161
-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.

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.

Quote from: Crumb;533161
-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.

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

Quote from: Crumb;533161
-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!

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).

Quote from: Crumb;533161
-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.

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.

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. :(
 

Offline SamuraiCrow

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Feb 2002
  • Posts: 2281
  • Country: us
  • Gender: Male
    • Show all replies
Re: Why we dont have GAME development contests
« Reply #1 on: December 10, 2009, 08:16:51 PM »
Quote from: leszeka33;533300
You are wrong.
Optimization for the weaker Amiga is boring, tedious and meaningless work.
Why I am in my spare time, I have to do some shit, if I can do nice and cool games?
Because it will not work on slow Amiga?
Buy a faster hardware running Amiga OS.

I have a MicroA1-c with AmigaOS 4.1 loaned out to another developer because I never use it.

The shader support isn't good enough on OS 4.x at this time to be able to implement even the classic Amiga features.  The Radeon 7000 graphics chips on the MicroA1-c motherboard is only decent for fixed-function pipeline 3d.  It sucks at most 2d graphics.

Tell me to buy a better Amiga when the Natami or CloneAA chipsets are available for purchase.  The CPU is just a required peripheral.  For true Amiga programming you need a good GPU and Copper/shader support.