Playing Sam's Journey, would an A8 version be possible

[Heaven/TQA]

 

Please use my 33 colors title screen!

 

Philsan_TotalEclipse.png

Philsan_TotalEclipse.xex

Like.

[+Adam+]

Like.

 

Yes, nice picture.

[emkay]

I never said that, I just say if its that easy how come you don't knock out programs here and there, not saying you can't do it, saying you over simplify it by a ton..

I'm pretty sure, an experienced C64 coder could write a whole "PAC MAN" game in less than 2 hours in Assembler. The most time he had to set the pixel of the sprites, to have the game looking right. No additional interrupts needed, no special tricks...

On the Atari, the routine preparations for splitting the PMg will take longer to be created.

Edited March 17, 2018 by emkay

[www.atarimania.com]

I believe it mostly comes down to history, circumstances and therefore how the Atari scene evolved.

 

My biggest regret is that the Atari barely left a trace in the UK marketplace. There was a natural evolution in games on dominant platforms in the country - mainly Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum - thanks to real competition, high sales, dynamics... Apart from rare solo efforts by Paul Woakes, Archer Maclean, Zeppelin Games or Harlequin Software, the Atari was left aside and progress stalled. New standards were set on other machines while we lost something like five years for not being in the motion, which is A LOT.

 

The "Polish revival" was a godsend to Atari users and brought us a number of new games and missing genres. The main problem was what we got was essentially the normal step up from the games we knew... when development stopped on the Atari, not necessarily the other games you could find on the Commodore 64, Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, MSX...

 

Nobody's to blame. At the time, some software just seemed "good enough" or Atari coders didn't have the same standards compared to some of the biggies / non-budget games you'd usually have on the Commodore 64 for instance. After all, you can't expect an amateur climber to beat Mount Everest...

 

So yeah, our cursor got stuck on games from the mid-eighties for a long time...

 

This being said, I think the Atari has been slowly catching up these past years: a number of titles are really "big" games with depth, which is a good thing

 

--

Atari Frog

http://www.atarimania.com

[+CharlieChaplin]

Well, I prefer irgendwer's title screen for Total Eclipse. But let's wait and see what the final versions of TE comes up with...

 

polish coders:

Mariuszw

Adam

KAZ

XXL

Bocianu

koala

Jakub Husak

Gonzo

and many others

 

czech/slovak coders:

Fandal

PG

MaPa

MatoSimi

and several others

 

german coders:

Creature XL

irgendwer

PPS

W. Fiedler

and a few more

 

other coders:

Popmilo

Vitoco

Mr Fish

Flashjazzcat

Tezz

(Allas)

Goblinish

TheRealBountyBob

Philsan

and several others

[+MrFish]

...Unfortunately, FPS games on 8-bits (heck, even most 16-bits) are usually not a good idea.

 

You mean like Midi Maze?

 

Yeah, who would think such a game would be worth making on an 8-bit... and of course multi-player networked + chat is out of the question.

 

[Note: This video is showing the game played on a PAL system; A 20% higher framerate can be demonstrated on an NTSC machine.]

 

Edited March 17, 2018 by MrFish

[TMR]

Well this thread is... interesting? Yes, let's call it that. =-)

 

Having more color choices is only good if one has some idea about how to use them.

I got the impression (although from whom I couldn't even hope to remember, it was probably around a decade ago) that a lot of Polish games were written on black and white televisions so colour were chosen based on luminance alone...?

 

How about the sequel to Mercenary...what was that called again? I played it on the ST about a decade ago...

Damocles?

 

 

Here's my list of some paricular coders,

but it's actually less than 5:

 

Heaven

PopMilo

TMR

Nah, I'm just a C64 coder who gets lost from time to time...

[pseudografx]

Well, I prefer irgendwer's title screen for Total Eclipse. But let's wait and see what the final versions of TE comes up with...

czech/slovak coders:

Fandal

PG

MaPa

MatoSimi

and several others

Well, even if I know basics of 6502 assembler, by no means do I consider myself a coder

Edited March 17, 2018 by pseudografx

[+MrFish]

Nah, I'm just a C64 coder who gets lost from time to time...

 

Alright, we'll just call you the "Lost Boys".

[+CharlieChaplin]

Mercenary was the first of the series, Damokles the third.

The second was "The Second City"...

[+Adam+]

I got the impression (although from whom I couldn't even hope to remember, it was probably around a decade ago) that a lot of Polish games were written on black and white televisions so colour were chosen based on luminance alone...?

 

Some of developers in Poland used black&white TV sets at that time, that's true - but it doesn't mean that they wouldn't use colours: there were cases when their bizarre colour combinations were corrected by their publishing company before the release. And I would consider also other reasons for "monochrome" style of many Polish games from that era:

 

- people in Poland loved the style of monochrome productions created by Zeppelin Games. Such titles as Draconus or Zybex were perceived as the highest quality games available on Atari at that time, much better visually than majority of older A8 games, they set kind of "modern standard" of how an A8 game should look like.

 

- some of Polish players used b&w monitors, the game supposed to look good also on such equipment.

Edited March 17, 2018 by +Adam+

[Heaven/TQA]

 

Some of developers in Poland used black&white TV sets at that time, that's true - but it doesn't mean that they wouldn't use colours: there were cases when their bizarre colour combinations were corrected by their publishing company before the release. And I would consider also other reasons for "monochrome" style of many Polish games from that era:

 

- people in Poland loved the style of monochrome productions created by Zeppelin Games. Such titles as Draconus or Zybex were perceived as the highest quality games available on Atari at that time, much better visually than majority of older A8 games, they set kind of "modern standard" of how an A8 game should look like.

 

- some of Polish players used b&w monitors, the game supposed to look good also on such equipment.

Both games blew me away even in 160x96 which I

Love since Gyruss

[Heaven/TQA]

Midi maze rock rediscovered when looking into raycasting stuff.

[Gunstar]

Mercenary was the first of the series, Damokles the third.

The second was "The Second City"...

I always considered The Second City as just an add-on and not a sequel myself. IIRC, you could not play it as a stand-alone game, but had to have Mercenary loaded then get it loaded through Mercenary. Though, I never got The Second City or actually played it, since I never even finished Mercenary, so maybe I'm just wrong. In either case, I did mean Damocles, obviously, since Mercenary & TSC are already available for the A8.

[TMR]

Some of developers in Poland used black&white TV sets at that time, that's true - but it doesn't mean that they wouldn't use colours

Awws, that's a shame! I quite liked that story... =-)

 

I always considered The Second City as just an add-on and not a sequel myself.

That's pretty much how Novagen saw it too, Damocles was occasionally advertised as Mercenary 2 (it also has mission disks which aren't counted in the overall numbering) and there's a Mercenary 3 after it which carries the sub title Damocles 2 just to make things more "fun"...

[Bill Loguidice]

You mean like Midi Maze?

 

Yeah, who would think such a game would be worth making on an 8-bit... and of course multi-player networked + chat is out of the question.

 

Well aware of it of course and I acknowledged that there are several first person games on all kinds of 8-bits. That's still not like what was being discussed, i.e., something like Wolfenstein 3D or Doom. The closest thing I can think of on an 8-bit is Gate Crasher for the CoCo 3 (512K RAM required, but nothing else special):

 

 

I can't really think of any others on any other 8-bits (without special add-ons, e.g., the SuperCPU version of Wolfenstein 3D on the C-64 -- that doesn't really count to me). If there are, I'd certainly love to know about them.

[+MrFish]

- some of Polish players used b&w monitors, the game supposed to look good also on such equipment.

 

There's an easy way around that: you just have an option for black & white, with a separate color table; quite easy to add.

[emkay]

Well aware of it of course and I acknowledged that there are several first person games on all kinds of 8-bits. That's still not like what was being discussed, i.e., something like Wolfenstein 3D or Doom. The closest thing I can think of on an 8-bit is Gate Crasher for the CoCo 3 (512K RAM required, but nothing else special):

What kills "everything" in your example, is the usage of colors and graphics for the "Objects" .

[emkay]

There's an easy way around that: you just have an option for black & white, with a separate color table; quite easy to add.

That should be a rule for all image converters.

And, well the advantage here is : You could change the colors to get better results on your screen.

The Atari has 128 colors for that available, but the colors were mostly used just like only 4 colors had been available at all.

[Bill Loguidice]

What kills "everything" in your example, is the usage of colors and graphics for the "Objects" .

 

I don't know what you're saying here. You don't think "Gate Crasher" qualifies because of the colors? Colors seem beside the point here, since it's probably the best functional example of what an 8-bit can achieve with a Wolfenstein 3D-like game (obviously a functional Doom-like game is completely out of the question).

[emkay]

I don't know what you're saying here.

So you're colorblind ?

[BillLoguidice]

So you're colorblind ?

 

I ask again, what do the colors have to do with the functionality? It meets the bare minimum of a Wolfenstein-3D-like game on an unenhanced 8-bit computer. It's about as good as any of them will likely ever get, which is really not that great if you actually play it, i.e., the real-world limitations of what we think of as that type of game become evident when you play it rather than just watch a video. It's a lot farther off from a Wolfenstein 3D-like game than someone might think. It doesn't take away from the impressiveness of the achievement, though. It's still a complete game rather than just moving down an empty corridor. We can certainly quibble about aesthetics - and I agree that it's not the prettiest game, not by a longshot - but then I wouldn't necessarily expect it to be. Of course, since you have a problem with how Sam's Journey looks and apparently like the way some of the stuff looks that you've shown, I'm afraid I don't have a particularly high opinion of your aesthetic sensibilities either (perhaps you yourself suffer from a type of visual agnosia?). But then this again is not about the tangent of colors.

[VladR]

The closest thing I can think of on an 8-bit is Gate Crasher for the CoCo 3 (512K RAM required, but nothing else special):.

Half a meg of RAM is a pretty special requirement, considering it's a 3D game!

 

The tables you can store into something like half meg makes a pretty huge difference to performance and features, as that's something I'm currently very much involved with (as in - how much RAM I want to throw at the 6502 flatshading problem).

 

Yes, I know we have that on Atari (or more - 4 MB now), but given recent discussions about RAM extensions, it seems once shouldn't target more than 320, as that's what most people will have (including 576, 1MB, 4 MB).

 

Gimme 0.5MB on Atari, and we can skip Wolfenstein's raycasting and move towards flatshaded polygonal environment (sort-of a cross between Doom/Quake).

 

 

BTW, today I solved last big problem with the 8-bit coordinate system and fixed the related glitches (it was quite a lot of research!), so within a week or two I should have something nice running in 20+ fps. I'm thinking of reusing the dataset from my StunRunner on jaguar...

[emkay]

I ask again, what do the colors have to do with the functionality?

I was thinking about the level of your question , seriously.

Seems, I found the most fitting answer.

 

The pictures show 3D scenes , one by day, one by night. Just the colors suffer a little by the contrast.

 

 

[emkay]

Additionally... you could do a full working 3D world without a single texture... just using lightning.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obfXcjS5TYA