mariuszw Posted October 26, 2018 Share Posted October 26, 2018 Hi everybody, We are proud to release Atari 8bit port of 3D adventure game: Total Eclipse! Team: Code: Mariusz Wojcieszek Graphics: Adam Wachowski Music and sound effects: Michał 'stRing' Radecki Additional graphics: Jose Pereira. Game is ported from C64. It features much better speed due to heavy optimizations and faster CPU clock, so it is much more enjoyable on Atari. It requires Atari with 64KB of RAM to run. It supports both PAL and NTSC, and also (for the first time) NTSC-50 and PAL-60. Game will also run properly on Atari with Rapidus accelerator. Game control: joystick up (or key arrow up) - move forward joystick down (or key arrow down) - move backward joystick left (or key arrow left) - turn left joystick right (or key arrow right) - turn right joystick fire (or key 0) - fire a pistol key P - look up key L - look down key A - angle change (small,medium or big, for current angle see heiroglyphics above the watch) key S - step size change (slow,medium or fast, see heiroglyphics for current state) key F - face forward (useful when disorientated) key U - U-turn key H - height change (stand or crouch) space key - shooting mode key C - enable/disable crosshair key R - rest key I - interrupt, a pause, displays a menu which offers music/sfx change (M) and game abort (ESC) key SELECT - changes between music and sound effects, work on title menu and in-game Gameplay video: TOTAL ECLIPSE Featuring Freescape by Major Developments Commodore 64 WELCOME TO EGYPTBACKGROUNDIt is written that, in the heart of ancient Egypt hundreds on yearsago, the High Priest of the day had become annoyed. His people wererevolting and refused to continue the sacrifices to Re the God of Sun.His anger had erupted so he set an ominous curse as punishment to thepeople.A great pyramid was erected and at the topmost chamber a shrine wasbuilt for Re the Sun-God. The curse was set. Should anything everblock the sun's rays during daylight hours it would be destroyed.It is now 26th October, 1930 and in just 2 hours the moon will totallyeclipse the sun, triggering the curse of Re, causing the offendingmoon to explode showering the Earth with colossal meteorites thusupsetting the ecological balance, and plunging civilisation into adark age of starvation and conflict.YOUR MISSIONIt is 8 o'clock, you have just landed your bi-plane next to the greatpyramid. Your mission is to reach and destroy the shrine of theSun-God Re, which is located at the apex of the pyramid.TREASURECollect as much as possible-you're gonna be rich! First day's target#125,000.YOUR EQUIPMENTA revolver -plus an ample supply of bullets.Your wrist watch -the eclipse is due just before 10 o'clock.A water bottle -keep this topped up-it is very hot! It is not healthy to be without water for long periods.Your trusty compass -an essential item for succesful orientation.THE SCREEN DISPLAYTop left -Ankhs collected.Top middle -Value of treasure collected.Top right -Current state of the eclipse.Main window -Freescape 3D generated view of your present surroundings.Message display -(Under main window). This normally indicates your current location plus the height of this chamber above sea level shown in cubits eg. 24c=24 cubits. The entrance to the shrine is at a height of 72 cubits.Bottom left to right-Wrist watch, water bottle, heart beat, compass. 26th OCTOBER 1930, EGYPT...After a three day journey involving most methods of transport one canthink of, and a few one would probably not like to, I arrived atAnkh-Arah village. It was a fairly typical North African town, withdry dirty streets, square whitewashed houses, and a stone well in themain square.I jumped clumsily down from my "taxi" and payed the camel driver hismoney. Doing a quick calculation in my head I came up with the sameanswer as when I started the journey-five shillings and a sixpence fora six mile camel ride. Captive markets such as helpless EnglishArchaeologists obiviously lend themselves to exploitation by thelocals... oh, well, at least I had learned the knack of getting off acamel without landing on my head, and that probably lowered the priceby sixpence or so.The driver unstrapped my cases and let them drop to the ground.Without any ado he spurred his camel, turned about and was gone,leaving me looking rather lost in a slowly setting cloud of dust.I retrieved my cases and set off in search of somewhere to stay.It took me twenty minutes to find the only inn in the village: a smallsandstone building like all the others, with two bedrooms, a hole inthe ground for a latrine and enough insect life to set the wholeEnglish population scratching themselves. One of these was the owner,who quinting into the sun I could just make out the tiniest silver ofthe crescent moon, which would soon eclipse the sun.All the other exploration work I had conducted had been very muchsmaller than this, and took months of painstaking effort, researchingand training.It was too big. I would never make it in time. The shrine that "Tiny"had identified was right at the apex.Skirting the base of the pyramid, I saw the door into theante-chamber... te.xex te.atr 45 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mariuszw Posted October 26, 2018 Author Share Posted October 26, 2018 And source code for those interested. Game is built upon binary image of C64 version, with Atari routines replacing C64-specific stuff. Atari version also feature several optimizations, which make the game faster than C64 original: fast table-based multiplication, optimized integer division, optimized polygon rendering and polygon sorting. Ornaments on game screen are built with PM/G graphics, which allow to use different colours in different sections of the screen (i.e. upper panel, game 3d view and bottom panel). Game also supports stereo Atari with extending mono sound to sound channel (RMT player has been modified with this feature). Enjoy! Mariusz. tesource.zip 15 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Adam+ Posted October 26, 2018 Share Posted October 26, 2018 And I have written this article for AtariOnline.pl. I hope you'll like the game. 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
R0ger Posted October 26, 2018 Share Posted October 26, 2018 Re .. re .. re .. released !? I thought it's years from release ! Wow ! Great news ! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted October 26, 2018 Share Posted October 26, 2018 Great! And me thinking of using more dithering need to peek into the source. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
snicklin Posted October 26, 2018 Share Posted October 26, 2018 Technically an amazing game here, I am surprised that games like this can be ported. Although the Atari can do it technically, you'd think that the code between the 2 platforms would be so, so different. I've been playing it in Altirra in the 21MHz speed mode. Now I don't know if this is classed as a bug or not (as 21MHz isn't an original standard, but these things could be argued), when my game was over, it went into the demo mode where it shows you what to do. It went through really quickly. I guess that there may not be a way of slowing that down if going at high speed. But I thought that I should mention it as the game itself became very playable at a high speed, however the demo situation didn't work as expected. Thank you for your massive amount of work, time and probably frustration (all programmers get a lot of it!). An excellent production here. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_The Doctor__ Posted October 27, 2018 Share Posted October 27, 2018 Now to take all that info directions and backstory and make it an Atari 8 bit displayable file/manual 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adam242 Posted October 27, 2018 Share Posted October 27, 2018 It supports both PAL and NTSC, and also (for the first time) NTSC-50 and PAL-60. Thank you so much for that! Looking forward to spending some time with this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AtariNerd Posted October 27, 2018 Share Posted October 27, 2018 It's pretty responsive at 3MHZ and 7MHZ, though I'm preferring the 3MHZ speed for some reason. The higher speeds, above that,seem to speed up the action much more , even as they smooth out the frame-rate, making control reckless in the confined areas. A flight sim based on this engine might be nice, though, if recalibrated and optimized for that higher clock speed, allowing smoother frame-rates. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atari Nut Posted October 27, 2018 Share Posted October 27, 2018 Thanks a lot. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Adam+ Posted October 28, 2018 Share Posted October 28, 2018 (edited) Thanks for your comments. I've been playing it in Altirra in the 21MHz speed mode. Now I don't know if this is classed as a bug or not (as 21MHz isn't an original standard, but these things could be argued), when my game was over, it went into the demo mode where it shows you what to do. It went through really quickly. I guess that there may not be a way of slowing that down if going at high speed. But I thought that I should mention it as the game itself became very playable at a high speed, however the demo situation didn't work as expected. That "demo mode" sequence scenario was created for specific settings of angle and step size. We couldn't use the same scenario for the settings we applied to faster version (with angle twice smaller and step size 3 time shorter). Mariusz decided to keep the original scenario (and settings) in demo mode, not to create (or convert into) another one. Edited October 28, 2018 by +Adam+ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gunstar Posted October 28, 2018 Share Posted October 28, 2018 I'm a bit confused as to what "extending mono sound to sound channel" means exactly. "supports stereo Atari with extending mono sound to sound channel (RMT player has been modified with this feature)." 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Adam+ Posted October 28, 2018 Share Posted October 28, 2018 (edited) I'm a bit confused as to what "extending mono sound to sound channel" means exactly. "supports stereo Atari with extending mono sound to sound channel (RMT player has been modified with this feature)." Yeah, that sentence was a little bit unclear. This is what was implemented: in case of two POKEYs the second one is playing the same sounds but 2 frames later, which together gives more "spatial" sound. A kind of "false stereo". Edited October 28, 2018 by +Adam+ 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Adam+ Posted October 28, 2018 Share Posted October 28, 2018 Oh, and if anyone needed the game's map - here you may find one. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Poison Posted October 29, 2018 Share Posted October 29, 2018 is it supported with Rapidus ? it could have great speed Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mariuszw Posted October 29, 2018 Author Share Posted October 29, 2018 It woks perfectly on Atari with Rapidus board. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Irgendwer Posted October 29, 2018 Share Posted October 29, 2018 Congratulations, that is a very nice port indeed! I'm not sure if I found a glitch/bug: I've played not very long, but discovered that in two places, the graphics have clipping/visibility problems. I've checked the C64 version at those places too, but wasn't able to reproduce the faulty visualization. (The C64 version was really a cold shower, the original speed is close to unplayable.) Do you plan to release even a bit faster version for 128k machines? (Loop unrolling (like in SCR) for e.g. "sub_4608_loop" or "copy_back_buffer_to_screen" could increase the frame rate further...) 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zap! Posted October 30, 2018 Share Posted October 30, 2018 When I first saw the thread title, I thought the old 3DO game was being ported! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Faicuai Posted October 30, 2018 Share Posted October 30, 2018 (edited) Hi everybody, We are proud to release Atari 8bit port of 3D adventure game: Total Eclipse! Team: Code: Mariusz Wojcieszek Graphics: Adam Wachowski Music and sound effects: Michał 'stRing' Radecki Additional graphics: Jose Pereira. (...) Absolutely GREAT work!!! LOVE the choice of color / palette, the fact that runs in ANYTHING you throw at it, and loads in almost 3.0s flat on A800 / Incognito or XL / SIDE. 3D is always hard on A8bit, but the work is commendable, besides the good sense of depth and textures for tonal separation of side surfaces, etc. Kudos!!! Edited October 30, 2018 by Faicuai 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tjlazer Posted October 30, 2018 Share Posted October 30, 2018 Very impressive game for the Atari 8 bit! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zeropolis79 Posted October 30, 2018 Share Posted October 30, 2018 Looks good! Once my current video commitments are done, I'll do a video review of this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mclaneinc Posted October 30, 2018 Share Posted October 30, 2018 Looks good! Once my current video commitments are done Do those pron vids take long to make? Seriously, where are these reviews please? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zeropolis79 Posted October 30, 2018 Share Posted October 30, 2018 Right now, I'm preparing a multi-format review in addition to a retrospective/chart video dedicated to the Dizzy series. But I can a typical review/gameplay video done in less than an hour. (assuming I don't try to showcase everything) But my channel is at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqO6nxLDpZqY5ZGGWh13TMw Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lost Dragon Posted October 30, 2018 Share Posted October 30, 2018 Fantastic work. Missed this one on C64, but loved Driller and Darkside and found Castle Master to be ok. Amazing to see this on A8. Great work by all involved. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mariuszw Posted October 30, 2018 Author Share Posted October 30, 2018 Thanks for all positive comments! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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