Final Assault - new game by GMG

[TheNameOfTheGame]

1 hour ago, Beeblebrox said:

@globe ah no worries. I am out at the mo but will hv a look at all your replies a bit later. Thanks again for an amazing engine/game, and for taking on board player suggestions. 

 

I like your lighter dithering version the best.

[snicklin]

How would a plain black for the floor, no shading or anything look to you? Is this possible?

 

[Beeblebrox]

7 minutes ago, snicklin said:

How would a plain black for the floor, no shading or anything look to you? Is this possible?

 

@snicklin  I'd imagine it's entirely possible, although personally I think it's quite a stark contrast and not sure it would look right. Again maybe if a config option was factored into future revisions it could be one of the presets I guess.

Edited November 7, 2021 by Beeblebrox

[Beeblebrox]

.... and of course I guess if a plain black floor was used, (or perhaps a very dark single colour in the same colour scheme(?)), that would free up CPU time for the "Anti-aliasing" to smooth out the jaggies!!  (kiddin!!)

[Beeblebrox]

15 hours ago, goldy/gmg aka lopez453 said:

that was my point that the futher the floor, the darker it should be, not only mathematically but visually.

The checkerboard pattern even if mathematically correct, visually some pixels just looks brighter in a similar way like in the illusion above.

 

"Blake Stone's ceiling tile effect" is currently not possible as Globe already said. The table is just what to draw, when there is no wall.

 

Currently the floor and the ceiling are not rotating. And not using any texture/tiles for floor/ceiling hides this fact.

Adding just textures would look strange as they will always lead in same direction and only the walls will be turning - a show stopper.

 

Doing rotable floor, ceiling, city skyline needs a lot of additional coding and would eat more CPU causing lower FPS.

 

 

 

 

@goldy/gmg aka lopez453 

 

No worries re the ceiling effect, I see your point with respect to the way this engine works and also the problems of rotating floor textures.

[Beeblebrox]

15 hours ago, globe said:

Would be a lot more blocky, don't think it would be pretty.

@globe  Fair do re ceiling effect.

15 hours ago, globe said:

Actually having a left-right scrolling skyline, mountains or something similar for outside areas is relatively simple and computationally cheap.

All you need is a mountain graphics that wraps around, that gets drawn in instead of the ceiling and a bit above.

For coarse (2 pixels at a time) scrolling you need one picture, for smooth scrolling you'd need 2, one of them pre-shifted by half the byte.

Or you could do a bit of a hybrid drawing and use hardware scrolling for part of the mountain that doesn't overlap with top of the walls.

 

BTW. it was done in ZX-Spectrum DOOM

Interesting. Would be great to see this engine do an outside area skyline or sky if you ever wanted to experiement.

 

15 hours ago, globe said:

Rotating floor + ceiling absolutely, skyline would just eat up more RAM for the graphics.

Maybe one for a future 128K engine where one of the elements is chosen rather than all of them. Certainly it's not worth having a hit on FPS.

 

Thanks for noting the request for the arrow direction of facing indicator on the map screen. This would really enhance gameplay.

[Beeblebrox]

19 hours ago, goldy/gmg aka lopez453 said:

 

If you don't like castle turret, you can try to alternate one 2 line high stripe of full color and one 2 line stripe of checkerboard

 

65 56 - checkerboard

55 55 - fullcolor

54 45 - checkerboard

44 44 - fullcolor

etc.

 

or

 

65 56 - checkerboard

55  - fullcolor

44 - fullcolor

43 34 - checkerboard

33 

22

21 12

11

00

 

 

@goldy/gmg aka lopez453

 

Ok I tried the first one you suggested, (called floor adjustment cheat table for ALTIRRA Goldy's 2 line checkerboard and 2 line full.atcheats) :

 

 

and the second,  (called floor adjustment cheat table for ALTIRRA Goldy's 2 line checkerboard and single lines.atcheats):

 

 

Both files attached. Interesting. My initial preference of the two is the second one. I can't work out yet if these definite patterns confuse my eyes when taking into account the walls. (Defined floor patterns draw your eyes to them). I guess in the areas with lots of standalone wall parts where you can see the floor in between is the best gauge. Thanks for the suggestions.

 

I'll have a play with both.  

floor adjustment cheat table for ALTIRRA Goldy's 2 line checkerboard and single lines.atcheats floor adjustment cheat table for ALTIRRA Goldy's 2 line checkerboard and 2 line full.atcheats

Edited November 7, 2021 by Beeblebrox

[Beeblebrox]

@goldy/gmg aka lopez453

 

So I've been testing the 2nd one in my previous post initially given it was my preference out of your two suggestions. (So the floor adjustment cheat table for ALTIRRA Goldy's 2 line checkerboard and single lines.atcheats)

 

    

 

 

It is totally playable but what I am finding so far is my eyes keep getting distracted and drawn to the the single colour lines in the floor pattern when I am looking for gaps in walls at distance or to the sides:

 

 

However they do help with sometimes distingushing between things when close up in tighter areas:

 

 

Also just to say this grey area is a prime example of how having a very distinct wall texture graphic as illustrated by the gray spheres, is great as a visual cue, where otherwise you might get lost in a sea of almost identical wall textures:  

 

 

I'd say having curved textures like this, given most of the wall textures run in straight lines, is definitely a plus.

 

I'd love to see the skulls in the earlier posted demo in this type of engine sometime as in post #101 here:

 

 

... and also just looking at the celtic wall pattern in the textures above made me think the engine running on 128k might be able to cope with psuedo wiring, industrial pipework or circuit board textures running horizontally and maybe linking up to each other:

 

 

 

Obviously all simplified and running in the engines's GR9 resolution/colour scheme naturally.

 

Heh just for fun whilst googling I came across this mod.... nice crossover:

Edited November 7, 2021 by Beeblebrox

[+CharlieChaplin]

Hehe,

 

there is a game named 3D-Pac (and also 3D-Pac Plus) by AMC-Verlag, where you as Pacman are running through 3D labyrinths collecting dots. The ghosts do hunt you, but you cannot shoot them (there are only two of them and as in the original you have to avoid them). The gfx are very simple, since the game originally appeared as a short magazine bonus in AMC-Soft (a german disk-magazine), so it can be compared to a type-in listing. The readers did like that version, it seems and so they made more levels for it and sold it commercially as 3D-Pac Plus. But it was the same game as before (same simple gfx, same gameplay, etc.), just more levels.

 

3D-Pac and 3D-Pac Plus

 

Regarding Final Assault, I would prefer if the floor and sky have no patterns/shading at all, just a plain single colour (e.g. grey or black or blue, like in the examples shown above), but that's just me, I guess.

 

[Heaven/TQA]

Regarding floor/ceiling

 

it is doable but same discussion we had on the SNES… having a texture not rotating looks simply wrong and strange…

 

so gradient is the maximum imho…. Don‘t underestimate rotation ceiling/floor compared to the raycasting part…

 

 

[Heaven/TQA]

51 minutes ago, Beeblebrox said:

@goldy/gmg aka lopez453

 

So I've been testing the 2nd one in my previous post initially given it was my preference out of your two suggestions. (So the floor adjustment cheat table for ALTIRRA Goldy's 2 line checkerboard and single lines.atcheats)

 

    

 

 

It is totally playable but what I am finding so far is my eyes keep getting distracted and drawn to the the single colour lines in the floor pattern when I am looking for gaps in walls at distance or to the sides:

 

 

However they do help with sometimes distingushing between things when close up in tighter areas:

 

 

Also just to say this grey area is a prime example of how having a very distinct wall texture graphic as illustrated by the gray spheres, is great as a visual cue, where otherwise you might get lost in a sea of almost identical wall textures:  

 

 

I'd say having curved textures like this, given most of the wall textures run in straight lines, is definitely a plus.

 

I'd love to see the skulls in the earlier posted demo in this type of engine sometime as in post #101 here:

 

 

... and also just looking at the celtic wall pattern in the textures above made me think the engine running on 128k might be able to cope with psuedo wiring, industrial pipework or circuit board textures running horizontally and maybe linking up to each other:

 

 

 

Obviously all simplified and running in the engines's GR9 resolution/colour scheme naturally.

 

Heh just for fun whilst googling I came across this mod.... nice crossover:

Dealing in low res on A8 with 4x4 pixels (80x60) I just can say avoid small detail wall textures as they got a pixel mess unless you are working with mip mapping  or filtering.

 

[globe]

2 hours ago, Beeblebrox said:

Would be great to see this engine do an outside area skyline or sky if you ever wanted to experiement.

I see couple of downsides compared to DOOM from ZX-Spectrum. Sinclair has color attributes allowing to paint the mountains in different color compared to walls while in this engine and this mode everything would be same color - blending more together. Of course something like thick black borders on the top of wall would be possible to make it clear where skyline begins but I don't think it would look especially good in this blocky resolution.

22 minutes ago, Beeblebrox said:

I'd say having curved textures like this, given most of the wall textures run in straight lines, is definitely a plus.

I'd love to see the skulls in the earlier posted demo in this type of engine sometimes as in post #101 here:

Textures are going to get an overhaul because like you and others in this thread suggested, it looks like that using simpler ones and ones with specific patterns would allow for easier orientation.

Guess that's one downside of this approach when 'broader public' doesn't get to see preview and can't suggest improvements early and things just get accepted as good enough.

 

 

Anyway, after looking over the earlier posts I found one mistake in couple of them - big pixels in this mode are made using  Vscroll trick, not Hscroll trick.

 

Also I rummaged in the heap of 'leftover' files from development and found old intro (xex - probably will only work in emulators again) and 2nd newer intro (just a bunch of small pictures that were supposed to accompany the background story together with small PMG animations) which didn't make it for the same reason as all the other features, but since these were made and I have no farther use for them I decided I might as well post them.

 

 

old intro 1.xex

[Heaven/TQA]

The Wolf engine coded by the hard guys is using 32x32 textures… all aligned each line at a page. I expanded it so it can handle 8 different textures by adressing lda texture_0x,x / lda texture_x0,x where x is the texture ID. Which is basicly the ID on the 16x16 map.

 

It took a lot of experiments to get the final textures. But the engine relies on symetric textures. The skull is not. So when watching closer… you see at some point they flip in X direction.  

 

Of course blurring several times helps a lot. Loosing details but makes scaling not a pixel mess.

 

I checked a lot of old Amiga games for textures to get a feeling how they dealt that. PCs don‘t help as they got 256 VGA at least.

 

Edited November 7, 2021 by Heaven/TQA

[globe]

10 minutes ago, Heaven/TQA said:

unless you are working with mip mapping  or filtering.

For big RAM version I'd consider mipmapping because the scaling algorithm this engine uses is kind of crude and the small resolution doesn't help either.

Filtering would likely kill the framerate, at least I'm not aware of some neat and really fast trick.

[Beeblebrox]

31 minutes ago, Heaven/TQA said:

Dealing in low res on A8 with 4x4 pixels (80x60) I just can say avoid small detail wall textures as they got a pixel mess unless you are working with mip mapping  or filtering.

 

@Heaven/TQA thanks, makes sense. 

[Beeblebrox]

22 minutes ago, Heaven/TQA said:

The Wolf engine coded by the hard guys is using 32x32 textures… all aligned each line at a page. I expanded it so it can handle 8 different textures by adressing lda texture_0x,x / lda texture_x0,x where x is the texture ID. Which is basicly the ID on the 16x16 map.

 

It took a lot of experiments to get the final textures. But the engine relies on symetric textures. The skull is not. So when watching closer… you see at some point they flip in X direction.  

 

Of course blurring several times helps a lot. Loosing details but makes scaling not a pixel mess.

 

I checked a lot of old Amiga games for textures to get a feeling how they dealt that. PCs don‘t help as they got 256 VGA at least.

 

@Heaven/TQA I can imagine it must have been a challenge. Incidentally I tried to find the demo itself to run it on my A8s. It is available for download somewhere?  I wasn't sure what it's title was.

[+CharlieChaplin]

You mean the Wolf3D demo ? Had been released some years ago at AA forum, but can also be found at Fandal's webpage.

 

[Beeblebrox]

23 minutes ago, globe said:

I see couple of downsides compared to DOOM from ZX-Spectrum. Sinclair has color attributes allowing to paint the mountains in different color compared to walls while in this engine and this mode everything would be same color - blending more together. Of course something like thick black borders on the top of wall would be possible to make it clear where skyline begins but I don't think it would look especially good in this blocky resolution.

@globe Sure. See your point with this engine.

23 minutes ago, globe said:

Textures are going to get an overhaul because like you and others in this thread suggested, it looks like that using simpler ones and ones with specific patterns would allow for easier orientation.

Guess that's one downside of this approach when 'broader public' doesn't get to see preview and can't suggest improvements early and things just get accepted as good enough.

That is fantastic news.   I persoanlly think you did it the right way around. Because you weren't hampered during development, but are willing to take on board some requestion post initial release, you get the best of both worlds.

23 minutes ago, globe said:

Anyway, after looking over the earlier posts I found one mistake in couple of them - big pixels in this mode are made using  Vscroll trick, not Hscroll trick.

 

Also I rummaged in the heap of 'leftover' files from development and found old intro (xex - probably will only work in emulators again) and 2nd newer intro (just a bunch of small pictures that were supposed to accompany the background story together with small PMG animations) which didn't make it for the same reason as all the other features, but since these were made and I have no farther use for them I decided I might as well post them.

 

 

old intro 1.xex 22.71 kB · 1 download

I just saw the leftover in Altirra just now. Some cool elements there.

 

Incidentally there is one thing I think has already been commented on, and that is the possiblity of having a 90degree left and right jump button option in-game.

The frame rate is great at present but where you are being attacked from behind I've often died just attempting to turn around and face the direction of the shots/enemy. Especially with the larger drone attacks. It's exacerbated by the fact you sometimes can't see where it's coming from because of the resolution. Therefore being able to jump instantly 90degrees at a time in both directions would elivate this. I don't think it would take away the challenge of gaemplay, but it would eliviate some frustration whioch might possibly stop someone playing.

Would that be simple to code I wonder as it would just be the view being oriented instantly 90 degrees?

 

IMHO it would be also great to have the option to play music in-game. (It's defintely not for everyone but I recall you mentioning you had wanted to have music in game which seamlessly changed depending on whether you were exploring or engaged in combat. I assume it was stripped out because of memory contraints? Perhaps in a future revision, (if latter was on the cards), for say 128k machines along with stereo hardware presense detection, it might be possible. 

 

Certainly having a version that auto detects the available ram, alongside being able to run on cut down 64K machines, means you could have elements you previously were forced to exclude.

 

Anyway just a few ideas. Thanks again.

 

 

[Beeblebrox]

4 minutes ago, CharlieChaplin said:

You mean the Wolf3D demo ? Had been released some years ago at AA forum, but can also be found at Fandal's webpage.

 

@CharlieChaplin  perfect. That's it, many thanks. I didn't know the name before and Googling something like Atari Wolfenstein 3D, etc get too many irrelevent hits. I also find AA's search engine trickly to find things.

[Beeblebrox]

Just quickly ran the Wolf3D demo on Altirra. Verrrry nice!  

 

@Heaven/TQA  Can i just ask with the Wolf3D demo:

 

• Is it running 25fps?
• Why is there a different colour vertical band to the right of the screen? Is it a PMG?
• It's a personal preference I know, but I think having a floor fill especially rather than one single colour, and to a lesser extent a single colour for the sky, is better visually. Did you ever have a dithered floor effect for the engine?  Or wasn't it possible?
• I really like music playing in the background, although I appreciate being a demo rather than a full game it lends itself to having music as another point of interest other than the graphics.

Great demo - great to see such textures.

 

[globe]

51 minutes ago, Beeblebrox said:

Incidentally there is one thing I think has already been commented on, and that is the possiblity of having a 90degree left and right jump button option in-game.

The frame rate is great at present but where you are being attacked from behind I've often died just attempting to turn around and face the direction of the shots/enemy. Especially with the larger drone attacks. It's exacerbated by the fact you sometimes can't see where it's coming from because of the resolution. Therefore being able to jump instantly 90degrees at a time in both directions would elivate this. I don't think it would take away the challenge of gaemplay, but it would eliviate some frustration whioch might possibly stop someone playing.

Would that be simple to code I wonder as it would just be the view being oriented instantly 90 degrees?

 

I already addressed faster turning in post #134 (no idea how to link, sorry) to a degree but I think couple of more details are worth mentioning:

 

First, the controls.

Joystick is far from ideal for this kind of game.

I used gamepad that was plugged into both joystick ports when testing on real hw but for majority of players going with one hand on joystick and other on keyboard, adding more and more controls is less than perfect.

For the future Goldy suggested mixing the controls up a bit.

Using joystick for forward / backward and strafe left / strafe right while having turning left and right on the keyboard near the Shift which would be used for faster turning (this would also overcome the one keypress at a time limit because Shift is handled kind of independently) .

I think this is worth a try.

 

Other thing is that fast turning has downsides too.

Earlier builds used twice as fast turning (128 steps for 360 degree turn instead of current 256 steps) which was ok when enemies were close and big.

When they were small and far away though it often happened that crosshair jumped over the enemy even if one tried to turn cautiously and player had to compensate with strafing.

For 90 degrees fast turning there was also a bit of confusion because players FoV is roughly 56 degrees and when you turn sideways in one keystroke you see completely different view.

 

 

Edited November 7, 2021 by globe
Typo

[Beeblebrox]

3 hours ago, globe said:

I already addressed faster turning in post #134 (no idea how to link, sorry) to a degree but I think couple of more details are worth mentioning:

 

First, the controls.

Joystick is far from ideal for this kind of game.

I used gamepad that was plugged into both joystick ports when testing on real hw but for majority of players going with one hand on joystick and other on keyboard, adding more and more controls is less than perfect.

For the future Goldy suggested mixing the controls up a bit.

Using joystick for forward / backward and strafe left / strafe right while having turning left and right on the keyboard near the Shift which would be used for faster turning (this would also overcome the one keypress at a time limit because Shift is handled kind of independently) .

I think this is worth a try.

 

Other thing is that fast turning has downsides too.

Earlier builds used twice as fast turning (128 steps for 360 degree turn instead of current 256 steps) which was ok when enemies were close and big.

When they were small and far away though it often happened that crosshair jumped over the enemy even if one tried to turn cautiously and player had to compensate with strafing.

For 90 degrees fast turning there was also a bit of confusion because players FoV is roughly 56 degrees and when you turn sideways in one keystroke you see completely different view.

 

 

@globe  

Ah now this is interesting. Whilst on occasion I've loaded up the XEX on my real A8 hardware, because of the screen dumps I've been posting I've been mainly running the game, (and of course the test XEXs) in emulation on Altirra. Therefore I've been exclusively using the keyboard and therefore my mapped PC keyboards cursor keys for movement. It had therefore not occurred to me that you aren't using the Atari's keyboard to control direction. I just checked out your keyboard controls image. How did I miss that?!

 

EDITEDCan I ask why the Atari's WASD or arrow keys aren't mapped into the game as the main keyboard controls? Is it because the Atari keyboard doesn't accept multiple keypresses similtaneously?

It's great to have the joystick as an option but I definitely agree these games lend themselves to keyboards and of course joypads. 

 

Secondly, the proposal to mix up the controls a bit might work if you have suckers on the underside of the joystick, but generally I reckon a lot of people run Atari Cx40s and non anchored joysticks, which require two hands to hold. You are not going to be able to use the joystick and keyboard together if you can't anchor the joystick to a desk for example.

 

So the fast/quick 90 degree turning I am referring to is more often referred to as snap turning, and it wouldn't be enabled by default and the normal movement during gameplay.You might not need to use it that often. The normal turning could be the default speed as you have it a present, and where on a rare occasion you need to snap turn 90 degrees at a time left or right, you hit either of two assigned buttons on the keyboard for the task. So say the V key for snapping left 90 degrees and B quick for the right. Alternatively have s snap turn that just moves 30 degrees at a time. Does that sound workable?

 

Snap turn functionality is seen a lot in VR gaming to avoid nausea. It's usually configurable and sometimes presets are in place to choose from 30, 60 and 90 degrees.

 

Apologies if you know all this already and I've misread. 

 

EDIT: ok, just read post # 134 here

(sorry I missed your reply there)

 

so I clocked your reply and explanation of the WASD keys here:

Option screen is definitely something that will happen in version for larger memory machines. There's a bit of a HW problem with ATARI keys though, only one key press at a time is registered so things like 'standard' AWSD controls often used on PCs won't allow for simultaneous walking forward/backwards while also strafing for example.

There are some possibilities to work around this by using SHIFT, console keys etc. but all in all it's somewhat less straightforward than what people are accustomed to from newer systems.

 

And for the turning your reply was:

Marco already suggested faster turning during the testing and we had test versions with extra controls for 12 degrees coarse scrolling (4 times faster than normal turning) and 90 degrees turns but in the end these were left out.

So yeah, now the gameplay is more 'tactical', slower instead of the usual run and gun many FPSes have.

 

So regarding turning speeds, it appears in the development stages the functionality was at some stage an option, where it sounded like there were additional controls for 4 x times faster scrolling than we have currently AND an option to Snap turn 90 degrees.

 

If I've read this correctly how about just having normal gameplay scrolling as default as it is at present, no extra course scrolling function, but just add an option to snap turn for perhaps keys V and B, where it snap turns either a present 30, 60 or 90 if you like? That way normal scroll speed and gameplay stays the same for the most part, but snap turn is there for those trickier moments. IMHO no-one wants to die in game because they couldn't orientate themselves fast enough. Snap turning would just be an extra control tool and I think would add another dynamic to play, making it equally as tactical.

 

Perhaps it would be possible in a future revision, (should it ever transpire), to have the ability to include snap turn in the proposed conguration menu? (Eg chose to enable it and/or have either 30/60/90 degrees). Obviously it's likely that would be for 128K version anyway, given the extra RAM needed for all the lists of possible configuration options that are steadily building up! .

 

By the way in my mentioning things like config menus and 128k versions - obviously there is no expectation these things will definitely become reality.  These are just all hypothetical wishlist suggestions and feedback. 

 

It's such a shame about the WASD keys. I wonder as you say if a workaround is at all possible using some non conventional Atari keys in their place?

 

Edited November 7, 2021 by Beeblebrox
adding more info

[Heaven/TQA]

2 hours ago, Beeblebrox said:

Just quickly ran the Wolf3D demo on Altirra. Verrrry nice!  

 

@Heaven/TQA  Can i just ask with the Wolf3D demo:

 

• Is it running 25fps?
• Why is there a different colour vertical band to the right of the screen? Is it a PMG?
• It's a personal preference I know, but I think having a floor fill especially rather than one single colour, and to a lesser extent a single colour for the sky, is better visually. Did you ever have a dithered floor effect for the engine?  Or wasn't it possible?
• I really like music playing in the background, although I appreciate being a demo rather than a full game it lends itself to having music as another point of interest other than the graphics.

Great demo - great to see such textures.

 

Long time that I checked the 25 fps. But <=25 fps like that depending on the view distance.

 

the color band was just to test the transparent missles effect.

 

dithered floor costs rendering time. Right now there are unrolled collum rendering code which take a ZP based texture cache and render and scale the wall slice. The ceiling and floor color are encoded… so at some point it just does LDA #ceilingcolor STA line STA line…

 

 

[Beeblebrox]

15 minutes ago, Heaven/TQA said:

Long time that I checked the 25 fps. But <=25 fps like that depending on the view distance.

Cool

Quote

the color band was just to test the transparent missles effect.

Ahhh, makes sense.

Quote

 

dithered floor costs rendering time. Right now there are unrolled collum rendering code which take a ZP based texture cache and render and scale the wall slice. The ceiling and floor color are encoded… so at some point it just does LDA #ceilingcolor STA line STA line…

 

 

Now I am not gonna lie......... I understood the first 5 words!  (I am after all a mere mortal) Thanks for explaining though. I pick up bits here and there and am always in awe of what you guys can create and run on the A8s.

Edited November 7, 2021 by Beeblebrox

[Beeblebrox]

@globe btw just a small observation and not at all important. But when you fire the rocket launcher and the BFG, the projectile seems to emerge from above and right of the end of the weapon rather than coming from the weapon "barrell" itself? This might be to do with the resolution and also perhaps the only way it could work. Again apologies if I've missed an explanation for this. It's only a small observation after all. 

 

Would be cool if the BFG projectile was larger also - but now I'm just getting picky heh heh