emkay Posted November 23, 2016 Share Posted November 23, 2016 (edited) Didn't know "the dark" before. While the C64 thingy is "fake" with 25 times CPU speed in the emulation, "the dark" shows even better , what's up Just using "what the computer's" hardware offers... And the Atari has actually the PMg (removing many clashes on the srceen) AND gr. 9 for a great depth impression... OK, the Speccy's "hires" has it's own flair. Edited November 23, 2016 by emkay 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted November 23, 2016 Share Posted November 23, 2016 (edited) Particular that kind of games Imagine: or Using LMS (hardware screen copy) and charmode (block movement), multiplexed PMg.... Even when using LMS making the walls look similar, in the upper and lower range, you could change the CHBASE pointer to have a different look there even for some enemies... resulting in a resolution of 160x240, not just 80x50... Edited November 23, 2016 by emkay 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Stephen Posted November 23, 2016 Share Posted November 23, 2016 I remember Capture the Flag from around 82, on an unmodified 800. Why was it never duplicated or topped? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted November 23, 2016 Share Posted November 23, 2016 I had a long email conversation with coder of capture the flag... he is btw head of development at Activision nowadays capture the flag was ahead of his time and uses some new techniques like span buffers and ora fillers. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted November 23, 2016 Share Posted November 23, 2016 " Yes, I first wrote the game for the Apple II and later ported it to the other systems. The challenge back then was how to get something like that to run fast enough for real time on such slow systems. As I recall, with the camera and world constraints I imposed, I only needed to do hidden surface removal effectively for one scan line. I was able to order enumeration of the walls within the view frustum to be ordered by depth (something like an octree rendering algorithm), so didn't need sorting, and I think I maintained a data structure of visible wall segments for the scan line and inserted new segments into that, updating it and doing hidden wall segment removal, as the walls were enumerated, in the end having an efficient list from left to right of the visible wall segments that needed to be rendered, basing the technique on old scan line based hidden surface removal 3d rendering algorithms predating the dominance of z buffer rendering techniques. Fill rate was also a very critical issue, hence my use of jumping into the middle of a sequence of store instructions to do the fill for the solid color walls as fast as possible. Back when I developed these games, I wanted people to be amazed and surprised something like that was even possible on such systems, nothing like that had been done before. (Also the initial Wayout logo on the Apple II even did a trick to render what looked like true 16 color high res, when the Apple II only supported 16 color low res and a kind of 6 color high res, if you didn't use color dithering. :-) I also experimented with a full 3d general renderer for these consoles, but it just wasn't fast enough, despite all the performance tricks I tried :-)" 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matej Posted November 23, 2016 Author Share Posted November 23, 2016 Capture Flag was my fav game on Atari! I played it for hours with my cousine. Nowadays exactrly same gameplay is in voxel fps shooter Open Spades. But you capture intel not flag. And you must bring intel back to your base (medical station). I am playing on Polish servers under name Matej. I am very good at that game. And YES OpenSpades/AceOfSpades is Minecraft like shooter! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McNAtisA5lQ 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted November 23, 2016 Share Posted November 23, 2016 I also experimented with a full 3d general renderer for these consoles, but it just wasn't fast enough, despite all the performance tricks I tried :-)" So he actually tried the wrong way. Apple II with "full 3d renderer" ... nothing more to say. I wonder , if he had seen "rescue on fractalus " ... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted November 23, 2016 Share Posted November 23, 2016 1982? Ah well... I guess not when he wrote Wayout... and don't understimate Paul's knowledge... http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,8785/ and check his linkedin profile as head of tech @ Activison. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted November 23, 2016 Share Posted November 23, 2016 and you can not compare today's knowledge with back 1982... I went today into my texture tunnel code written 199x and I thought wtf... so crappy written... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted November 23, 2016 Share Posted November 23, 2016 1982? Ah well... I guess not when he wrote Wayout... Well, he was a pioneer back in that time, releasing Wayout and CTF . So wrong decisions have been easily done, when no comparision is available. The real issue is that, even after "Wayout" was that great on the A8 and ROF showed the real power... no further development happened in that direction. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted November 23, 2016 Share Posted November 23, 2016 yeah.... I guess Lucasfilm should have made the concepts available to the public so everybody could benefit but well... no internet, wikipedia etc... Carpenter presented basic concepts at Siggraph but that's it... key was to get the "high level" 3d maths to 8bit low end computers... and that's still hard to do. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted November 23, 2016 Share Posted November 23, 2016 (edited) well... look... RoF seems to be "real 3d" when I looked into it esp grid rendering but Fox et al did a lot of short cuts... here I patched the game to have no heights... so you see the "grid" and the FOV. the uniqueness of RoF is that it is a big "fake" and "illusion"... Popmilo knows why... ;=) as its based on the concept of special drawing order of the grid and filling sky to mountain top contur. Edited November 23, 2016 by Heaven/TQA 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted November 23, 2016 Share Posted November 23, 2016 (edited) yeah.... I guess Lucasfilm should have made the concepts available to the public so everybody could benefit but well... no internet, wikipedia etc... Carpenter presented basic concepts at Siggraph but that's it... key was to get the "high level" 3d maths to 8bit low end computers... and that's still hard to do. Still no one really wants to have a full 3D game on an 8 bit Computer, except some people liked Games like "Driller" with 4-10 seconds per frame. But, there are enough examples today on other 8 bits, and still the A8 could do it faster Edited November 23, 2016 by emkay Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted November 23, 2016 Share Posted November 23, 2016 well... look... RoF seems to be "real 3d" when I looked into it esp grid rendering but Fox et al did a lot of short cuts... here I patched the game to have no heights... so you see the "grid" and the FOV. the uniqueness of RoF is that it is a big "fake" and "illusion"... Popmilo knows why... ;=) as its based on the concept of special drawing order of the grid and filling sky to mountain top contur. What do you want to show exactly? If you remove one direction, you get, ofcourse, squares. If you add the height again, that show 3 dimensional calculations.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted November 23, 2016 Share Posted November 23, 2016 you see a) RoF is based on grid where grid points contain the height/tag values for the fractal line b) it looks like "real 3d" as there are 16bit calculations envolved and perspective transformation (see when banking/turning) c) drawing mountains are based on connecting 2d transformed grid points and drawing them in a special order (let's see if someone comes up in which way) d) screen gets filled with ORA filler and most top "contur" (mountain tops/skyline) it will stop filling. actually RoF fills from top to skyline the sky. e) mountains are "no pixels" as they are background color as far as I remember. what I wanted to say is that RoF is advanced but as in most cases in 8bit world... one engine can not be transfered to another game as they are optimised and written for that actual game. Driller etc is using those "freescape" engine? as far as I remember and that's more "generic" so it's slow. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted November 23, 2016 Share Posted November 23, 2016 (edited) "Fake 3D" is, when the 3D is just a visual part without any relevance in the gameplay. And, yes, even Wolf 3D was fake 3D, as the 3rd dimension was only a projection. Doom also was fake 3D, as the "jumps" and height levels just had been projections . How nitpicking could things get? RoF uses all 3 dimensions for the gameplay. The height of a mountain is directly acting on the height of the ship. If the Hill is 1 meter, you have to fly 2m high. If the hill is 100 meter , you have to fly 101m or even higher. And, because the height calculations cost additional CPU cycles, on the C64 the hills were generally less high. Edited November 23, 2016 by emkay Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted November 23, 2016 Share Posted November 23, 2016 hm.... as every time. The answer is missing, just like "hey emkay, you are right" let's check the possibilities" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted November 23, 2016 Share Posted November 23, 2016 Ok... back to the topic... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted November 23, 2016 Share Posted November 23, 2016 Ok... back to the topic... Never left it. The question is: After including all hardware-features , how many voxels at 80x50 could be used for a game ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted November 23, 2016 Share Posted November 23, 2016 (edited) Define voxels... the 3D ones or in a Comanche like? 3D ones like in mindcraft I doubt... in Comanche like I processed around 40x40 at 25-16 fps. Old engine 80x40 in 16-12. Edited November 23, 2016 by Heaven/TQA Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted November 24, 2016 Share Posted November 24, 2016 Define voxels... the 3D ones or in a Comanche like? 3D ones like in mindcraft I doubt... in Comanche like I processed around 40x40 at 25-16 fps. Old engine 80x40 in 16-12. 3D or comanche like? Well, as the name says already: Voxel = volumetric pixel. There is no volume without 3D . The difference is just the amount of Voxels in those game. While they keep the Voxel always square and small in Minecraft, to have that "8Bit" look... in Comanche the grid gets lower, more filling the Voxels inside "non 3D like" ... Every "rotating" object is a "Voxel", as you calculate the grid of each, and just fill it with some colour. Keep the resolution /and DMA) low, allows to calculate more "Voxel-Grids", filling needs less CPU due to the low amount of pixel, to fill with a colour.... and so on. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted November 24, 2016 Share Posted November 24, 2016 anyway... Voxel space is a special case... so we can not compare that with the Mindcraft. but as an idication for such work.... none of the top groups on c64 or spectrum did yet touched "3d Voxels" which has a reason... (ram/cpu). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matej Posted November 24, 2016 Author Share Posted November 24, 2016 And pseudo voxel? Background like on ballblazzer and cubes will 2D be isometric? Something like this? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted November 24, 2016 Share Posted November 24, 2016 but as an idication for such work.... none of the top groups on c64 or spectrum did yet touched "3d Voxels" which has a reason... (ram/cpu). The reason is that both of those computers were too slow. On the other hand is "Mood" something into the direction of "Voxels" for the C64. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted November 24, 2016 Share Posted November 24, 2016 And pseudo voxel? Background like on ballblazzer and cubes will 2D be isometric? Something like this? Games like Archipelagos would run more than well on the A8. Imagine the "Gr7" CPU cycle per pixel ratio... Thinking about Mercenary that runs a bit faster with "gr.7" but wasn't optimized for the A8 in the code. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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