Screenshoots from 2 futur Jaguar games

[GT Turbo]

Hi,

 

Last week end the A.C. (Atari party) has take place near Paris. Fadest, Matmook and Gregg have started to code two new Jaguars games, screenshoots on Jagware

 

 

GT Turbo

[The_Laird]

Let me guess, more puzzle games?

[TrekMD]

Well, they look colorful. What kind of games are these? They do look like puzzlers.

[GT Turbo]

Well, they look colorful. What kind of games are these? They do look like puzzlers.

 

Sorry, no puzzle game this time !!

 

Black Hole (by Fadest) is an 8 players action game were do you need to push (Into the black hole) or fire on your opponents, a great game, i love it !! You can use the Black Hole for doing curve on your weapons trajectory.

 

Dragibug Attack is a funny game, we do you need to pick up Dragibus (Candies)... more infos by Matmook in few days, a very cool game, funny !!

 

 

GT

[Fadest]

Let me guess, more puzzle games?

Even worse, party games...

 

 

 

 

The positive thing is that Black Hole is only the result of a 24h coding contest, from concept to prototype in 1 day (including all wasted time for sprites as I am not a graphic artist). It is pretty obvious that it is an utopia to think that 8 jaguarists are willing to sit in the same place in front of a TV to play a competitive shoot game, so don't expect too much (or too less as you want) from this.

[sh3-rg]

The AC looked like it was a lot of fun, thanks to those who have posted their pictures & videos up

 

And yet another two new (multi-player!) games from Jagware guys and both look great - looking forward to those, oh & of course a final version of Ladybugged!

 

Well done all the Jagware teams for the 1-2-3 in the coding comp - AC & OL 2010 PWND

[+LS650]

That Black Hole game looks like a take on the original PDP Space Wars. That is a cool game, but most home versions of it are not too good, so this looks like it could be interesting.

[Fadest]

Basically, this is based on the memory I have from a old ST game (maybe DP ?) with only 2 players. I never saw a PDP terminal from my own eyes

 

To be more precise, the contest had some rules which was basically this year :

1- duel game / multiplayer

2- zone(s) to gain points

3- playfield

optional :

4- bonused or malused projectiles and or players

5- various zone(s) (size/position)

 

As you can see, it was intended to be a sport game, windjammers has been used as model by organisators...

I wanted to make something different from a sport game, and this old ST game came to mind (don't even remember if we were able to shoot). What is missing are multiple game mode I thought of (team vs team - sprite are designed to be in 2 teams for team modes, capture the flag, race (each team has a special champion that must be in black hole first to win), ...). And of course nothing is perfect (apart maybe shoots curved trajectories) in it...

[Starcat]

Great to see more Jaguar games coming along!

Keep up the good work!

[doctorclu]

 

Black Hole (by Fadest) is an 8 players action game were do you need to push (Into the black hole) or fire on your opponents, a great game, i love it !! You can use the Black Hole for doing curve on your weapons trajectory.

 

I would like to see this. I like multiplaver games on the Jaguar.

 

So is this a team tap game?

[CrazyChris]

Let me guess, more puzzle games?

 

 

 

Fadest makes good stuff!

[ovalbugmann]

Thanks for the info GT Turbo, I will be looking forward to these games.

 

And Fadest, I think it's great that your continuing to work on additional Jaguar games as I have enjoyed your currently available demos and I like your work! - as Starcat has already said; it is great to see more Jaguar games moving along!!

 

[Fadest]

 

Black Hole (by Fadest) is an 8 players action game were do you need to push (Into the black hole) or fire on your opponents, a great game, i love it !! You can use the Black Hole for doing curve on your weapons trajectory.

 

I would like to see this. I like multiplaver games on the Jaguar.

 

So is this a team tap game?

Right now, it should handle 2 team taps and 8 players (jagpad or rotaries), but we tested it only with 5 players (including one rotary). I guess there would have some slowdown with 8 players as there is a lot of optimizing to do (I don't know why, but usually, code written between 2 and 5 AM is usually not really optimized ).

[Gorf]

 

Black Hole (by Fadest) is an 8 players action game were do you need to push (Into the black hole) or fire on your opponents, a great game, i love it !! You can use the Black Hole for doing curve on your weapons trajectory.

 

I would like to see this. I like multiplaver games on the Jaguar.

 

So is this a team tap game?

Right now, it should handle 2 team taps and 8 players (jagpad or rotaries), but we tested it only with 5 players (including one rotary). I guess there would have some slowdown with 8 players as there is a lot of optimizing to do (I don't know why, but usually, code written between 2 and 5 AM is usually not really optimized ).

 

 

 

If you are using the 68k to read all those rotaries you are going to have a hard time getting any kind

of decent frame rate performance. Use the DSP. I have 8 rotaries running in my 3D Paddle Baddles games

and they work fine and at full frame rate. Set up an interrupt in the DSP to read them a bunch of times

per frame. If you are only using the DSP to play sounds and music, you should have a ton more horsepower

left to read 8 rotaries with no problems.

[Fadest]

 

Black Hole (by Fadest) is an 8 players action game were do you need to push (Into the black hole) or fire on your opponents, a great game, i love it !! You can use the Black Hole for doing curve on your weapons trajectory.

 

I would like to see this. I like multiplaver games on the Jaguar.

 

So is this a team tap game?

Right now, it should handle 2 team taps and 8 players (jagpad or rotaries), but we tested it only with 5 players (including one rotary). I guess there would have some slowdown with 8 players as there is a lot of optimizing to do (I don't know why, but usually, code written between 2 and 5 AM is usually not really optimized ).

 

 

 

If you are using the 68k to read all those rotaries you are going to have a hard time getting any kind

of decent frame rate performance. Use the DSP. I have 8 rotaries running in my 3D Paddle Baddles games

and they work fine and at full frame rate. Set up an interrupt in the DSP to read them a bunch of times

per frame. If you are only using the DSP to play sounds and music, you should have a ton more horsepower

left to read 8 rotaries with no problems.

You know, what is nice with librairies is that you don't have to worry about technical things if you want, but you can rewrite critical parts to your need if needed. Translation : right now, I don't know how Seb is handling jagpad in Sebrmv's library, but if it can be improved and if I need more power, I know I can work on this point.

 

But the main optimizing point right now is about all the calculation for black hole gravity. I decided to go with Pythagore theorem (which in the middle of the night was probably the highest mathematical concept I could handle ), which means lots of multiplication and square root in a loop (8 ships and 3 shoots per ship, so potentially 32 objects to compute for gravity). I know I can do it far far better...

[GroovyBee]

I know I can do it far far better...

For a fast integer square root algorithm read Jack Crenshaw's article here :-

 

http://www.embedded.com/98/9802fe2.htm

 

Or you can find a 68000 implementation of Newton's method on page 128 of Andrew Tyler's book "Real-time 3D graphics for the Atari ST".

[Gorf]

Why use the 68k when you have to much faster much more powerful RISC processors at your disposal?

Anything in that article can certainly be applied to the two Jaguar RISC's. You will do much better

at sqrt and multiplies in the RISC's, seeing that the RISC's have single cycle multiples and even

better a serious matrice multiply. I bet you could come up with a seriously power algorithm for what

you are trying to do a lot more efficiently using the GPU or DSP than you could ever hope for with

the 68k.

[ggn]

I know I can do it far far better...

For a fast integer square root algorithm read Jack Crenshaw's article here :-

 

http://www.embedded.com/98/9802fe2.htm

 

Or you can find a 68000 implementation of Newton's method on page 128 of Andrew Tyler's book "Real-time 3D graphics for the Atari ST".

 

Also, lots of square root routines detailed and analyzed for performance here

[Fadest]

Thanks guys.

I was using an iteration method based on an observation find somewhere but not really good for big numbers. At 3AM, Azrael wrote me a small routine based on Newton's method

 

In fact, after reflexion,I think I can do without all those square roots. I mean, I just want to know a distance, but I can probably deal with the square of the distance, I just have to adjust my algorithm... and this will probably be far more efficient than the most optimized sqrt routine.

[+CyranoJ]

Thanks guys.

I was using an iteration method based on an observation find somewhere but not really good for big numbers. At 3AM, Azrael wrote me a small routine based on Newton's method

 

In fact, after reflexion,I think I can do without all those square roots. I mean, I just want to know a distance, but I can probably deal with the square of the distance, I just have to adjust my algorithm... and this will probably be far more efficient than the most optimized sqrt routine.

 

If your only after a square of a distance, and the screen is only say 320 pixels wide... just use a pre-calculated lookup table and be done with it

 

It's only 640 bytes for 16bit and 1280 for 32

[ggn]

Thanks guys.

I was using an iteration method based on an observation find somewhere but not really good for big numbers. At 3AM, Azrael wrote me a small routine based on Newton's method

 

In fact, after reflexion,I think I can do without all those square roots. I mean, I just want to know a distance, but I can probably deal with the square of the distance, I just have to adjust my algorithm... and this will probably be far more efficient than the most optimized sqrt routine.

 

AKA do the math - algorithm optimizing is usually much more efficient than code optimizing!

[Gorf]

Thanks guys.

I was using an iteration method based on an observation find somewhere but not really good for big numbers. At 3AM, Azrael wrote me a small routine based on Newton's method

 

In fact, after reflexion,I think I can do without all those square roots. I mean, I just want to know a distance, but I can probably deal with the square of the distance, I just have to adjust my algorithm... and this will probably be far more efficient than the most optimized sqrt routine.

 

You can probably use vectoring and forget the sqrt all together. I am assuming you want to know how close you are to the

black hole/star? Then from that you want to adjust the speed of the ship to emulate it being pulled toward that black hole/

star?

 

if that is the case

 

xv = x2-x1 and yv = y2-y1. xv and yv now become your ship's vectoring delta's.

There is a little more to it than this but it will certianly be much more

efficient than trying to compute sqrt's.

[Christos]

Fadest, I am not sure you need sqrt's at all.

 

Let's imagine a black hole of mass M and a spaceship of mass m. The force at any point outside the event horizon is given from the equation F=K*M*m/r^2 where r^2=(x-xo)^2+(y-yo)^2 and (xo,yo) are the coordinates of the center of the black hole and while the direction is the vector that connects the ship to the black hole.

 

Now let's imagine that your ship moves away from the black hole with it's engines applying a force f. The acceleration of the ship is then (F-f)/m=a again in the direction of the vector connecting the singularity with the ship's center of gravity. I can imagine now that you don't want to bother with polar coordinates but with Cartesians. Fortunately physics allows us for this. The principle of independancy of motion allows us to use fx and Fx (and Fy and fy) which are Fx=Fcos(theta) and Fy=Fsin(theta).

 

So your acceleration now becomes ax=(Fx-fx)/m and ay=(Fy-fy)/m and the speed of your ship is now ux=uo+ax*t and the same for uy. Those calculations are too much to do realtime though, so I suggest tables of Fx and Fy and simple functions for fx and fy.

 

And I could add a few more ideas, for example if you aim for a multilevel game, increased difficulty can be achieved by adding more mass to the black hole (which will also increase it's Schwarzschild radius). Also you can use the fact that when the ship falls slowly towards the event horizon it never falls in but if it goes fast it does..

[Fadest]

Hey, it was something like 3AM, you know, this moment of the night in parties where everybody around (apart GT and Azrael) is sleeping and you cannot walk in room without hurting a kind of human caterpillar lying around.

 

Azrael really tried hard to explain me lots of things like this but I cannot remember a single part of it

[Gorf]

Fadest, I am not sure you need sqrt's at all.

 

Let's imagine a black hole of mass M and a spaceship of mass m. The force at any point outside the event horizon is given from the equation F=K*M*m/r^2 where r^2=(x-xo)^2+(y-yo)^2 and (xo,yo) are the coordinates of the center of the black hole and while the direction is the vector that connects the ship to the black hole.

 

Now let's imagine that your ship moves away from the black hole with it's engines applying a force f. The acceleration of the ship is then (F-f)/m=a again in the direction of the vector connecting the singularity with the ship's center of gravity. I can imagine now that you don't want to bother with polar coordinates but with Cartesians. Fortunately physics allows us for this. The principle of independancy of motion allows us to use fx and Fx (and Fy and fy) which are Fx=Fcos(theta) and Fy=Fsin(theta).

 

So your acceleration now becomes ax=(Fx-fx)/m and ay=(Fy-fy)/m and the speed of your ship is now ux=uo+ax*t and the same for uy. Those calculations are too much to do realtime though, so I suggest tables of Fx and Fy and simple functions for fx and fy.

 

And I could add a few more ideas, for example if you aim for a multilevel game, increased difficulty can be achieved by adding more mass to the black hole (which will also increase it's Schwarzschild radius). Also you can use the fact that when the ship falls slowly towards the event horizon it never falls in but if it goes fast it does..

 

 

I bet you can do this real time no problem using the GPU. My guess is there is some way to stuff this into a

matrix, which the GPU OR the DSP would be excellent at in real time.