Most graphically Impressive 3D games on the Atari ST/Falcon?

[Matt_B]

Yeah, I don't think the blitter helps much with most 3D games beyond being able to clear the back buffer when you're drawing a new frame without hogging the CPU. It's mainly designed to move and draw rectangular areas which is only of so much use when 3D engines really need to draw lots of triangles. Appropriately designed demos are capable of leveraging it rather more though.

 

The Amiga blitter does have some line/fill functionality but getting games to use it efficiently appears to have eluded most if not all games programmers back in the day.

 

[Cyprian]

4 hours ago, Matt_B said:

Yeah, I don't think the blitter helps much with most 3D games beyond being able to clear the back buffer when you're drawing a new frame without hogging the CPU.

the ST's BLiTTER can be used for various things like filling polygons (e.g. demo Back to oldschool by Mystic Bytes). In some cases you can run the BLitter and the CPU in parallel (one long instruction like mul/div/ bit rotation).

[Leeroy ST]

To anyone that's played them, how have the 3D rpg games held up? Are they playable?

[calimero]

Here is Crown of Creation 3D for Falcon:

 

much better then anything on ST. 
 

Falcon also can run Doom (since we are talking about non polygon 3D games...)

 

btw 

I can not imagine, nor know, for some spectacular 3D games on Mac. Mac have same MC like ST or Amiga. In case of original Mac, it was slower than ST since it was badly designed. Newer Mac only had faster CPU then ST. No special hardware for 3D (like e.g. Falcon DSP...)

Acorn have much better RISC ARM cpu so it is no wonder that it has great 3D games...

 

Edited July 26, 2021 by calimero

[calimero]

1 hour ago, Leeroy ST said:

To anyone that's played them, how have the 3D rpg games held up? Are they playable?

AmberMoon on Amiga have terrible 3D part that ruin whole game. 
 

Then there was Legend of Valhaour (or similar :D...) for ST. (Did not played it but it looks fine)
 

On Falcon you have Towers. Descent 3D RPG...

Edited July 26, 2021 by calimero

[Leeroy ST]

4 hours ago, calimero said:

Here is Crown of Creation 3D for Falcon:

 

much better then anything on ST. 
 

Falcon also can run Doom (since we are talking about non polygon 3D games...)

 

btw 

I can not imagine, nor know, for some spectacular 3D games on Mac. Mac have same MC like ST or Amiga. In case of original Mac, it was slower than ST since it was badly designed. Newer Mac only had faster CPU then ST. No special hardware for 3D (like e.g. Falcon DSP...)

Acorn have much better RISC ARM cpu so it is no wonder that it has great 3D games...

 

Actually we are talking polygon but Yeah dont think MAC had anything impressive in 3D until 95 or after. Had some fps and a racing game before that iirc.

 

3 hours ago, calimero said:

AmberMoon on Amiga have terrible 3D part that ruin whole game. 
 

Then there was Legend of Valhaour (or similar :D...) for ST. (Did not played it but it looks fine)
 

On Falcon you have Towers. Descent 3D RPG...

What about Castle Master?

[calimero]

Oh, sorry. AmberMoon and Legend of Valhour are using a raycaster... not polygons. 
 

If you want to see how many polygons Falcon can handle, then maybe Douglas Little DLM Quake engine is best stuff: (version before he add textures, lightmaps...):

 

here is also 3D demo from AnimaInCorpore:

 

 

In comments on YT he suggested that Falcon is 20 times faster than ST regarding flat polygons...

 

 

[Leeroy ST]

21 hours ago, calimero said:

Oh, sorry. AmberMoon and Legend of Valhour are using a raycaster... not polygons. 
 

If you want to see how many polygons Falcon can handle, then maybe Douglas Little DLM Quake engine is best stuff: (version before he add textures, lightmaps...):

 

here is also 3D demo from AnimaInCorpore:

 

 

In comments on YT he suggested that Falcon is 20 times faster than ST regarding flat polygons...

 

 

Do games actually take advantage of that though?

[calimero]

Two videos from my previous post did not.
 

There was some 3D polygonal games for Falcon like Gravon but it is not impressive speed wise (like that crap Thalon shooter...). Falcon did not see any commercial success like ST so you can not expect nothing more but this demos and “indie” stuff. 
 

I just post links what is done on Falcon, including game Crown of creation, so one could imagine what could be possible to do on Falcon!

 

Example DLM (one man show) make Doom on Falcon:

 

btw authors of Gravon, brothers, later become army contractors for developing combat simulation. 

Edited July 28, 2021 by calimero

[masteries]

On 7/26/2021 at 6:15 AM, calimero said:

This is interesting: “using blitter to speed up rectangle filling”. 
Petari write that Amigas custom chips could not speed up 3D games. 
As far as I read, only recently some Amiga demo scene coders did some examples of 3D filled polygons using blitter. 
 

Can somebody confirm that Robocop 3 is using blitter on STe to speed up 3D. 
And does Robocop 3 use blitter on Amiga as well?

 

some years ago I open thread on EAB on this topic... http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=77162

 

 

btw

Crown of 3D Creation on Falcon is probably best 3D game for Falcon
There is also impressive 3D example on YouTube by AnimaInCorpore...

 

Really, test Robocop 3 by yourself on a STE, and on a ST.

See the difference

 

I know about rectangle filling properties, due to AGT engine has these capabilities; you can select one colour of the palette, and fill a rectangle from map coordinates;

the implementation in AGT doesn´t need to access RAM in order to retrieve graphics data, due to you are using a single colour. It performs very fast, you can create many of these big filled rectangles using different colour at 50 fps

 

This is also the implementation for sprite blinking, when you shoot at them, they are turned white and they require much less time to be rendered than their normal frames.

 

------------------

 

Legend of Valour has a very impressive pseudo 3D engine, there are real windows in buildings, people roaming around...

 

 

 

[calimero]

I also wonder if any of 3D games ever used blitter for speed up but I never get an answer.  
 

I will try Robocop 3. 
 

I wonder if it is faster on Amiga then on ST (does it use blitter on Amiga)?

[Leeroy ST]

21 hours ago, calimero said:

I also wonder if any of 3D games ever used blitter for speed up but I never get an answer.  
 

I will try Robocop 3. 
 

I wonder if it is faster on Amiga then on ST (does it use blitter on Amiga)?

I played R3 only on a basic line Amiga (weaker than 1200) but it's not as fast as an ST. 

 

But from what I gather the custom chips and other limitations make it tough to do much more with 3D games even with a 1200. You might get a couple more frames and less drops for some titles but otherwise you won't see a boost like you see with Mega ST or Falcon, supposedly.

[Matt_B]

The Amiga blitter has the ability to draw lines in arbitrary directions and fill shapes, which sounds pretty useful for 3D games. However, it's typically a three pass operation. Draw the outline, fill the shape, and blit the result to the screen. Certain edge cases aside, it's usually just quicker to draw your polygons with the CPU. All else being equal, the ST version of a game will be faster due to the higher clock speed.

 

 

[SlidellMan]

Let us not forget:

 

[alexisread]

For the Falcon, there wasn't much as (stated above) it had a very short sale life, and was rather crippled compared to what was originally planned.

Running is probably the most impressive game.

 

There's also k karts

However I don't think the games really used the dsp. Better demos of the Falcon's abilities are the quake demos mentioned above, realtime raytracing

 And 3d texturemapped landscapes

 

Lastly, the Falcon can probably do better, but voxel engine demo

 

 

Edited July 31, 2021 by alexisread

[Leeroy ST]

So what's generally considered the 3D ST game with the smoothest frame rate, just curious? 

[calimero]

2 hours ago, Leeroy ST said:

So what's generally considered the 3D ST game with the smoothest frame rate, just curious? 

One with least amount of polygons and quarter screen for game play!

 

TrexWarrior

No Second Prize 

 

by my personal experience are smoothest. 
 

btw

Can I ask why did you open this thread(and other similar threads about 3D graphics)?

 

EDIT:

Epic was epic

I do remember that Mig-29 Fulcrum was smooth;

also Battle Command...

 

you can also check thread: https://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?t=23208

Edited August 1, 2021 by calimero

[Leeroy ST]

On 8/1/2021 at 3:43 PM, calimero said:

One with least amount of polygons and quarter screen for game play!

 

TrexWarrior

No Second Prize 

 

by my personal experience are smoothest. 
 

btw

Can I ask why did you open this thread(and other similar threads about 3D graphics)?

 

EDIT:

Epic was epic

I do remember that Mig-29 Fulcrum was smooth;

also Battle Command...

 

you can also check thread: https://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?t=23208

No second prize seems slow and choppy to me when I played it but maybe a Mega ST runs it better. I remember some racer being smooth but I can't think of it, I believe it was first person.

[+DarkLord]

As far as racers go I always loved Vroooom, but I can't believe

you found No Second Prize disappointing.

 

It rocks here, super smooth and super fast...

 

[Matt_B]

I suppose we're in an era where even the most detailed sim racer runs at 60fps+ so its easy to see anything less than that as a bit choppy, but No Second Prize was remarkably fast for a 3D polygon game of its time.

Compare it to something like F1GP on the ST - which admittedly uses far more detailed models - and it's pretty smooth.

[Lostdragon]

On 7/22/2021 at 6:55 PM, Leeroy ST said:

It's why I mentioned if any had "passable" or better frame rate because The few 3D games I've played save Robocop 3 are very slow. I heard Achimedes and early Macs had better times with frame rate than the ST and Amiga though in the early 90's, but outside Starfighter I'm not aware of any of the earlier games on Acorn, and I know nothing about Mac before mid 90's.

 

But ST wise I was curious to know what games have reasonable speed, seems there are a decent amount mentioned already I wasn't expecting.

 

The Jaguar was third person so that's already a big difference, like you said it seems it's just a shared title but two different games.

There was an interview with Matthew Gosling on the Justclaws website some years back where the differences between the ST/Jaguar versions were explained, but that's now a dead link ?

 

 

Never played either version, but have seen some say the ST version is the more playable version due to lower difficulty and claims made Atari asked for the Jaguar version to be made harder. 

 

Could really do with some of the people from Caspian Software interviewed, other than Gosling, he's a little biased it seems over how his time at Caspian ended and gives a very 1-sided account of the Jaguar release. 

[Lostdragon]

Robocop 3 blew me away and was the last ST game i ever bought. 

 

The limited ST colour range was put to great effect, environments felt gritty and an ominous, foreboding atmosphere prevailed throughout. 

 

 

Loved the teraforming effects in Midwinter II, use an explosive on the beach crater forms, tide comes in and crater fills with water... 

 

 

Gave up waiting for Epic (which despite what Retrogamer Magazine claimed, was not universally panned at Review, mixed reviews yes, but a Marmite title, not universally hated on), but from what i have seen, graphics wise it looked fantastic for the time and hardware. 

 

 

 

Starglider II and the ability to literally go anywhere you want, leave planet and head out into space and make planetfall elsewhere, was just mind blowing. 

 

Titles like Battlemorph on Jaguar CD seemed limited in ambition by comparison, only letting you operate above or below water... 

[calimero]

5 hours ago, Matt_B said:

Compare it to something like F1GP on the ST - which admittedly uses far more detailed models - and it's pretty smooth.

F1GP was almost strategy game...!  But I played it a lot!

 

and I loved melting scene in Starglider II when you get closeto sun...

 

 

Edited August 5, 2021 by calimero

[+DarkLord]

One of my favorite parts of Starglider II was the time delay weapon.

 

There's just something hilarious about watching an enemy literally

run into their-selves... 

 

[Leeroy ST]

13 hours ago, Lostdragon said:

There was an interview with Matthew Gosling on the Justclaws website some years back where the differences between the ST/Jaguar versions were explained, but that's now a dead link ?

 

 

Never played either version, but have seen some say the ST version is the more playable version due to lower difficulty and claims made Atari asked for the Jaguar version to be made harder. 

 

Could really do with some of the people from Caspian Software interviewed, other than Gosling, he's a little biased it seems over how his time at Caspian ended and gives a very 1-sided account of the Jaguar release. 

Did you try the link in the internet archive?

 

13 hours ago, Lostdragon said:

Robocop 3 blew me away and was the last ST game i ever bought. 

 

The limited ST colour range was put to great effect, environments felt gritty and an ominous, foreboding atmosphere prevailed throughout. 

 

 

Loved the teraforming effects in Midwinter II, use an explosive on the beach crater forms, tide comes in and crater fills with water... 

 

 

Gave up waiting for Epic (which despite what Retrogamer Magazine claimed, was not universally panned at Review, mixed reviews yes, but a Marmite title, not universally hated on), but from what i have seen, graphics wise it looked fantastic for the time and hardware. 

 

 

 

Starglider II and the ability to literally go anywhere you want, leave planet and head out into space and make planetfall elsewhere, was just mind blowing. 

 

Titles like Battlemorph on Jaguar CD seemed limited in ambition by comparison, only letting you operate above or below water... 

The driving and flying sections in Robot Cop 3 were pretty large open cities for the time, it was cool too just move around. 

 

2 hours ago, DarkLord said:

One of my favorite parts of Starglider II was the time delay weapon.

 

There's just something hilarious about watching an enemy literally

run into their-selves... 

 

I always wonder which I liked more between Starglider II and Star Fighter.