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Best 3D racing game for the 9918A


Asmusr

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On 9/3/2021 at 1:32 PM, Asmusr said:

The 9918A is difficult when it comes to racing games. We have Pole Position for the TI. Has anything better been developed for one of the other computers that share the same VDP (Colecovision, Intellivision, MSX1, ...)?

 

On 9/3/2021 at 1:45 PM, save2600 said:

Not sure I'm aware of anything better than Turbo for both the CV

 

CV Dukes of Hazzard?

 

J8NvrK.thumb.gif.42822f8f81e75d867a16b81a2410a609.gif

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Dear Asmusr,

 

The best 3D racing game for the 9918A is Hang On for MSX 1:

 

There is another non 3D racing game XRacing for MSX1 similar to the game F1 Spirit:

 

What is more important: For the latter game smooth scrolling techniques are discussed here: http://santiontanon.blogspot.com/2019/04/smooth-scroll-in-xracing.html. I don't know, if you already know all these possible techniques for smooth scrolling. The originator of this deep knowledge in smooth scrolling techniques for MSX 1 is artrag, who developed on the basis of this knowledge Uridium:

 

Now, I presented the section with artrag earlier, because I want to make some proposals. I don't know, if they are of any use for you, but maybe you can realize a 3D car racing game on the basis of my proposals, if you want. According to the statements about smooth scrolling, it seems to be possible to split the screen for different graphical objects/actions into different areas. So why not use a lower part of the screen for the driving surface realized by utilizing the Multicolor Mode as in your following demo:

Then the usage of sprites for the racing cars, objects at the edge of the driving surface and otherwhere? At last smooth scrolling high resolution graphics in the upper area of the screen for objects at the horizon?

 

 

Regards

 

Edited by MueThor
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8 hours ago, MueThor said:

it seems to be possible to split the screen for different graphical objects/actions into different areas. So why not use a lower part of the screen for the driving surface realized by utilizing the Multicolor Mode as in your following demo:

Splitting the screen on the 9918/9928 takes a lot of CPU, you have to poll the status register to catch specific rows on the screen. Good for demos, less helpful for games that need to do a lot of computation.

 

There's a lot of knowledge here about smooth scrolling - the Magellan tool can even pre-calculate a lot of it for you.

 

 

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23 hours ago, Leeroy ST said:

 

CV Dukes of Hazzard?

 

J8NvrK.thumb.gif.42822f8f81e75d867a16b81a2410a609.gif

While this runs on the Z80, access to the VDP is still cumbersome on the CV regardless as it has to go through the I/O ports of the Z80. I doubt this game is  doing any real-time 3D transforms but is likely using sprites with variable magnification. Still very well done and fast!

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59 minutes ago, Vorticon said:

While this runs on the Z80, access to the VDP is still cumbersome on the CV regardless as it has to go through the I/O ports of the Z80. I doubt this game is  doing any real-time 3D transforms but is likely using sprites with variable magnification. Still very well done and fast!

I remember reading on here somewhere it did and was a rare case but that was years ago.

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On 9/5/2021 at 8:36 AM, retroclouds said:

Lotus F3 for MSX1. Granted it’s not a 3D first person. But this is the best smooth scrolling racing game I’ve seen for the 9918.

It’s a homebrew of Dvik & Joyrex, they did some very impressive over the years.

I agree it's impressive, but they are sacrificing a lot of graphics details in order to make the scrolling 1 pixel smooth. I would probably have chosen to scroll 2 pixel at a time, which would roughly have allowed 4 times more tiles, provided I understand their basic technique. 

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Dear Asmusr,

 

Quote

FYI the demo is using ordinary graphics mode and not multicolor mode.

Thank you for the clarification.

 

BTW, possibly you can extract some new informations about Pseudo 3D graphics used in 3D race games from following link: http://www.extentofthejam.com/pseudo/ . Whatever you will do, I would be very excited, if you programmed a 3D racing game for the 9918A.  

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2 hours ago, MueThor said:

BTW, possibly you can extract some new informations about Pseudo 3D graphics used in 3D race games from following link: http://www.extentofthejam.com/pseudo/ . Whatever you will do, I would be very excited, if you programmed a 3D racing game for the 9918A.  

Thank you. Perhaps you're not aware that I already did this, which was heavily based on the information from the page you link to. The video is from the version that doesn't require the F18A:

 

 

The development thread is here. 

 

 

 

 

 

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Regarding Stunt Car Racer, which is a fantastic game, and has recently been ported to the BBC Micro and Atari 8-bit .... Would it be possible to do it using a monochrome wire-frame for the elevated tracks ?   Perhaps have the play screen slightly smaller than other versions so as to hopefully speed things up?

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23 hours ago, Retrospect said:

Regarding Stunt Car Racer, which is a fantastic game, and has recently been ported to the BBC Micro and Atari 8-bit .... Would it be possible to do it using a monochrome wire-frame for the elevated tracks ?   Perhaps have the play screen slightly smaller than other versions so as to hopefully speed things up?

I don't think it would work with a simple wireframe. It looks like it would have to fill the polygons even if it's with the same color to cover the edges behind them (assuming you draw the polygons back to front). There is probably some clever algorithm that reduces how many polygons you need to paint, and without that algorithm I wouldn't know where to start.

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I was wondering about another racing game ... an old favourite of mine, on the Atari XL and C64, "Great American Cross Country Road Race" ... it stemmed from the old 2600 game "Enduro", they added bits to it , and came up with this ...
 


Would this be even possible on a TI?  Albeit maybe running slightly slower?  The reason I chose to ask about this one is that I see the sides of the road are quite clear without much on them apart from Cacti and the Fuel Pumps ... leaving just the road to twist and turn .... I can imagine it on the TI ... if the colours were a problem it wouldn't look too bad even if monochrome for the road and background.  Then we'd just have the top horizon shifting left / right , and the eventual pop-up of the city when approaching "city limits".  If I were good enough, I would attempt this.  But i'm not.  So i won't.  But someone out there might be :)

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9 hours ago, Retrospect said:

Would this be even possible on a TI?  Albeit maybe running slightly slower?  The reason I chose to ask about this one is that I see the sides of the road are quite clear without much on them apart from Cacti and the Fuel Pumps ... leaving just the road to twist and turn .... I can imagine it on the TI ... if the colours were a problem it wouldn't look too bad even if monochrome for the road and background.  Then we'd just have the top horizon shifting left / right , and the eventual pop-up of the city when approaching "city limits".  If I were good enough, I would attempt this.  But i'm not.  So i won't.  But someone out there might be :)

If we can accept that the sideways scrolling would not be smooth, I don't see any problems making something similar for the TI at a pretty good speed. It looks like there are only 3 images of the road: straight, left turn, right turn, so it should be possible to fit those into one character set. The moving stripes could probably be managed by some pattern updates and likewise the horizon graphics. But I don't really think this is the best we could do.

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What about using something similar to Hang-On on the MSX1 / SG-1000.  In replacing the bikes with cars and retaining the road and background effects?  Also agree with MueThor with this being the nicest looking racing game on the TMS9918A VDP.

Edited by Torrax
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9 hours ago, Torrax said:

What about using something similar to Hang-On on the MSX1 / SG-1000.  In replacing the bikes with cars and retaining the road and background effects?  Also agree with MueThor with this being the nicest looking racing game on the TMS9918A VDP.

I agree that Hang-On has the most smooth and detailed road of the lot. It looks like it's using the technique where each line of a predefined image is scrolled individually. It's also quite slow, which is the price you have to pay on the 9918A. This is probably using mode 2 while the faster roads are using mode 1, which means that a lot more data have to be transferred to the VDP each frame.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Just now, artrag said:

Moreover in Wec Le Mans the road has hills and pits, in Hang On or msx it is flat and boring

Yes, Wec is great for the hills.  Martin Webb, in regards to "outrun"'s hills on the c64, said he achieved it by raising the horizon and lowering it again.  Sounds achievable to the right coder. I would think that same technique is done in Wec.

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