This should have read: "However, I would not code..."

Reading files from disk is really simple.
Its just a few lines to code.

For a demo its not needed and you can include all images and files just in the binary.
But for a game with maybe intro, probably several level, maybe a highscore -  loading different level files, or different music just is very handy.

But all this could be done later.
I would propose to start simple, open a screen, and make a simple test render.

And my advice is NOT to surf the internet so much looking for tips as many posts that you might find online are posted by confused people talking nonsense.

- Vampire is a great next performance step from Jaguar AND has an actual large installed user base AND is actively being developed right now

- my HW cut-off is Sega Saturn, anything after that, might as well get back to DX12 shaders and Steam Unity Asset Shovelware...

- And this is probably the most important one : The community doesn't appear to be even 5% as rabid as Jaguar one

Makes sense ?

i see. i dint know there are communities more rabid than amiga, but ok, on apollo forum its pretty safe. save for me apparently;)

when every cycle matters, from this point of view its probably better to forget the os. i think you simply see by doing, as gunnar says. good luck.

But, yesterday I found a super-short (less than 50 lines) ASM example code that starts the bitplane screen and draws some lines.

I have a script that compiles and deploys it to WinUAE and it's running there with the changes I make, so I finally have a baseline here.

Just started transferring the chunky ASM code from that previous C/Asm sample. Hopefully, will have that today...

I tried the IRC link the other day but kept getting error msg. May try again or perhaps rather get an IRC client...

There's a Jaguar community?

learning something everyday

Keep up the great work!
Hopefully, soon we will be see some demo screens.

While there are many different configs, typically only 2 are identified demo competitions:
A500/1MB (includes also those A500+/A600 models)
AGA + 68060 66MHz/64 MB (A1200/A4000)

Additionally, you will find that these days, new games can require AGA Amiga/2 MB ram as a minimum. Moreover, for 3D AGA demos/games a 68030/50 MHz was often identified as a minimum.

I would not support anything less than a 68030 for a 3D game. 68030 is a common accelerator board for the A1200 that many use even today for just playing games. So you have that and the Vampire. A 68060 system can well only have AGA, and no additional gfx board. Gfx boards were not often supported in demos or games on the 68k Amigas, could be skipped as well, as nobody today would use such nonstandard hardware anyway.

And also, while chip ram is SLOW on older Amigas, the screen rendering in 3D games is done in fast ram (memory access speed up to 50-60 MB/sec on 68060 systems), so the slowness applies only to the c2p conversion speed.

Every Vampire supports chunky graphics. I'd say this means chunky graphics hardware is constantly gaining in popularity. A lot of 060 demos are very chunky-centric and thus do support graphics cards. It just exchanges a call to a c2p function by one to the cybergraphx-API...

If you want to impress Vampire owners and offer them a game what they just HAVE TO BUY then you need to focus on the power that AMMX/VAMP/SAGA offer. 

This means you will design a game which is many many levels over what classic HW could do.

And this is a sensible decision.

Obviously, everybody wants the highest possible resolution at highest quality at 60 fps.

But, a compromise must be made here, somewhere.

Now, ideally, there would be some kind of LevelOfDetail that would allow people to choose if they want 60 fps or nicer gfx. Which is laboursome, as you create art assets 3 times.

On another hand, Apollo will give users option to choose ridiculously high resolutions. 1600x1200 is a factor of 30x more pixels than 320x200.

It would appear to me, that I should strive to have 60 fps at 320x200 and anything above that is optional ? What do you think of it ?

And honestly, at these kind of resolutions and speeds I cannot see the appeal of 3D. IMO it just looks like rubbish. I don't know why everyone has a facination on whether something can run Doom or not (or similar). I mean back when it came out, I get it, it just blew us all away because we'd not seen it before. But pixelated 3D just looks like rubbish compared to what we have now.

Quality 2D pixel art on the other hand can look stunning at any resolution if done right!

Martin White wrote:

But pixelated 3D just looks like rubbish compared to what we have now.     Quality 2D pixel art on the other hand can look stunning at any resolution if done right!

Yes, that's exactly why I prefer flatshaded look to early '90s texturing that aged incredibly awful.

But Gunnar showed us that they have some functionality for filtered texturing. Of course, we don't yet know how fast it is, but if you designed a 3D scene around its performance characteristics, I'm sure it would look stunning.

At the very least, the 3D engine cutscenes, where it's generally accepted by everybody to have a lower framerate, could look absolutely gorgeous!

Same 3D scene in 1600x200 vs 640x480 looks vastly superior in 640x480 even though the difference in pixels is only ~4%. Anything beyond 640 only marginally improves the final look, if you're staying at 240p.

Now, there is a possibility, that filtered textures might give us the same look at 270p/360p that unfiltered at 480p. I haven't really tested that on Jaguar, so unsure. Did you happen to make these tests ?

Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

And question is how complex models and much details we can draw.

Yeah, well for sure we won't be able to draw two 60,000 polygon 3D models like on X360 that has over 10 GHz Raw power just in its CPU :)

That's why I mentioned FPS genre - you can get a lot of 'cool' factor from simple, 2-triangle wall, as we have the RAM for textures and lightmaps. And, at loading-time, you can precompute a lot of effects into the lightmaps, as from performance standpoint - it costs the same to fetch the texel whether the lightmaps is a single-color rectangle, or it contains multiple per-pixel shader FX.

Of course, designing a Vampire-specific FPS 3D engine is a whole other ball-game :)

This depends mostly on the outer game code feeding it,
and also on cache hitrate.
Under best condition up to 40 MegaTexel/sec

Because at 60 fps that would be 10x more pixels than there are at 320x200 ! Obviously random access vs cache-aligned would make for a huge difference, but still.

BTW, just installed IRC client :)