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Documentation about the Vampire hardware

Iridium Port?page  1 2 

James Roberts

Posts 7
16 Feb 2019 16:27


Hi I am the coder behind the development of Iridium. We have made our initial Kickstarter goal and are initially releasing on Steam this October. At a later date we are planning on porting Iridium to the Nintendo Switch (faster if we make our stretch goal) as well as other platforms.
 
  It would be awesome to be able to bring Iridium to the Amiga as that is where I first started to program games. Classic hardware is to slow, I am however very interested in finding out of it would be possible on the new Vampire V4. To this end I really need some information concerning OpenGL or other 3d APIs as well as if there are any good C/C++ compilers available.
 
  Here is a link to the latest WIP video showing one of the larger (not largest) NME ships.
 
  EXTERNAL LINK   
 
  Nebula-Design members:
  James Roberts - code and design
  Kevin Saunders - graphics
  Akira - Music


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
16 Feb 2019 16:31


C-compiler = GCC
 
Did you see this game on Vampire?
194x Deluxe?
EXTERNAL LINK 
It a 2D game like yours, using lots truecolor objects with alphablending.

I would avoid an extra level of abstraction like OpenGL but go directly for AMMX accelerated Blitting of Alpha Bobs.
 


Aleghid V4/1200

Posts 26
16 Feb 2019 17:14


it would be great if it could work on both v2 and v4. it would be a must-have for any vampire system!!!


Stefano Briccolani

Posts 586
16 Feb 2019 17:16


Aim for vampire v2 specs, there is a fairly good user base by now. The iridium port would be a killer-app for vampire and at the same time will give the game a true retro credibility


Aleghid V4/1200

Posts 26
16 Feb 2019 17:20


Stefano! L'ho detto prima io! :P


James Roberts

Posts 7
16 Feb 2019 17:22


194x looks great however I didn't see any colour addition or real-time scaling / rotating which Iridium uses a lot.

To convert Iridium to plain 2d would loose a huge amount of the game style and make the huge enemy ships impractical :(


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
16 Feb 2019 17:47


James Roberts wrote:

194x looks great however I didn't see any colour addition

The game uses color blending all the time.

The animated ocean texture is blended over the underground.
The bullets are all semi transparent with glow.
The shadows are semi transparent as well.

Its maybe not so visible on the Youtube video.

If you expect to run OpenGL games on AMIGA, this is not realistic.




James Roberts

Posts 7
16 Feb 2019 18:06


Regardless of which blending options are supported are there any functions for scaling and rotating large bitmaps (quarter screen size and up)?


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
16 Feb 2019 18:33


James Roberts wrote:

Regardless of which blending options are supported are there any functions for scaling and rotating large bitmaps (quarter screen size and up)?

Do you mean like this?
EXTERNAL LINK 

Cheers
Gunnar


James Roberts

Posts 7
16 Feb 2019 18:54


Yes that's what I am after:)

Do you have any idea of the fill rate capabilities e.g. how many full screens could be drawn simultaneously?

The background in Iridium could lose the scaling effects and just be blitted however the foreground large ships can not.


Vojin Vidanovic
(Needs Verification)
Posts 1916/ 1
16 Feb 2019 20:49


James Roberts wrote:

  To this end I really need some information concerning OpenGL or other 3d APIs as well as if there are any good C/C++ compilers available.

Nice game, looking forward to classic shooter in modern specs.
Sadly, on AmigaOS 3.x there is just miniGL, Glide like "shortened" OpenGL and StormMESA, quite old OpenGL implementation.

Until Gunnar reveals Vamp v4+ 3D implementation, even that does not work. So only option is to carefuly tune in 3D effects to 080 CPU, faster Blitter and MMX that it supports. This might be quite of work, but maybe Flype or some team member could aid the coding? Surely Vamp users would support the crowfunding then.


James Roberts

Posts 7
17 Feb 2019 00:04


Thanks for the info, that's very interesting. Would be great to bring it to the Amiga :)


Thellier Alain

Posts 141
18 Feb 2019 12:39


Software color blending & rotation are possible with enough CPU power
See that
EXTERNAL LINK  Tested in WinUAE anyway


Olaf Schoenweiss

Posts 690
18 Feb 2019 17:36


composite.library?


Thellier Alain

Posts 141
19 Feb 2019 09:38


composite.library is something I am working on (not finished)

It is almost the same a my PatchCompositeTags for OS4 that was doing (with software rendering) the OS4 Composition effects.
PatchCompositeTags is only to allow WinUAE users to run OS games that use Composition
See at 1'30 MACE running using PatchCompositeTagsin WinUAE:
EXTERNAL LINK 

So composite.library is the same but rebuild as .library for OS4 and OS3
For OS4 can be used as .library or to patch the Composition
For OS3 can be used as .library only so for recompiling programs that use OS4's Composition to OS3

As it use a lots the cpu it is only usable inside WinUAE
But I hope that (one day)once optimized with AMMX it may be usable on Vampire

Anyway what I wanted to say is : if you got true color modes and enough cpu power then games like Iridium with rotation/resizing/transparency become feasible even without OpenGL
 




James Roberts

Posts 7
19 Feb 2019 10:50


That looks like it could be a good option. I will have to look into this further :) If it ends up being CPU bound then the resolution may need reducing. Invent our artist I am sure however can make all the graphics look great regaredless :)

For screen and bitmaps are the following modes supported?

16bit - RGBA 4444
16bit - RGBA 5551

What other ones are available now or planned for the future? Sorry if this info is already available but my quick search failed me.


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
19 Feb 2019 12:43


James Roberts wrote:

For screen and bitmaps are the following modes supported?
 
  16bit - RGBA 4444
  16bit - RGBA 5551

SAGA supported formats:

Amiga Planar mode 1-8 Planes
8bit chunky
15bit
15bit + Alpha
16bit
24bit
32bit ARGB
YUV  (mpeg video)

For texture are supported all the above,
plus S3 DTX compressed truecolor textures.


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
19 Feb 2019 12:50


APOLLO has excellent AMMX acceleration for Sprite/Bob operations.

For example:
You can have Sprites in 15bit+Alpha format in memory.

With 1 single cycle instruction APOLLO can read 64bit(4 pixel)
and with 1 single cycle instruction it can store of those 4 pixels, the non transparent.
This means with 2 cycle the CPU can copy and mask 4 complete hicolor pixel.

APOLLO 68080 does for free handle misaligned memory reads.
This makes copy of Sprite data very simple to code and fast.



Richard Gatineau

Posts 60
24 Feb 2019 07:09


@James Roberts: Thanks again for Iridium... ^^
Your new game looks great. It will be really amazing to do that port! :)

@Gunnar: A 16bit 4444 mode should be really great for games.


James Roberts

Posts 7
28 Feb 2019 13:57


Thanks for the info. I will look into this more once I've finished the initial release. It would be great to make a Vampire version, I am tempted to port my 'Lunar Jetman Remake' first thou. I better start saving :)

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