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Running Games and Apps.

Games Suited to Be Ported/developed for Vampirepage  1 2 3 

Mateusz S.

Posts 53
08 Oct 2020 03:14


Half-Life source code has leaked.. just saying.. ;P


Amiga Noob

Posts 33
08 Oct 2020 04:03


Reply again from another thread.
 
 
Olaf Schoenweiss wrote:

  But it is still niche and market small compared to mainstream platforms including smartphones. It is a kind of hobby to support it (if ever), not if you need the money for living. Also there are software houses out there concentrating on retro platforms also announcing new games. I am not pessimistic at all, the amiga platform is showing much more activity today than f.e. a year ago.
 

 
  I think the Vampire platform might be actually good at least for indie developers(bedroom coders).
 
  How much money do an average indie game developer make:
  EXTERNAL LINK   
  $25000 dollars! There's too much competition going on in the indie market, especially smartphones. There's thousands of indie games on Steam and if you add other other platforms like itch.io probably a hundred thousand more. Competition on Vampire? Almost non-existent. I think there's no more than 10 Vampire specific games being develop, maybe even less than 5.
 
  Pricing an Amiga game for 30EUR seems to be acceptable(RESHOOT R). If you price it like that on Steam prepare to get bad comments by people who will say the following lines: "Indie game for 30EUR?! That's robbery!". Most indie game has average pricing of $5-10.
 
  I've seen there are 5400+ Vampire Users. Let's say you make a game that looks better or has larger scale in gameplay than RESHOOT R and you price it for 30EUR, and let's say only 1000 Vampire users bought your game. That's 30000EUR! Almost equal to money generated by an indie developer on Steam. I read Vampire users are hungry for a Vampire specific game.
 
  Most indie devs do game development because they mainly love to do it anyway, money is just a bonus. That's why I think most of them have other jobs that generates more money.
 
  It will be good if others know about the Vampire, not just Amiga community. I observed most Amiga/68k programmers which are the target are mostly interested on what they can do with a retro machine or how much they can show their coding prowess.
 
  Exaggerated example:
  Programmer: "Look at how I port/develop Doom on Atari 2600!"
  Modern Gamer: "Wow you are such an amazing coder! I would rather play Doom Eternal on my PS4 though."
 
  These coders maybe don't want to program on a Vampire because it doesn't show there coding skills as much(Easier to code, less coding tricks on a Vampire).

Don't just bring back the past 68k coders, how about also bringing in new blood of 68k programmers.


Amiga Noob

Posts 33
08 Oct 2020 07:11


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

  I think Vampire is very good for doing Jump and Runs games
  or for 2D games like Age of Empire / Alpha Centauri / Star Craft / Dune 2000
 
 

 
  Hmm, I was planning to develop an experimental fighting game(Not a traditional fighting game like Street Fighter,King Of Fighters, Tekken, etc.) for the V4. Some problems on the V4 though for a fighting game is that right now it has fixed refresh rate of 50Hz(Am I correct on this one?). Most Fighting games today, especially the mainstream ones has fixed 60fps and sometimes there is a bad reputation on fighting games that have less than 60fps.
 
  Another problem is the buttons support. If I read correctly, number of buttons supported is 3(Sega genesis). Its limiting designing a fighting game on 3 buttons. Mainstream fighting games today supports an average of 6 buttons. Although I probably could just do with only having keyboard support to have multiple buttons designed in the game.
 


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
08 Oct 2020 08:14


Aldrin O. wrote:

 
Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

    I think Vampire is very good for doing Jump and Runs games
    or for 2D games like Age of Empire / Alpha Centauri / Star Craft / Dune 2000
   
   

   
Hmm, I was planning to develop an experimental fighting game(Not a traditional fighting game like Street Fighter,King Of Fighters, Tekken, etc.) for the V4.

 

Nice!
I think many people like 2D Fighting games.

For example IK+ was very popular on Amiga.
Streetfigther, Samurai Showdown, Mark of Garou are other very popular fighting games.
 
What type of game do you think about?
What screen resolution do you want aim for?
What color format do you aim for the game?
How many animation frames to you aim for?
 
Aldrin O. wrote:

Some problems on the V4 though for a fighting game is that right now it has fixed refresh rate of 50Hz(Am I correct on this one?). Most Fighting games today, especially the mainstream ones has fixed 60fps and sometimes there is a bad reputation on fighting games that have less than 60fps.

PAL is 50 Herz, this means all fighting games ever in Europe runnign on PAL were always 50 Herz.
And people always were happy with this ...

And actually all 2D games (like Streetfighter) have much less animation frames then 50 Herz even.

 
 
Aldrin O. wrote:

Another problem is the buttons support. If I read correctly, number of buttons supported is 3(Sega genesis). 

Atari and Amiga games normally only used 1 button.
Also IK+ the most popular Amiga fighting game supports just one button.
 
Vampire per defaults supports 3 buttons, and can in support more buttons - but today there are no games making any use of more buttons on Amiga. This means so far enabling more buttons was not that important.
 


Olaf Schoenweiss

Posts 690
08 Oct 2020 08:48


What we need is better support, making it easier to develop.

One example is Scorpion Engine

EXTERNAL LINK 
you develop in windows and test in UAE with aros roms

there is redpill f.e.. Amos AGA now (I think to do something there). You have Amiblitz. And of course you can use C or E with plenty of support. It must be as easy as possible to create games and it must be possible to do something without being a amiga expert because that would limit the number of devs. There are some old developers who are still active and might become interested but that limits the number. I do not think that it is possible to do a perfect amiga game that is also running on modern platforms because the concepts are very different so you have to decide for amiga or against. And yes promoting never hurts (I did that when natami was still in development) but the response was of course limited because (if you do it for living) number count (potential sales) and not how sympathic the platform might be. Perhaps some might be motivated for fun (hobby), also there is some potential because there are Retro software houses who might support the platform (I remember one announcing amiga support).


Amiga Noob

Posts 33
08 Oct 2020 09:13


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:
 
  Nice!
  I think many people like 2D Fighting games.
 
  For example IK+ was very popular on Amiga.
  Streetfigther, Samurai Showdown, Mark of Garou are other very popular fighting games.
 
  What type of game do you think about?
  What screen resolution do you want aim for?
  What color format do you aim for the game?
  How many animation frames to you aim for?

I won't reveal much but it will be in a less fantasy setting as the last 3 fighting games you listed. There are many traditional fighting games already ala Street Fighter and I kind of want to differentiate my game instead of competing with those.

Target would probably be 640x360/480x270 to scale well with widescreens. I know V4 fixed resolution is 960x540 so it will also scale well I think.

I'll probably go Truecolor. My plan is a pixel-art game but with a modern look to it(NextGen Amiga) to differentiate it from 16bit era games on Sega Genesis or SNES and especially AGA Amiga games.

I haven't think about how many frames but I hope I won't be limited by capabilities of V4.
 
Gunnar von Boehn wrote:
 
  PAL is 50 Herz, this means all fighting games ever in Europe runnign on PAL were always 50 Herz.
  And people always were happy with this ...
 
  And actually all 2D games (like Streetfighter) have much less animation frames then 50 Herz even.

I think back in the arcade days, it is true that fighting games in Europe runs 50 fps due to PAL. But modern fighting games like Street fighter 5, Tekken 7, etc all have 60 fps. Especially today that competitive games or "e-sports" are globalized, they need to standardized their frame rates for tournaments which is 60 fps.

Since I will not go the traditional fighting game route. It's not that big of a deal for me to go just 50 fps. But if some developer would like to create a traditional fighting game, convincing those competitive players to play their game would be hard since almost all now are used to 60 fps.

Gunnar von Boehn wrote:
 
  Atari and Amiga games normally only used 1 button.
  Also IK+ the most popular Amiga fighting game supports just one button.
 
  Vampire per defaults supports 3 buttons, and can in support more buttons - but today there are no games making any use of more buttons on Amiga. This means so far enabling more buttons was not that important.

It's nice to hear that it's possible to support more buttons. Your right, only add support for more buttons once there's actually a game that needs it. Once I'll be able to show the game, probably next year since I still haven't even ordered a V4 yet, then I'll ask again for more button support.

One of my goal is to create a competitive game for the Vampire Platform. Competitive games or the more popular term "e-sports" is trendy this days so I think it can help get Vampire out in the world.



Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
08 Oct 2020 09:34


Aldrin O. wrote:

I'll probably go Truecolor. My plan is a pixel-art game but with a modern look to it(NextGen Amiga) to differentiate it from 16bit era games on Sega Genesis or SNES and especially AGA Amiga games.

 
yes, Pixel-Art (retro style) always has some special charm in my opinion.
 
 
Aldrin O. wrote:

I haven't think about how many frames but I hope I won't be limited by capabilities of V4.

With frame rate I did mean the frame you paint.
A normal special move animation - which last 1 second.
Would in theory have 50 drawn animation frames for just 1 move.
If you character has 20 moves ... this would mean 1000 animation frames.
 
But in reality no game did this.
The "real" animation rate is normally less than 10 FPS in games.

You can see this clearly in arcade sprites.
If this move takes 0.5 second in the game in "real" 50 FPS -
this would be 25 animations - but 2D Arcade games always use much less

 


Amiga Noob

Posts 33
08 Oct 2020 10:08


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

  With frame rate I did mean the frame you paint.
  A normal special move animation - which last 1 second.
  Would in theory have 50 drawn animation frames for just 1 move.
  If you character has 20 moves ... this would mean 1000 animation frames.
 
  But in reality no game did this.
  The "real" animation rate is normally less than 10 FPS in games.

No move will be 1 second long with 50 different drawn animation.  Planned number of attacks would be 12 for all characters and then adding different number of unique attacks/moves for each character. I kind of want all attacks to be reactable, so let's say an attack like a jab will be 0.5s long. As a pixel art game, I'll probably not do full animation and only limited in-between frames(?) I have to experiment to know what kind of feel of the animation that I like once I begin developing.



Amiga Noob

Posts 33
08 Oct 2020 11:51


Olaf Schoenweiss wrote:

    What we need is better support, making it easier to develop.
   
    One example is Scorpion Engine
   
    EXTERNAL LINK     
    you develop in windows and test in UAE with aros roms
   
    there is redpill f.e.. Amos AGA now (I think to do something there). You have Amiblitz. And of course you can use C or E with plenty of support. It must be as easy as possible to create games and it must be possible to do something without being a amiga expert because that would limit the number of devs. There are some old developers who are still active and might become interested but that limits the number. I do not think that it is possible to do a perfect amiga game that is also running on modern platforms because the concepts are very different so you have to decide for amiga or against. And yes promoting never hurts (I did that when natami was still in development) but the response was of course limited because (if you do it for living) number count (potential sales) and not how sympathic the platform might be. Perhaps some might be motivated for fun (hobby), also there is some potential because there are Retro software houses who might support the platform (I remember one announcing amiga support).
   

   
    Those tools are good... for Amiga retro people and not for Vampire specifically though. Does those tools have features that can use the special hardware of Vampire?
   
    My vision for Vampire, although may sound unrealistic to Amiga users is, being competitive with modern PC's. There are some people who think Windows is bloated, Linux is bloated, x86 is bloated. There seems to be praise on Apple Silicon/ARM/Risc-V. Apple looks like unfriendly to low-level programmers or even hardware people though. Same as manufacturers surrounding ARM. Risc-V, most of the time, associates itself with a complex OS(Linux). The common users may not care but I hear/read a lot of statements of programmers on how they do not like the current state of computers. I think Vampire can be the platform for them. I only have recently known about Amiga and Vampire so I may not share the same vision as the Amiga community.
   
    The only thing I can see at the moment on their competitive edge on PC/Mac/Smartphone is simplicity(ISA, Chipset, and OS). Apollo Team has the opportunity to not do the mistakes made by PC world, it's probably hard for PC's to go back to simple days.
   
    Well, at least that's what I thought the Apollo Team is saying the way it was advertise to me. I thought Apollo Teams major goal is to make Amiga(Vampire) competitive against PC.
   
    At the moment, Vampire just sounds like "Vampire is faster than other Amigas". It would be better if Vampire sounds like "Only Vampire makes it possible". Maybe not through power like in the old days, but in a different direction(Simplicity).


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
08 Oct 2020 12:44


Aldrin O. wrote:

  My vision for Vampire, although may sound unrealistic to Amiga users is, being competitive with modern PC's.
 

 
The 68000 CPUs are much nicer to code in ASM than all the other CPUs.
They are nicer to code than X86, PowerPC, ARM .. all...
But today many people not know what ASM is.

Yes the 68080 is very powerful.
The 68080 can compete and can beat PowerPC, Intel and ARM cores - when using the same technology.
 
This means when you put an ARM core in the same "chip" and compare it with the 68080 in the same chip - then the 68080 will mop the floor with the ARM. It will beat it in many ways.
 
But PC and Vampire are not using the same chips technologies.
Because of the difference in the manufacturing process a PC is a lot faster then the Vampire.
 
As long the process technology is not on the same level there is zero chance for competing with a PC performance.



Olaf Schoenweiss

Posts 690
08 Oct 2020 13:04


I do not see it that negative.
 
  These tools support AGA. AGA on A1200 had limits because of the resources, bus speed and limited RAM. On V4 these limits are heavily lifted, you can do much more than you could in the past. Depending on the language even RTG is additionally supported.
 
  Of course currently SAGA specific features are not supported in any language/compiler. But even without that much better games are possible now.


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
08 Oct 2020 13:15


Aldrin O. wrote:

x86 is bloated. There seems to be praise on Apple Silicon/ARM/Risc-V.

 
You need to be very careful what you read online.
A lot of such "praise" is in reality fake and marketing nonsense.
Of course Apple/Arm/others want to sell you their stuff.
So they work a lot on creating for you "marketing fairy tales".




Amiga Noob

Posts 33
08 Oct 2020 14:26


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:
 
  The 68000 CPUs are much nicer to code in ASM than all the other CPUs.
  They are nicer to code than X86, PowerPC, ARM .. all...
  But today many people not know what ASM is.
 
 
 
  Yes the 68080 is very powerful.
  The 68080 can compete and can beat PowerPC, Intel and ARM cores - when using the same technology.
 
  This means when you put an ARM core in the same "chip" and compare it with the 68080 in the same chip - then the 68080 will mop the floor with the ARM. It will beat it in many ways.
 
  But PC and Vampire are not using the same chips technologies.
  Because of the difference in the manufacturing process a PC is a lot faster then the Vampire.
 
  As long the process technology is not on the same level there is zero chance for competing with a PC performance.
 

Well I heard you said in the AmigaBill show if the Vampire is implemented on a ASIC it will be like Intel Atom speed. Does an Intel Atom outperform Arm Cortex A78? I don't know. But doesn't matter as long as Apollo Team maintains/improves simpilicity while improving its power then it will one day compete with PC. Beat PC in performance and simplicity? That's a Win-win! Beat PC in performance but complicate things for low-level programmers? It just becomes another PC world all over again. Yeah many people definitely don't bother with ASM. There are still communities though(I know at least one), millennial's for that matter, that are interested in low-level.

Olaf Schoenweiss wrote:

I do not see it that negative.
 
  These tools support AGA. AGA on A1200 had limits because of the resources, bus speed and limited RAM. On V4 these limits are heavily lifted, you can do much more than you could in the past. Depending on the language even RTG is additionally supported.
 
  Of course currently SAGA specific features are not supported in any language/compiler. But even without that much better games are possible now.

I guess I was negative about those AGA tools, but on second thought since SAGA is close to AGA, then those tools could still utilize some of SAGA even if not all of it.

Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

  You need to be very careful what you read online.
  A lot of such "praise" is in reality fake and marketing nonsense.
  Of course Apple/Arm/others want to sell you their stuff.
  So they work a lot on creating for you "marketing fairy tales".

Of course, I better experience it first before I believe it. I'm not that confident of a programmer yet to judge what's good or bad. And also, don't get me wrong, I'm very interested on V4, but since I haven't used one yet, I also don't have a say if it is actually simpler.



Amiga Noob

Posts 33
08 Oct 2020 15:40


So I got this from another thread

Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

  Lets look at the memory. I think for making games having enough Sprite memory is very important.
 
  Lets say you want to make a simple Streetfighter game
  With a player being 64x64 pixel big.
  With 16 color this game sprite needs 2KB space per frame.
 

I don't know how 2KB was calculated but suppose my game would be the same, let's say character has 100 moves and 50 drawn animation each, that would be 5000 animation frames. And 5000*2 would be 10000KB or 10MB for 1 character, If there are 2 characters it would be 20MB. V4 has 512MB RAM. LOL I'm guessing I do not need to worry about memory I think? Am I right about my calculations?


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
08 Oct 2020 15:54


Aldrin O. wrote:

I don't know how 2KB was calculated but suppose my game would be the same,

The KB does depends on size and the number colors.
Streetfighter had sprites of 100 pixel height, and 40 to 100 pixel  width in average.

If the sprite uses 16 colors then this would be 100*60/2  = 3 KB per frame.

If you use 24bit truecolor then the math is 100*60*3 = 18 KB per frame.


Amiga Noob

Posts 33
08 Oct 2020 16:16


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

   
Aldrin O. wrote:

      I don't know how 2KB was calculated but suppose my game would be the same,
     

      The KB does depends on size and the number colors.
      Streetfighter had sprites of 100 pixel height, and 40 to 100 pixel  width in average.
     
      If the sprite uses 16 colors then this would be 100*60/2  = 3 KB per frame.
     
      If you use 24bit truecolor then the math is 100*60*3 = 18 KB per frame.
   

   
  That would be 176MB total then for 24bit truecolor, still enough I guess even including stage. 100 moves per character, and 50 animation frames each move is an overkill for my game anyway.
 
  Is it possible for sprites to be 16 color and stage to be 24bit truecolor?


Smartroad 78

Posts 116
08 Oct 2020 20:59


I'd love to see GemRB so I cant play my favorite game on my favorite computer hehe


Tim Trepanier

Posts 132
08 Oct 2020 23:31


How about getting games like 194x, that's part of Coffin, completed? Someone must have that code base. Do you also have more sound and graphics assets.


Stefano Briccolani

Posts 586
09 Oct 2020 06:12


smartroad 78 wrote:

I'd love to see GemRB so I cant play my favorite game on my favorite computer hehe

Yes, GemRB would be killer! Baldur's Gate on Amiga..



Saladriel Amrael

Posts 166
09 Oct 2020 11:11


I've recently found this new AGA shoot'em up being developed:

 
  EXTERNAL LINK 

 
  Maybe we can contact the developer and ask him if he is interested in developing an enhanced version / sequel for V4, he seems very talented

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