Please let me give you a rough overviw about the spec of our games.


Platforms:

The games that we will construct with ARCADE Kit will
run on basicly all known Operating systems.
Windows, Linux, MorphOS, MacOS, AmigaOS, BeOS, RiscOS, QNX, and even on consoles like GP2x and Playstation II.

Game type:

All games created with the Kit now will be 2D games Arcade games.


Supported Resolutions:

Basicly any resolution would be possible
Ranging from lowres 320x240 to 640x480 or higher as 800x600.
I highly recommend to use 640x480 for your games.
640x480 will look much better than 320 and will be faster than all the higher resolutions.


Effects:
Currently the game supports simple special effects as
- areas of light around certain sprites
- shadows
- half transparent sprites (usefull for smoke or fog)

If you need more effects tell me and I'll provide them.


I'm looking forward to answer you questions

Is it possible to let the kit automatically detect if hardware accelartion is available and use it?

this way we can implement much more special effects (for example: alpha channels for all sprites, which looks more smoother), but it probably won't run smooth on non-hardware accelerated graphic cards!?

_________________
Jochen Heizmann
Intermediaware Homepage
Absolute Blue - Horizontal Shoot'em'Up Game

I agree to what joe said. That feature would be handy.

My shooter would really make a good use of alpha channeled bitmaps just for the record. Without them I think some of my ideas would look a bit dull...

_________________
Go out and smell the roses. Don't spend a day rendering them.

And here we go.

What I would like to be implemented into the engine/editor (on the FX side) would firstly be motion blur effects. Then there should be an option if a bitmap should have a filter(overlay, multiply and such)

Those would be the first things I would like to have

And there will be more...

_________________
Go out and smell the roses. Don't spend a day rendering them.

Hi Joe , Yes, in theory we can do this with SDL.

But this would be quite an programming overhead as
we will need to write the games based on OpenGL
with an additional softrenderer as fallback.
The situation on AmigaOS/MorphOS is a bit unpractical for building games requiring OpenGL. AmigaOS and MorphOS support a wide range of very old GFX-card. Many AmigaOS 68K users have cards with 2MB video memory. On MorphOS you find people using a broad range of video cards ranging from 4 MB to 128 MB.

If we want that our games run on all MorphOS computers, then we need to make the games run smooth on those 4MB cards too. Using OpenGL and even 2D HW acceleration is pointless on these cards as they lack a reasonable amount of memory to store any images.

The KIT currently chooses the most compatible approach.
The games are fully rendered in Fastmem and the screen is simply copied to the GFX card for display. This puts no requirements on the GFX card at all. A 1 MB card is fine for lowres and 640x480 games.

This approach still allows us to create fast games too.
If we reasonable optimize our blitting routines then the games will actually be very fast this way. For example the lowres version of 194x runs smooth on a 25MHz Amiga - even with enabled light casting and dynamic shadows, which are similar to transparent sprites in overhead.

My proposal is to stay in softrender for best compatibility.
But to put some work in optimizing our routines for best speed.

This will give us the advantage that our games will run on other platforms very HW-acceleration is not available e.g like the Linux GP2X console.


A mathematicel example to show the bandwidth needs:
If we create our games in softrender mode (fastmem)
then our game speed will be bound by our memory bandwidth.

A 640x480 screen in 15bit is 600 KB in size.
On the Pegasos we have a memory bandwith of 300 MB using sequential pixel access and up to 700 MB when copying bigger blocks using Altivec or Cache prefetching tricks.

If our game runs in 50 Hz then our available bandwidth per
frame is between 6 to 14 MB.
For a simple blitting to create the screen and then to blit it to the GFX card we need 2.4 MB bandwidth. (4 x 0.6)
So we still have a 3.5-10 MB bandwidth reserve for the sprites and objects. This should be enough even for demanding effects.

I have been told that while the Efika CPU is lower clocked the memory bandwidth is better than the Pegasos.

I'm looking forward to see your ideas for effects challenging this softrendering.


Cheers
Gunnar

Hi,
I'm not in your project, but why not using an OpenGL compatible library anyway ?
There are soft versions of it available on Amiga (TinyGL for ex.).
With that you could both make 2D & 3D games and use 3Dhw acceleration when available.

Anyway, that's a good project.
I wish you good success

Hey guys, I'm sure a lot of you know me fron the forums ans the scene. I am on the project helping with art. Things like stills, title screens, and some objects, characters ect. i'll get more into it as time moves one. For now i am on vacation and will be going on a work related trip for most of June. I have a Powerbook to work on the road so I'll be looking in here and on the mailing lists. If you need anything let me know.

Hi Geoffrey,

You are right that there are 3D Libs for Amiga.
And using them to create real 3D games makes good sense, while using them for transparency effects in a 2D game is not so good as their softrenderer is much slower than using optimized 2D blit routines with transparency support in the first place.

The idea of the Kit is to be a great tool for greating classic 2D Shoot-Em-Ups. Its very important for me that the Kit is most easy to use.

If we broaden the scope of the Kit to support everything then the Kit will just get much more complicated to use.

People that want to do everything should use a programming language to do that.
The Kit is aimed for people which have no programming skills and might lack the background to use complex 3D things.
Image the Kit as simple to use as SEUCK was on C64.

Cheers
Gunnar

OK, if you don't need 3D I understand that you don't really need OpenGL

A long time ago I used a software called "AMOS".
That was quite nice for making game with a limited knowledge. It was using BASIC.

It was really good for beginers !
Do you know it?

yes, i used amos pro a year or two in the 90s. you should have a look at blitzmax (www.blitzmax.com). very easy but also very powerful and fast language for creating games. it supports windows, linux and mac os x!

_________________
Jochen Heizmann
Intermediaware Homepage
Absolute Blue - Horizontal Shoot'em'Up Game

Yes, AMOS and Blitzbasic are very good tools for people having some programming knowledge.
And if you can write C then writing a game in C and SDL is actually quite easy too.

The difference to programming tools kits is that our Kit targets people with zero programming know-how.

Cheers

hi gunnar can you tell me about the state of SDL on PPC ie. comparative speed to x86 versions.