There is now a kickstarter project for BASIS:
BASIS Kickstarter

Two questions that might come to you are:

What is BASIS and What does it have to do with Amiga?


Well, if you know Spriter, BASIS is quite similar, except, amongst other things, it has one earth shattering advantage when compared to Spriter, it has Hollywood plugin to make it work on Amigas.


For those who dont know what the less known Spriter is, the idea with BASIS is following.

When you normally make a video game character, you have to make may different drawings for each of its positions and movements.

BASIS however takes better approach to this. Instead of having multiplke drawings from each possible sitaution, you just create hands, legs, head etc. and put them together to make a drawing.

Then you make several different postitions using these pieces, like sitting, standing and punching.

Then on program you just tell the program that your character is now moving from that sitting or punching position to standing position, and then Hollywood BASIS plugin will take care of creating all those necessary in between frames on the fly.

There is of course much more to BASIS, but this was just simple explanation about the core of BASIS.


BASIS and Amiga.

Scott Williams, who is behind BASIS, has no background on Amiga. However, as i happened to show my interest to his program at very early stage already, he decided to make Hollywood plugin for his BASIS program.

Now notice. BASIS program itself, the program which you use to create those characters works only on Windows currently.

However, when those characters have been made, they can be used in Hollywood with BASIS plugin.

Current state of the plugins is that other Amiga flavor plugins are working as far as I know, except Amiga OS 4 version is not working yet, but he told me that he is planning to get his hands on that version soon.


He have currently been developing BASIS as a side project, and even if his kickstarter fails, he plans to continue developing it, just bit slow. What he is hoping to accomplish with kickstarter is that he could concentrate on BASIS for full time for some time at least. Basically he thinks it will take years to do all he plans to BASIS if he does it as a side project. If he gets some funding through kickstarter, then he will be able to make much faster progress.

Notice also that he is planning to release BASIS for free (as he already have actually, since you can already download the first public release)

Lets show our support to him and trust that will encourage him to give more support to Amiga as he already has done through Hollywood Plugin, and perhaps even make the BASIS program available as Amiga version.


If you want to see BASIS in action, you can download a small game named "Clone Pacman Faces the Dragon" that i made in about three hours (that includes creating the pacman character and figuring out how that BASIS plugin works), which really shows how fast you can make pretty looking stuff with Hollywood and BASIS plugin together:


AOS3
AOS4
Linux
MorphOS
Windows

Amiga OS 4 version shouldnt work, but i put it here in case it does, since it is now compiled with Hollywood version 5.3


Edit: Do spread the word around about this project

Last edited by Bugala on 10-Jul-2013 at 08:59 PM.

@Bugala

Ummmm... What's wrong with using the Spriter documentation found on the BrashMonkeyGames.com website to create a Hollywood plugin?

@Bugala

Ok. Already tried to run several versions. Neither of it worked. What should I see? What is the requirements of this?

@Bugala

Sounds like an interesting project. The dragon in your little demo program looks and moves rally nice, albeit a bit tiled. But it seems to be quite cpu demanding - 90 - 100% load on G4/1500.

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@Samurai_Crow

Quote:

What's wrong with using the Spriter documentation found on the BrashMonkeyGames.com website to create a Hollywood plugin?

I think the only problem is that nobody made it yet.

@Zylesea

100% cpu usage doesn't mean demanding, could just mean bad programming or not using correct use if frame rate limiters etc

Last edited by TheAMIgaOne on 11-Jul-2013 at 01:38 PM.

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@Lazi

Quote:

@Samurai_Crow Quote: What's wrong with using the Spriter documentation found on the BrashMonkeyGames.com website to create a Hollywood plugin? I think the only problem is that nobody made it yet.

That, plus when spriter (at least i think it was spriter?) was having kickstarter long ago and I asked here in Amiga Forums would it be possible to use with Hollywood or make it work with Amiga or something else similar, i think i got answers in way of "now way!, too much trouble".

so dont really know, but why bother after Spriter when we already have Basis and especially when plugins are made by the actual creator of Basis, not by some Amiga fellow.

When did cretors of Spriter do anything similar to our choice of platform?

I at least decided Basis desreves some bucks from me as a thank you, especially since ever since i saw spriter i was thinking i would really like to have something like that in Hollywood to accommodate the lack of 3D.

For I am hoping to make Point´n´click game, perhaps even several, some day with Hollywood and was thinking it would be very good if i could use 3D for character movements, but Spriter/Basis works as fine alternative for having 3D modelled character in 2D pictures, like many point´n´clicks nowadays use.

@Lazi

Does it give you some error message when you try to run it?

The requirements im not sure what they are, but i think program itself doesnt take much memory etc. but Hollywood probably does.

It works in Full HD screen, but it autoscales to any screensize you have open when you start it as it runs on fullscreen borderless window.

In previous version I put here there was a problem with autoscaling which was a bug in Hollywood 5.2, but except for Linux exe, I have compiled all the others now with Hollywood 5.3, so that problem shouldnt be there anymore.


What you should see is first one screen of text where story and instructions are told. After tha you should see pacman at middle bottom side of screen moving its mouth open and shut (this was my own test on making basis character, and afterwards i figured i could have done the opening shutting thing better making it stay ball shaped all the time), and then from left bottom screen there should be coming a walking dragon that speeds up all the time little by little and starts running after couple of secs.

Plus you should see blue rectangles coming from right that pacman needs to jump over.

@Bugala

As the MOS version is working, I was able to test it. Very impressive work.
Now just the OS4 version needs some fix because that one crashing badly.

@Zylesea

As TheAMIgaOne said, i believe the reason for 90-100 percent CPU usage is that it tries to run as fast as it can.

For example on my wifes Win7 machine it was updating something between 500 - 1000 times per second.

I know this because I had a bug in my code where i had forgot to change one number and with machines running it between 500 - 1000 times per second, it got extra hard since speed was much faster than with rest since it executed speed increase more times than it was supposed to.

@Lazi

Although i made that pacman myself, that Dragon was one of the included example projects in Basis.

By the way, thanks for confirming that AOS4 version is not working, since it wasnt a sure thing wether problem was in Hollywood or plugin, but Scott was quite sure it was in his plugin.

He said to me he is planning to get his hands on that AOS4 plugin soon after he gets couple of other things done first.

@Bugala

Rally nice application, looks nice and it reminds me about spriter.

hope you get bug fixed.

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@Bugala

Quote:

Bugala wrote: When did cretors of Spriter do anything similar to our choice of platform?

Michael Parent was a member of the ill-fated NatAmi team. He wanted me to write an exporter to AmigaOS 1.3 and up. Unfortunately, the alignment of the AnimOb, AnimComp, and similar structures in Graphics.library makes it extremely inefficient on a 68020-68060. Also, the blitter masks get reread for each bitplane on the blitter on the Classics when using BOBs.

If they bothered to fix the alignment bugs on PPC, it's still rather awkward to use those routines and last I heard, the most efficient way to implement those routines on Amiga is from scratch. Especially since I heard that the Animate function in Graphics.library is under 256 bytes on 68k and uses a bunch of callback hooks.

Also, Mike Parent wrote a demo on his Amiga 500 that implemented some fake transparency by precalculating a transparency mask into the palette. He is one of us even though he used AmosPro instead of Hollywood for his Amiga stuff.

@Samurai_Crow

Oh, seems i was wrong. My apologies for Spriter guys in case they see this.

Didnt know Spriter guy/s had any Amiga background. Not that i had checked either, I just made bad assumption.

Last edited by Bugala on 12-Jul-2013 at 09:20 AM.
Last edited by Bugala on 12-Jul-2013 at 09:19 AM.

@Bugala

the project sounds very interesting. Do I understand it right that you can use it with Hollywood and that it will be free and developed anyway, only faster with the Kickstart money?

I try to get more game-development on Amiga (in my case AROS and 68k) and Hollywood will propably my favorite tool there. This program would perfectly fit in.

@Bugala

I will test it and would put it in my "dev page"

http://www.aros-platform.de/html/devtools.html

(It still misses PortablE, Hollywood, Antyriad Gx)

@OlafS25

Quote:

Do I understand it right that you can use it with Hollywood and that it will be free and developed anyway, only faster with the Kickstart money?

Yes, thats how i understood it, that he is anyway going to be developing it forward, he is just afraid that as a side project each step might take even a year to accomplish, hence kickstarter money might change each year into one month or something, dont know really how much the speed up is, but i understood it would be very big boost.

And yes, as he already did release it for free, and hes plan is that it will be free in future too. All he is looking from kickstarter is to make it faster.


Working with hollywood:

It works following way.

BASIS, the program to make those characters, works currently with PC only. He doesnt have a plan for Amiga version about that currently, but perhaps if main interest shwn to his program are from Amiga users, he might make one for Amiga too.

But BASIS characters can be used in Hollywood directly with plugin support.


You could think this with following way. Lets say that deluxe paint would be available to PC only.

So in this imaginative example you could only use PC to create Dpaint pictures, but then there would be plugin in Hollywood to show those pictures in Amiga too.


This is the idea with BASIS too. Program to create characters is only available in PC, but characters created in it, are available to use with Hollywood.

Just like in that simple game example I made.


Its basically similar situation as with TILED map editor: http://www.mapeditor.org/

You can only make maps using Windows, but you can use those maps in Amiga programs except BASIS characters are more complicated system to transfer into new systems and BASIS now has direct HOllywood support.

Last edited by Bugala on 12-Jul-2013 at 01:49 PM.

@Bugala

http://www.mapeditor.org/

the maps can already be used? Is there any documentation/examples already?

It sounds all very interesting because I had idea how to improve game-development for Amiga (and in my case AROS). The idea I call the "two-ways" of game development. One way is to get f.e. 3D engines supporting Amiga. The example where this will be the case is Antyriad gx. So you can develop a 2D/3D game in it and compile it for AROS X86/X64/PPC/68k. It would be good to get more of those tools (even if they f.e. still run on Windows or Linux). The other way is to improve game development on Amiga but not by porting tools but by integrating/supporting them. On amiga-side you need a framework (tools/plugins/routines) that support the integration in the game. Hollywood is my personal favorite for 2D games there (because it supports different platforms including Android). So basically level-design, graphics, music and so on is done on Windows or Linux, the coding of the game on amiga. AROS is here my favorite because the API is the same (or at least very similar) on all platforms what avoids lots of testing.

@OlafS25

Not actually a tutorial, but gives you good idea about tiled editor:
http://forums.hollywood-mal.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=723

@Interested

Mainly writing this message to tell that there are only 32 hours left before Basis Kickstarter closes.

Currently it is only barely 10 percent funded from the minimum, so likely it is not going to happen.

however, Showing our support even with 1 Dollar donations that wont even happen might anyway greatly encourage developers and if they come from Amigans, will probably make them pay more attention towards Amiga.

Now is your chance to most likely for free to get some developer to pay more attention to Amiga by making donation that likely wont happen.



I already posted about this to Hollywood Forums, but putting it in here too.

There is now Hollywood basis plugin documentation included on basis in HTML format in "Demos":
http://achild.wikidot.com/basis


It is not complete yet, but it has almost all of the stuff there, so it is very helpful.

Also stuff have been updated to 0.92 bringing some more (useful) options to Hollywood plugin too.

Last edited by Bugala on 07-Aug-2013 at 07:17 PM.