@nubechecorre

Quote:

nubechecorre wrote: @saimo here there is a longplay that you can watch in hd hope it helps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6K1rLGmxGFg

Thanks, but I can't afford to see it all. Anyway, from what I've seen, there are no sprite-based clouds.

Last edited by saimo on 21-Jul-2016 at 09:50 PM.

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@saimo

I took that info straight from the horses mouth.
Was an interview with the developers where they mention it.

@fishy_fis

Quote:

fishy_fis wrote: @saimo I took that info straight from the horses mouth. Was an interview with the developers where they mention it.

I am at 30 minutes of the longplay now, and there's no trace of such effect. Maybe they used or intended to use it, but eventually changed their mind. And for better: seeing the video, I have noticed that they actually also the 8th bitplane for fog, rain, snow and smoke! Really remarkable, given the DMA time that that requires, the amount of objects moved, and the various special effects scattered here and there. A jewel of programming.

EDIT: seen the whole video now (crazy of me to "waste" so much time) - the 7th and 8th bitplanes are also use for slime-like bullets, glass see-through effects with bugs and train cars, lasers, and gas/electricity-like discharges. I have the impression that the emulator used for the video failed to render the lasers properly.

Last edited by saimo on 22-Jul-2016 at 07:16 PM.
Last edited by saimo on 22-Jul-2016 at 07:13 PM.

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RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC

@saimo

Quote:

saimo wrote: @g01df1sh Quote: g01df1sh wrote: @saimo how does that compare to T-Zero ? T-Zer0 is LOWRES 320x264x7 (i.e. 128 colors). Please note that: * also Banshee uses 7 bitplanes, although it uses the 7th for special effects (fog, rain, lighting) only; * more colors doesn't mean better graphics.

Sounds something like a special 7Bit Half Brite that adds effects instead of just halving the brightness of the colors. Neat.

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@ErikBauer

Quote:

ErikBauer wrote: @saimo Sounds something like a special 7Bit Half Brite that adds effects instead of just halving the brightness of the colors. Neat.

Yes, the concept is the same. But the programmers didn't invent anything there: bitplanes are naturally suitable for this sort of thing, and who knows how many times the trick had been used before. The remarkable thing is that they used 8 bitplanes (not just 7: see my previous post) in a very busy context: blitting lots of objects on 6 non-interleaved bitplanes, full screen data fetch, sprite data fetch, rendering of background, special effects, collision detection, game logic, etc. The AGA architecture has little memory bandwidth (even in burst mode) and the CPU suffers a lot from that, so those 2 additional bitplanes come at a sizeable cost. Still, AFAIR, Banshee was made to run at 50 Hz also on a vanilla A1200.
And, of course, it's also cool that they used the transparencies in different ways, by redefining the palette dinamically.

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RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC