@BigD

That mod was originally created on my 25MHz Apollo1240 accelerated A1200. The very idea of playing it in fullscreen was preposterous. I suspect I was getting around 10 FPS in 2/3 size 1x1 based on the weapon animations I put together. The chaingun used to loop almost perfectly on that spec, but to make it loop in UAE I have to drop the frame cap to about 10fps.

Also note that fullscreen in the original game was only 288 pixels wide compared to 320 wide in this version. That's 11% more frame per frame, to paraphrase Cave Johnson.

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@Karlos

It's a great collaboration of optimised game engine and rethought out assets! I still prefer Project Osiris but for the Amiga we finally have a worthy sequel to AB3D!

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@BigD

Bear in mind I never finished it. So there's plenty left to do.

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@Karlos

Fair enough but you have already made a sizable improvement!

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@BigD

PiStorm Lite firmware updates have dramatically improved the chip ram write performance. Now TKG runs at the refresh rate:

https://youtu.be/IFP4sgPoLHc

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@Karlos

I assume some kind of chip ram cache system.

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@Karlos

Great news! Now where are the CM4 Adapter boards?

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@NutsAboutAmiga

I'm not sure. Caching chip ram doesn't seem like a winning strategy given the complications around the fact it's read and written by the custom chips. I expect the changes are something more nuanced.

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Progress has resumed after a bit of a break. Pipper has an experimental branch that moves the screen set up from assembler to C. This is a significant step towards having a functional RTG version and adding new features in general.

I identified an issue that meant lots of walls were being rendered using the more expensive Gouraud shading routine when unnecessary (which also degrades the display quality too) and abu_the_monkey fixed an ancient texturing bug that made it difficult to make doors and lifts out of arbitrary wall sections. He's also fixed an issue in the level selection rollout.

I've also picked up a bunch of level editing and retexturing for my mod with the aim of freeing up to 3 complete wall slots and a floor or two for reuse later. Currently working on reimagining level J as some sort of overrun research complex.

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@Karlos

Nice progress

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@Karlos

Great work by everyone.

How much of a performance gain would you guess you could get by switching the wall rendering routines?

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@Amiboy

Well, there is already an option to force all walls to use the simple lighting path which on faster machines is worth maybe 2-3 FPS. So it's reasonable to imagine it's between zero and that, depending on the scene.

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News update.

The engine now supports 8-bit RTG. It's not yet feature complete, but it works. More significantly from a development perspective, th back has been broken for the inclusion of code written in C, which will make it easier to add new features and improve the system friendliness of the application.

In other news, LevelEd303 has had its first update to v304. There are many problems and instabilities in 303 and the original tools are almost unusable so this is a win

I uploaded a couple of videos showing the editing workflow/experience:

https://youtu.be/GxdGbA1_9mo

https://youtu.be/BQez4aWOYAc

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@Karlos

really good work, looks good.

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@NutsAboutAmiga

I built this two level staircase as a tribute to AB3D1 admin block level using the updated LevelEd 304 as part of a secret area

https://youtu.be/GKW8plIdaWo

Credit goes to pipper for adding C support and RTG, and to abu_the_monkey for getting the level editor into a buildable state.

I've not submitted any code changes for a while as I thought I'd take advantage of the current improvements to try and get my mod into a playable state.

Last edited by Karlos on 27-May-2023 at 12:40 PM.
Last edited by Karlos on 27-May-2023 at 12:38 PM.

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@Karlos

Excellent work! I am playing AB3D 2 both on my PPC EUAE on A1222 and A1200 with BlizzardPPC on AmigaOS3 (68040).

Such a fantastic thing to have AB3D 2 updated and playing again.

What kind of speed improvement can we expect from new RTG version? I have BVision and CGX installed.

@dooz

Speed should depend on method used to run the game.

I think most GFX card are connected via the Zorro III slot, on real computers.

BVision is connected directly to accelerator.

EUAE does not emulate bus speed, read and writes goes to system memory, every time you do a write however it does checks what part of memory changed, so it knows what part of the screen is changed, and only the changed region will be copied to GFX memory and displayed.
(So essentially it will write same data twice, the logic here is direct access to VRAM is slow, DMA copies or other transfer methods are often faster.)
(at least that’s how it normally works, its complicated)

if they manage to make it really system friendly, without dependency on Amiga hardware, it can run directly on AmigaOS4.1 without EUAE that be another ball game.

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@dooz

AGA stopped being the bottleneck for 060 when the C2P was replaced with Kalms optimised routines, which take about the same time as just copying the data from fast to chip on 060+. With those, and the latest firmware, the PiStorm32 hits 50fps consistently on AGA.

However, for your configuration, there should be some gain because the BVision has about double the write bandwidth of AGA so transferring a frame should only take about half the time.

We haven't actually optimised the RTG code yet, for example, back on my own BVision/040 combo I found that move16 loops were faster and don't fill the datacache with data we aren't going to use again.

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A problem I think we will need to solve soon is that the game is coupled to the refresh rate today, with animation intervals measures in frames (i.e. actual game frames). It needs to move to a constant time mechanism, a bit like Doom's gametick concept or similar.

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@Karlos

Looks really good.

One question, is it possible to make the game use warp3d

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