@BigD

You don't need it. Have you tried redownloading?

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@Karlos

No, I've made my own lha.

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@Karlos

Looking good in 2-player. A slight bit of instability on the slower machine 060 RTG but got Docking Rig working now under RTG on both!

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@BigD

Are you playing PiStorm v 060?

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Taking a pause from the mod and adding features to come back to an issue that might yield some pretty big speedups, especially on slower kit.

The game engine has a big problem with PVS culling. I'd noticed it before but I was not really aware just how pervasive that problem is.

https://youtu.be/HEYbqV1iSXM?si=QJHA4a4SR14Qf4gy

In the above video you first notice the strange frame dip on rotating. When turning off the wall rendering it becomes obvious why. At a certain rotation, a large swathe of the level and the objects within it suddenly become visible. These are being drawn, then covered up by the wall, which is why the frame rate goes down.

The game does not use a BSP tree like doom. Instead, there are convex polygons, called zones. Zones that share an edge are connected to make larger shapes. When deciding what to draw, the engine rotates the world points into view space and then determines the relative order of the zones (that are fully or partially in front) from the player.

Starting with the zone the player is in, any edges shared with adjoining zones in front of the player are followed and whatever is behind them is supposed to be clipped, so that only the exposed parts of that zone will be drawn, and so on. Finally the visible regions are then rendered, farthest to nearest. This is very similar to, if not the same as, the visportal mechanism used by things like the duke Nukem engine.

However, it appears to have a lot of failure cases. The one in the video appears to be triggered when the zone joining the players zone and the one that erroneously becomes visible ends up "behind" the player while connected to zones still partially in front of the player.

There are other examples where areas that are connected by zones that are strictly in front of the player but outside of the connecting edge are also rendered and then overdrawn.

Finally there's the issue that stuff is still drawn behind fully closed doors and lifts.

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@Karlos

Yes! I like that you can cycle through the weapons with the CD32 pause button now! V cool!

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"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@BigD

Didn't that always work?

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@Karlos

Not sure, it's the first time I've done it reliably! 2-player works fine as long as I select the PiStorm32 machine as Master! Good fun! Thanks and love the new textures! Can get 20fps on the 060 with slightly reduced screen and effects! Very good!

Last edited by BigD on 07-Oct-2023 at 09:00 PM.

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"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@BigD

You might get a better than 20fps if we can stop it drawing things that aren't actually visible.

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@Karlos

No wonder it was dirt slow if they never fixed this before the initial release in the 90s! That was a key part of making Doom fast! I'm not sure how it worked with Quake but speed is key on 68k systems that never got higher clock frequencies (before PiStorm CPU emulation).

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"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@BigD

It was unfinished. It was a choice between that, or never released. I'm hopeful we can get it into a state Andy Clitheroe might have been happy with. He pretty much implemented the whole engine single handed, so I don't begrudge him the shortcuts and bugs.

We have already improved performance significantly over the WHDL slave, which already was faster than the release version, mostly with a lot of micro optimisation because ironically those are easier to see than the bigger picture algorithms driving the code since it's all written in assembly language.

It may be the case yet that this whole visible set determination ends up with a rewrite in C, which is a lot easier to make changes to.

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@Karlos

Has anyone tried approaching Andy to show him what is being done with the game engine?

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@Amiboy

Not to my knowledge. I think the suggestion did come up but I don't know what came of it.

Last edited by Karlos on 08-Oct-2023 at 02:45 PM.

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I've found him on LinkedIn but something tells me he's probably not going to respond to my network request.

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@Karlos

You can but try! You trying to make his game shine! What's not to like?

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"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@BigD

If he checks as often as I do, it'll be another decade before he responds lol

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gog has a slight upgrade PC version see here-https://www.gog.com/en/games?query=alein%20breed&order=desc:score

Also something of interest -https://www.humblebundle.com/store/cinemaware-anthology-19861991?dfw_tracker=154059-cinemaware_anthology_19861991_storefront&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=05_0612_RTN&utm_content=All_Storefront_catalog_static_price_description&utm_term=RTN_Previous_All_Storefront_Buyers_365d_Excluding30d&fbclid=IwAR1OLgC3zY6uYPkAb8KkvZ363blAzjBsib6fU8JO1cUYBnURv0OaLvavAHQ

Looks like their running in UAE not converted

@hardwaretech

That's surely the 2010 era isometric view game? We're talking AB'3D' 2 here! No PC version is available as far as I know!

Last edited by BigD on 11-Oct-2023 at 09:33 AM.

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"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

Slow but steady progress is being made on the PVS issue. I can now dump a debug log trace of the PVS logic for the current frame for post mortem after quitting the game and it's throwing up a lot of surprises.

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Been away for a while, but I thought it was time to do more level editing work.

I'll just leave this here

https://youtu.be/tPP9aESLINk?si=7VIW0qzs1FK-6IfV

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