STraTOS 1997 April & May/STraTOS 1 - 1997 April & May.iso/CD01/INTERNET/SITES/RAND/UNSPLIT/text1024.txt

Text File | 1997-02-06 | 7.7 KB | 199 lines

OK, here's an updated version of the BAD MOOD Amiga group article
that Simon put together.

Any final comments would be much appreciated.

If you have any performance figures for BAD MOOD v2.14alpha on accelerated
hardware, please let me know. Take a look at what I've written below to
get an idea of what kind of figures I'd like to have.



Subject: A FreeWare Doom compatible game

(Note: This article has been cross-posted to a number of Amiga newsgroups.
       Please, edit the distribution line if your comments aren't of
       interest to all of them.)

To all interested parties,

Here is an open offer for anyone who's interested in helping out with
the creation of a Doom clone for the Amiga machines.

The project is called 'BAD MOOD' and has so far been restricted to the
Atari Falcon030 (and compatible) computers.

The program (which will be described later) is currently 100% assembly.
To complement the 68030 code, the Falcon's DSP chip (Motorola 56001) is
also heavily used (see later on porting).

The BAD MOOD project was initialised about a year ago following the
discovery of a Doom WAD file viewer for the PC. This program (by Jake Hill)
came with C++ source code and showed how to produce a 3D engine where
Doom compatible WAD files can be viewed.

The project is being developed over the internet with a specific BAD MOOD
mailing list in operation.
Information, list transcripts, ideas, graphics, animations, screen shots,
etc are available from several FTP and WWW sites.


So why is this message posted here?
-----------------------------------
Well, the reason is that this is a programming project that interests
many people and could be beneficial to both the Amiga and the Falcon
platforms, as their architectures are similar.

The idea behind this post is to further the project in many areas with
the distinct possibility of code being produced for single Motorola
CPU systems. This not only benefits all Amiga owners but will also
benefit Atari & clone machines that are not equipped with a DSP, such
as the new PCI 68060 clone called Hades060.

Both versions of the program will benefit from the joint collaboration
in ideas and theories for creating Artificial Intelligence, the Sound
System, Multiple Player and Network Support etc. as well as 68060 CPU
enhancements/usage.

Before we talk about other Doom related utilities that have been
currently written, here is a small excerpt from one of the latest
BAD MOOD releases:

*---------------------------------------------------------------*

Bad Mood v2.14 alpha release - 28/06/96

Bad Mood is a special project planned as the basis for a PC Doom /
Doom II / Heretic compatible (pseudo) 3D game system for the Atari
Falcon & compatibles.

The system itself is intended more as a generic game engine than
any specific game, in order to allow open-ended flexibility and
therefore encourage development of a vast array of generically
similar games on the Falcon. Bad Mood itself is being developed
into a fully playable game in order to demonstrate the power of
this engine.

There is still much to do before a final release, but with new
people joining the team, the project is becoming more and more
a reality.

This software is currently 'freeware', and is therefore available
free of charge. The Bad Mood developers retain the right to alter
this freeware status for future releases, although this is highly
unlikely. Sourcecode is also freely available.

*----------> Features <-----------------------------------------*

* Doom, Doom II & Heretic IWAD compatible.
* Supports Doom, Doom II & Heretic PWAD files.
* 16-bit truecolour graphics.
* Perspective mapped walls.
* Rotating, perspective mapped floors & ceilings.
* Transparent wall textures.
* Alpha-channeled wall textures.
* Wraparound sky textures.
* Artificial & depth-cued lighting.
* LRU graphics cache for high speed & low ram requirements.
* Variable x & y detail settings.
* Variable viewport size up to 320x240.
* Scaled player movement.
* Simulated 'bobbing' movement.
* Advanced version of BSP & occlusion algorithms for speed.
* Works with all good CPU accelerators, including 68040 CPUs.
* Fully FastRAM compatible with both FXRam & real 32-bit RAM.
* Sources are freely available from several FTP & Websites.

*---------------------------------------------------------------*


Apart from the main program development, other utilities and
applications are also being developed in parallel.

There is FWT - FalconWadTool. A conversion of the PC program for WAD
object management, both in terms of manipulating and importing/exporting
data (graphics and sound).

Another is a major piece of software based on DEU - The Doom Editor
Utility (for level creation and editing).
This application has been converted to run with GEM, the Atari
equivalent of PC-Windows or Workbench.
Written in C it closely follows to the original DEU code but has been
modified to comply with GEM window operations as opposed to the limited
original PC-DOS version.


So, is BAD MOOD fast?
---------------------
Naturally!  :-)
This is by far the fastest Doom-like engine produced on the Falcon.
There are ten or so other engines, some commercial, some FreeWare or
ShareWare.

Some actual performance figures:
(Standard Falcon030, 16 Mhz CPU, 16 bit bus, 32 Mhz DSP)
(Without the DSP this machine is similar to a non-FastRAM Amiga 1200.)

    The Doom ShareWare WAD file, DOOM1.WAD on the opening level (e1m1)
    at 320x200, full-screen, with all surfaces fully textured starts out
    at about 5 fps. When walking around, the framrate never drops below
    4 fps and often is quite a bit higher.

    The Heretic ShareWare WAD starts out at about 4 fps and drops to
    3 fps in some places.

Changing the view size to a quarter of the original screen area will
usually at least double the frame rate.
160x100 is probably going to be a usable resolution on a standard Falcon.

Using an accelerated machine obviously gives better results. The majority
of BAD MOODers do have accelerated machines of one form or another.


A quick note on porting
-----------------------
Although the architectures of the Falcon and Amiga machines are fairly
similar in that they both use a Motorola 68k CPU, there are a few
important differences.

Most notably, the Amiga's lack of a DSP chip on a standard machine.
The DSP functions can of course be ported to the normal CPU, and a
fast processor should do fine.

Also, there is a difference in terms of graphical modes that will need
to be addressed.
The Falcon version of BAD MOOD uses a chunky 16 bit mode, while on the
Amiga (without a graphics card) it would be necessary to use a planar
256 colour mode. With all the effort Amiga programmers have put into
chunky to planar conversion, that shouldn't be a problem, though.

All 68030 code has been written for HiSofts Devpac 3, which is
available on the Amiga as well.
This produces a compact executable of around 38 Kbyte.
The full program with the DOOM2.WAD will actually run successfully in
less than 100 Kbyte RAM, but the graphics cache will be working overtime!


What do you do now?
-------------------
If after reading this post you are interested in any aspect of the
project (porting the code, helping with ideas and theories for monster
AI etc or _whatever_) then please reply!

Ideas, thoughts, suggestions, code, etc are all very welcome!


Regards,
Bertrand Le Roy  (Project coordinator)
Johan Klockars   (Mailing list and FTP/WWW site maintainer)

[e-mail] (Johan)   http://rand.thn.htu.se
xxxxxxxxx (Bertrand)    http://

--
  Chalmers University   | Why are these |  e-mail:   [e-mail]
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                        | so hard to do |  WWW/ftp:  rand.thn.htu.se
   Gothenburg, Sweden   |     well?     |            (MGIFv5, QLem, BAD MOOD)