1. Re: Comments on game changes
- Posted by Mind Ventures <mventure at IO.COM> Jan 23, 1997
- 1019 views
- Last edited Jan 24, 1997
There are a number of emulators out there for computers like the Apple ][ and the Atari 8-bits. Some of the places on the 'net that have these also have a lot of the old software which is really commercial but lets face it I doubt anybody gets too upset if you pirate these days. I have seen Wolfenstein for the Atari out there on one of these sites. I don't know if they even made an IBM version. The only ones I recall were Apple, Atari and Commodore. Wolfenstein reminds me a lot of Temple of Apshai and they both bring back very fond memories. I agree that most games these days are shoot first and figure out a story line later. That's what seems to sell these days. For the time being, it is probably the fad of it all. Simple hunt and shoot AI requires a lot less programming than multiple action programming and semi-realistic character interaction. Shoot-em-ups dominated the game market for many years before adventures and crpgs became accepted. I think we'll see more andmore games moving to this 3d first person perspective with real time animation but it's going to take a little time and maybe bigger hardware -- you see how slow these things run today with a minimum of character AI... more complicated reactions and autonomous actions will eat more processing cycles. I don't think Euphoria can handle a real-time 3d engine with texture mapping etc. The basic engine isn't that bad. I've seen one written in basic which ran well although it was a simple plot and fill with solid colors type of engine and didn't include any texture mapping at all -- this is where the big problem lies. I can dig up the qbasic demo if somebody wants to see the code. I didn't write it I just dl'd it to see how it worked. I do believe Euphoria will work well for first-person view 3d games such as the *old* bardstale games or more recently the SSI Eye of the Beholder series. I'm working on something like this myself and it requires a lot less processing. Naturally, it isn't as action oriented but with adventure style games where the object is more to solve the story and less to kill everything in site, I think it works just fine. Essentially, player movement (particularly turns) is limited so you advance one black at a time so there is some animation as you move through the mazes and you can animate the sprites that represent the other characters in the game with little trouble. Image scaling is all done in advance and you can achieve a nicer high-res picture with this method than you can realistically achieve with real-time 3d because the pictures are all drawn first and you don't do any on the fly scaling or texture mapping. If I get some code I'm satisfied with for a demo, I'll post it on this list or put it on a web page. Keep up the good work everybody. I'd love to see more games in Euphoria. Oidzone is actually what made me decide to give the language a crack. I just hope I can get some nice looking results out of it myself and maybe help convince others to give it a go. Chuck