Just dropping in to announce the second public BETA of my Alien Breed Project.
This should run fine on any MorphOS system with at least a 500Mhz CPU and 64Mb of free RAM, so in other words, our humble Efika's do not appear to be enough due to CPU speed.
Other than that, I should have all crashes resolved, and in theory the sound track should be supported in MorphOS, but I do not yet have a machine strong enough to correctly test it, so I am unsure.
Additional notes are included in the link.
Please feel free too get back in touch with me about bugs, suggestions, and so forth.

Christopher

http://abodamexprojekt.host-ed.me/images/

I am looking forward to test this on my machine! AB3D MOD for Odamex is the most interesting gaming project in our community, imho. What will the next update will include? In other words, in which areas/part of the game will you focus on: stability or features? If the latter, which features specifically? In any case, keep up the excellent work!

Really nice work.
Alien Breed 3D was one of my favorite first person shooter.
I really liked the whole game design and atmosphere.

On power Mac G5 with radeon 9600 there where some wrong colors within
hud.

Go on with your great work!



[ Edited by eliot 31.07.2013 - 19:34 ]

Cool_amigaN,
Quote:
Thank you once again Cool_amigaN. :)

With this release, I rebuilt the entire WAD, which reduced the file size about 2Mb. I replaced the musical score for the level, added a slew of new sections, added detail to some sections, replaced many of the older textures with new ones, and re-worked the behavior of an enemy or two in order to prevent them from crashing the game.

The next release will/should be the final release before I move on to the next level/chapter. So I need to finish up detailing BIG TIME, as a lot of this still looks like vomit due to the palette conflicts (as eliot is noticing), plus the levels and the lighting needs a lot of detail put into them, not to mention enemy arrangement, as the one I'm currently using is temporary and only for the beta release.
I REALLY need to add in a few more game play features that harken back to the classic Alien Breed series. My first step was to prevent enemies from dropping guns or ammo, though I don't want to just leave ammo and health laying about the level, so I'm going to be adding in computer terminals that will give access to items, though not via a tedious menu screen as in the classic games. Also I do not intend to include a purchasing system. That just don't make sense to me. Why in the world would they have shops set up in the middle of a war zone anyhow?!?! :)

Another thing to look forward to is the fact that when Odamex .7x releases, 32bit True Color will be supported, so the display will begin to look a LOT better than it currently does. Also it sounds as if OpenGL support is still slated for an even further release, and I'm actually getting excited about that because MorphOS seems to handle things much faster in GL than in software mode for some reason, which might even make this playable on an Efika some day.

Anyhow, that's the plans. Make things look and play more professional than they do now, finalize the mapping, and inject as much of the classic Alien Breed vibe as I can into it...

...on that note, I hope it doesn't currently feel like too much of a departure from the original series. Sometimes I feel like I got carried away. :)
Hope you all enjoy what I got thus far though.

> MorphOS seems to handle things much faster in GL than in software mode for some reason

That should be true not only for MorphOS but for every OS, the reason being that opposed to CPUs, GPUs are specifically designed for graphics operations :-)

Andreas_Wolf,
Quote:

Love live GPU's! It's sad really, Quake II runs better than DOOM and other software based FPS' do on my Efika. Who'd a thunk it? :)

It's been a while since I owned a PC of near the same specs as my Efika, but I don't remember software handling that poorly. Maybe I'm wrong and it's just been too long.

InGame.jpg

[ Edited by XDelusion 31.07.2013 - 22:37 ]

Doom's and Quake's software renderers are apples and oranges.

>> Quake II runs better than DOOM and other software based FPS' do on my Efika.

> Doom's and Quake's software renderers are apples and oranges.

I think he compared Quake II in hardware mode with Doom in software mode.

You are probably right, my bad. I assumed he was talking about software renderers, but you were talking about OGL vs software before.

> you were talking about OGL vs software before.

Yes, as a reply to him talking about OpenGL vs. software rendering in the first place ;-)

And while you two are trying to be clever, I'm still trying to understand why software mode is always so sluggish on a 400Mhz machine. ;)

I think you missed the primary point of my comment. I know what GPU's are and how hardware acceleration works.

[ Edited by XDelusion 01.08.2013 - 09:20 ]

> you two are trying to be clever

I've just clarified to BSzili that you weren't comparing software rendering speeds of different games (which is true, isn't it?) and that I was not the one starting the OpenGL vs. software rendering talk in this thread.

> I think you missed the primary point of my comment. I know what GPU's are and how
> hardware acceleration works.

Then you know very well why any OS (not only MorphOS) "seems to handle things much faster in GL than in software mode", provided the software renderer doesn't drop too much detail due to performance reasons :-)

I don't know for sure. As I was saying, I have not owned a PC running at a similar speed to my Efika in years, so I'm just going off of memory, but I don't remember software mode feeling quite as sluggish, but I could be wrong.
All my other computers are running at 3Ghz or above, so everything runs great be it in software or GL on them.

> I don't know for sure. As I was saying, I have not owned a PC running at a similar speed
> to my Efika in years, so I'm just going off of memory, but I don't remember software mode
> feeling quite as sluggish, but I could be wrong.

Even if software mode was faster on your PC than it is on your Efika, I bet that on your PC, software mode was slower (and/or with less details) than hardware mode.

> All my other computers are running at 3Ghz or above, so everything runs great be it in
> software or GL on them.

If you benchmarked the maximum frame rate in both modes, I think you'd still find that OpenGL mode runs faster (and/or with more detail) than software mode.

For sure, Hardware mode is the way to go, I was just speculating about performance in software mode compared to other OS' on older hardware. Maybe some day I'll run across some old hardware and can do some comparisons.

BTW, I was just poking fun at you two, I'm not cross, I just talk a lot of smack. It's part of my charm. :)

> I was just speculating about performance in software mode compared to other OS' on
> older hardware.

I was just replying to your speculation about performance in hardware mode compared to software mode on the same OS and same hardware :-)

You are correct though about the GUI business. I CERTAINLY can not say I've ever used an OS, that looked so good, AND ran so great in such limited conditions. That's why I bought to Efika, just to see how well MorphOS really ran under such limited conditions. So I'm not trying to bash MorphOS, I'm just questioning the Frame Rates in software mode with a 400Mhz CPU and more than enough RAM left for DOOM.
Something is off. I just ran tests in Odamex and without my project running, it runs at about 9-15FPS, and averages in the middle generally. With my Project, you can knock about three or four numbers off those specs. There was not much difference either with the textures turned off, but it did look cool! :)

Anyhow, yes, the frame rate is too low to be playable really. You can kind of enjoy DOOM II on the Efika, but not fully, at least not with Odamex. Then again, maybe it's just the port? BSzili is looking into it.