Alien Breed 3D Special Edition

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Squirminator2k
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Alien Breed 3D Special Edition

Post by Squirminator2k » Thu Jan 19, 2006 1:36 pm

I've been in contact with someone via email who says he's quite sure he remembers reading about a "special edition" of AB3D in an old Amiga magazine. This SE apparently boasted an improved game engine including a 1x1 pixel rendering engine and various other enhancements. It's possible that the efforts they put into enhancing the AB3D engine went towards producing the rather disappointing but technically phenomenal AB3D2:TKG instead, and it's also possible that the "enhanced engine" may have been a fan-produced effort, such as the attempt to recreate AB3D in the AB3D2 engine a few years ago.

Has anyone else ever heard of or read about a Special Edition of Alien Breed 3D?
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Re: Alien Breed 3D Special Edition

Post by AndrewTaylor » Thu Jan 19, 2006 3:49 pm

Squirminator2k wrote:a 1x1 pixel rendering engine
Pff... I could write one of those.

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Re: Alien Breed 3D Special Edition

Post by Squirminator2k » Thu Jan 19, 2006 7:22 pm

AndrewTaylor wrote:
Squirminator2k wrote:a 1x1 pixel rendering engine
Pff... I could write one of those.
For the A1200? For AB3D? I'm sure you could find the sourcecode somewhere, and I'm quite sure AmiNET has a few Amiga assemblers and such available.

It's easy to wirte for a PC, maybe, but AB3D was revolutionary on the Amiga for its time, surpassed only by the AB3D2 engine (which, unfortunately, no computer in the known world was fast enough to run).
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Post by AndrewTaylor » Fri Jan 20, 2006 12:06 am

I must be missing something here. As far as I can tell it wouldn't take much CPU whack to render one pixel.

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Post by Squirminator2k » Fri Jan 20, 2006 1:23 am

We're looking at getting a game like AB3D running out of the box on a base Amiga 1200 with 2MB of Chip RAM, 1MB of Fast RAM, and not much else. The game runs fine on a CD32, but I doubt it would run fast enough rendered in a 1x1 pixel engine. Hell, Xtreme Racing and Gloom still struggle when rendered at the optional 1x1 on an emulated Amiga with what is effectively unlimited Chip and Fast RAM, and those are by far much simpler game engines.

To put things into perspective: my Dad had an A1200 with a graphics accelerator card. AB3D ran fine. The Demo we had of AB3D2 struggled to run even at minimal screen sizes, and ran sluggishly when set to the same window dimension as that used for the first AB3D. I'm fairly confident that getting the AB3D engine to render in 1x1 would've been tricky on most out-of-the-box A1200s and A4000Ts.
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Post by worMatty » Sat Jan 21, 2006 9:01 pm

What's 1x1 pixel rendering?

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Post by Squirminator2k » Sat Jan 21, 2006 9:13 pm

It means rendering the game engine as pixel-per-pixel, as opposed to doubling pixels up (alà the "quality" setting in the original "Doom", which makes the game appear chunkier but makes it play more smoothly).
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