[HN Gopher] The Polygons of Another World
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The Polygons of Another World
Author : ibobev
Score : 372 points
Date : 2020-01-02 17:40 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fabiensanglard.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (fabiensanglard.net)
| bluedino wrote:
| The SNES was the platform I played "Out of this World" on.
|
| The interesting thing about it was, it was a polygon game that
| ran without using the SuprFX chip.
|
| With the SNES being sprite-based I could never figure that out.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I've always wondered, did Nintendo demand that all games have
| continuously running soundtracks? I remember playing this game
| and Prince of Persia on the SNES and being really put off by
| these soundtracks someone shoehorned in.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| Funny trivia about this:
|
| >[...] They also wanted to replace all the music made by
| Jean-Francois. I had yielded for the extra songs, but I
| wanted to keep the music of the introduction, as it perfecly
| matched the atmosphere and the animation timing. This became
| a real struggle [...] So I took drastic measures. I thought
| of creating an endless fax. A huge fax of a meter long in
| which I wrote in big letters "keep the original intro music".
| I would insert it in the fax, enter the number, and when the
| transmission started, I would tape both ends of the letter
| together, which would create a circle that went on and on
| until there was no paper left in the offices of Interplay, at
| the other end.
|
| http://www.anotherworld.fr/anotherworld_uk/another_world.htm
| egypturnash wrote:
| The article has a link to a video of the author of the SNES
| port talking about it.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiq0OL8rzso
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| Another World was _astounding_ when it came out. Although the
| Amiga was considered a high spec machine at the time, its
| graphics hardware was oriented around scrolling, sprites, and
| rectangular blits. This is good for the typical platformers and
| shoot-em-ups that dominated gaming at the time but useless for
| the type of full motion video the AW was attempting.
|
| The Amiga's blitter could write almost 4Mbs per second (if you
| set things up juuuust right and you had the wind behind you). On
| a modern monitor (a modest 1920 * 1080) the Amiga's blitter would
| take almost 2 seconds just to clear the screen.
| the_af wrote:
| It was astounding back then and in my mind still is a work of
| art. Like Fabien says, its limited palette actually worked in
| its favor. The evocative graphics still remain some of my
| favorites, ever.
|
| It's one of my most replayed games ever. Even when I know the
| plot and there are no surprises, this game manages every time
| to take me to... (cue music) ANOTHER WORLD.
| meerita wrote:
| I played this game in the PC, back then. It was one of those
| games I've consireded like "top game" for D.O.S. What a nostalgia
| bump I've got.
| tetris11 wrote:
| I played this for the first time on the Nokia N900 (armv7-a). I
| thought it pretty, but unplayable. Had no idea of the porting
| history until this article.
| yantrams wrote:
| It's available on Nintendo Switch for those who are interested in
| trying it out.
| rasz wrote:
| Traditionally some corrections for the author:
|
| >The Amiga 1000 could not boot by themselves, they had no ROM.
| The bootloader was on a floppy and you better not lose or damage
| it!
|
| Amiga 1000 has bootloader (Kickstart loader) in ROM, chips U5N
| and U5P - two 256Kbit EPROMs/mask ROMs, 64KB in total. What it
| didnt have was firmware(Kickstart, like PC bios) or
| system(Workbench, like PC DOS/Windows) in ROM. You can see chips
| containing A1000 bootloader on the motherboard picture, its the
| two with stickers, right below two 8250 CIA chips
| https://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/media/download_...
|
| You __cant __boot(load) without a bootloader. Trivia: Back in the
| day Bill Gates held a record of writing the shortest bootloader
| for Altair 8800, computer with nothing but LEDs for output and
| switches for input. You had to input said bootloader every single
| time you wanted to load something (like BASIC) from tape.
| 'Computer Notes Volume 1, Issue 6, 1975' Page Twenty-One, Author
| Bill Gates: "I've written a bootloader that only takes 13 bytes
| of keyed-in data, but anything smaller than 20 bytes isn't easy
| to use.". He was finally beat by one byte in 2017
| http://just8bits.blogspot.com/2017/03/doing-it-in-less-than-...
|
| >It was Commodore best selling product with an estimated 6
| millions units shipped from 1987 to 1991
|
| other than you know, C64 ;-) and thats not counting other
| products like Datasette Commodore 1530, shipped with every VIC-20
| and C64.
|
| >amiga_arch.svg
|
| Chip RAM is not directly connected to CPU, its gated behind AGNUS
| https://www.pmsoft.nl/amiga/A500-block-diagram.jpg DBR signal is
| what switches CPU data bus access.
| Flow wrote:
| A few games used the RAM intended for the Kickstart on A1000.
| The same game on A500 needed 1MB RAM.
| fabiensanglard wrote:
| Thanks for these clarification, I will update the article and
| drawings tonight.
| gpderetta wrote:
| > firmware(Kickstart, like PC bios)
|
| My understanding is that Kickstart contained both Exec (the
| kernel) and Intuition (the windowing GUI library), so it was
| more than a BIOS.
| the_af wrote:
| Since you seem knowledgeable, and this seems surprisingly hard
| to google, do you know why it was named "Amiga"? I know the
| codename was "Lorraine" and, because I'm a native Spanish
| speaker, I know "amiga" means "female friend", but why was this
| name chosen? Did they simply pick a random name, and if so, why
| Spanish?
| coldtea wrote:
| The team that designed (which Commodore later bought) was
| called Amiga Corporation.
|
| They were initially called Toro, but there was another
| company with that name.
|
| As for the choice - they just wanted a nice friendly name,
| and Amiga was that, being simultaneously a nice sounding
| foreign word (for the English speakers) by with the known
| friendly Spanish connotation to many.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| > Datasette Commodore 1530, shipped with every VIC-20
|
| The Datasette did _not_ ship with every VIC-20. There were
| plenty of non-Commodore datasette clones on the market,
| however.
| bbmario wrote:
| Fabien's blog is a pot of gold. I love this "archeological"
| approach to programming. He also makes the articles feel like
| documentaries. It's just unique.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Awesome read
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Using a custom VM was certainly a clever and efficient at the
| time. LucasArt used the same trick for a lot of point and click
| games.
|
| I don't think this idea would scale well for much bigger
| projects, as debugging internal scripts can quickly become a
| bottleneck.
| klodolph wrote:
| Well, the technique has been used in newer projects as well.
| Quake and Quake 3 both had VMs that ran the game logic.
|
| Tooling is a perennial problem with extension systems, but it's
| really damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you're not
| using an extension system, then you're probably writing the
| game logic and the engine as one giant mass of C++ code.
| Writing tons of game logic in C++ will get you in trouble for
| lots of reasons. Writing an interface between your C++ core and
| some kind of scripting system will get you in trouble for
| completely different reasons.
|
| Tim Sweeney did a presentation about the programming
| environment needs of different parts of games back in 2005,
| still worth reading: https://www.st.cs.uni-
| saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced...
| csande17 wrote:
| Another example of custom VMs from that era is Infocom's
| Z-machine, used for text adventure games.
|
| The strategy of using a bytecode VM to ship cross-platform
| games seems to have been pretty popular back then, which is a
| little surprising to me -- I thought Java came up with that
| idea first!
| gowld wrote:
| The first computer language in history was bytecode language
| for a VM.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Code_(computer_language)
| jonny_eh wrote:
| I guess Java's "innovation" with VMs was requiring the user
| to download it separately from the programs it runs.
| pkaye wrote:
| Its older than that. There was the p-code machine used for
| Pascal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-code_machine
| ncmncm wrote:
| This is truly amazing.
| keithnoizu wrote:
| I was just eyeing the game on my steam library early in the day.
| Fantastic title, shame he went on to produce so few follow ups.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Eric is clearly a genius, I assume he hit a sophomore slump.
| He's only made a couple games since, many years later.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Even with just one major game to his name, its legacy lives
| on. Another World set the template for the "cinematic
| videogame" and even today you can see the influence of its
| cutscenes and minimalist gameplay on games like Ico/Shadow of
| the Colossus and a plethora of modern indie games. It
| accomplishes with wordless dialog what Hideo Kojima tries to
| do with 20 hours of overwrought monologues.
| tekstar wrote:
| If you haven't played this game I strongly recommend it. It's on
| GOG. It's on old emulators too but the graphics and input
| handling can be pretty rough and unforgiving.
| derefr wrote:
| Given that it's apparently a bytecode executable for a VM, is
| there a modern implementation of said VM? Maybe even one that
| translates the draw ops into Vulkan commands? Seems like a fun
| project.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| It's also on Steam now!
| facorreia wrote:
| I second this. Another world was a fantastic, innovative game.
|
| Also look for Another World - 20th Anniversary Edition.
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| Didn't realize they released an updated version. Just found
| this graphics comparison[1]. Looks like they mostly just
| smoothed out the lines.
|
| 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b86QXaOdgX8
| lloeki wrote:
| IIRC the 20th anniversary version has backgrounds entirely
| redrawn and pre rendered as bitmap, they're not poly
| anymore. The animated stuff is the original polys rendered
| as always, only at much higher resolution than the original
| 320x200. Sadly they lack detail, see notably at 2:26 in the
| comparison video. Also at 2:47 you can see perspective has
| been corrected, but the overall result is less consistent
| (left wall vs five spoke machine). I very much prefer the
| original one overall, the reduced detail and
| inconsistencies in art of the new one just takes away the
| immersion.
| stuart78 wrote:
| What I found funny about watching that is that the 2014
| version is exactly how I remembered the 1991 version.
| Memory smoothed it all out I suppose.
| exlurker wrote:
| The magic of CRT :)
| DHPersonal wrote:
| It's available on iOS, too:
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/another-world-20th/id460076328
| artur_makly wrote:
| who remembers... Bard's Tale??
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bard%27s_Tale_(1985_video_...
| luismedel wrote:
| Amazing, as everything in Fabien's site.
|
| I rushed, hoping to find some oldskool tricks and remember my
| time spent reading Denthor's VGA Trainer[0].
|
| It seems I'll have to wait some more chapters for that, though.
| :-)
|
| [0] http://textfiles.com/programming/astrainer.txt
| [deleted]
| newnewpdro wrote:
| Another World's original author Eric Chahi gave a great GDC
| "Classic Game Postmortem" talk about creating the game:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFaOYYSxSEA
| lilSebastian wrote:
| Third time this has been posted in 17 hours:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21931895
| carapace wrote:
| Tell the mods: hn@ycombinator.com
| tombert wrote:
| I was one of the few kids who got a 3DO (yes really), and I had a
| copy of Another World for it, after already having played it on
| the Genesis, and I was a bit underwhelmed, since moving to
| comparatively more-powerful hardware didn't make the game look a
| million times better.
|
| After a bit, though, I realized it wasn't that the 3DO version
| was underwhelming, but instead that the Genesis version was
| _amazing_. It already felt like a next-gen game, and so the
| upgrade to the 3DO didn 't make a huge change.
|
| In the end, it has become one of my favorite games. I love the
| art, the style, the cutscenes, and even though it's incredibly
| short, I love the story.
|
| I never played Heart of the Alien, because I never had a Sega CD,
| but I'd like to play it at some point on an emulator.
| jacobush wrote:
| "The 3DO version of Out of This World is quite different from
| the other versions in terms of graphics and sound. The polygon
| backgrounds have been replaced by hand-drawn versions, the
| quality of which varies from stunning to amateurish."
|
| https://www.mobygames.com/game/out-of-this-world
| quincunx wrote:
| Love this, love the write up.. but on the amiga...
|
| the A500 had 6 bitplanes, not 5, also, with PAL being the most
| popular region, I'd say 320x256 was the more popular resolution
| over 320x200. 6 bitplanes are used for Hold and Modify (HAM mode,
| where 2 bits select Red, Green, Blue or Palette, and the
| remaining 4 bits indicate either R G or B values, or the index of
| the color.) The other 6 bitplane mode is "Halfbrite" which
| doubles the palette size for a total of 64 colors, where the
| second half 32 colors are half the intensity of the first half.
| When running with 6 bitplanes, agnus (the memory controller if
| you will) steals a lot of cycles for Denise (the display chip)
| from both the 68K and the blitter. The blitter being crucial for
| drawing filled polygons.
|
| The second thing that made the Amiga revolutionary (and one could
| argue, for this reason, that the PCI architecture of Hombre/AAA
| is not a true Amiga no matter Commodore's demise) - the second
| thing is the way that Agnus orchestrates memory access much like
| the microcode inside a CPU orchestrates registers and ALUs. In
| particular, Agnus controls the memory address lines and chip-
| register-address lines; the chip-register-address and the memory
| address lines are opened up simultaneously against eachother with
| one reading and the other writing. So, for instance, when reading
| bitplans, agnus opens the chip bus using one of the register
| addresses 0x110-0x11A for BPL1DAT to BPL6DAT depending on which
| of the 6 bitplanes is being read; while at the same time driving
| the appropriate memory address by putting the contents of agnus
| registers 0x0E0-0x0F6 for BPL1PTL/H to BPL6PTL/H on the address
| bus of the "chip memory" DRAMs. The datalines of the DRAM and the
| special chips (Denise here) directly open on eachother (eg. DRAM
| and Paula chip-selected at the same time.)
|
| I'm not sure if I did it justice and got the elegance of this
| architecture across in this short post. I'm sure many enthusiasts
| like me who got their start on the Amiga programming 68K continue
| to discover new things about this machine.
|
| Good times, warm memories.
| fabiensanglard wrote:
| Thanks for the correction. I will update the drawings asap.
|
| Since you seem to know the machine well, maybe you can shed
| some light on something i was unable to clarify: What is the
| fastest way to clear a framebuffer to a desired color on an
| Amiga. My hypethesis is that it was done with the Blitter, by
| disabling all DMA entries "doing something else". Do you have
| any idea?
| quincunx wrote:
| To set the framebuffer to a single color, consider that there
| are actually up to 6 "framebuffers" (one for each bitplane.)
| Consequently, it is to either set all bits for a given
| bitplane to 1 or to set them all to 0. To control the actual
| word that is blitted without DMA, you would use BLTADAT,
| BLTBDAT or BLTCDAT registers to control the corresponding
| blitter input word with DMA disabled (so the blitter does not
| write into these registers itself.)
|
| A common technique to avoid having to blit each bitplane
| independently (esp. for BOB sprites where the blits are small
| and plentiful) is to interleave the bitplanes by row using
| the BPL1MOD and BPL2MOD register values; these values are
| added to each bitplane pointer address at the end of each row
| to move the pointer to the start of the next row;
| consequently a single blit operation can capture all
| bitplanes as in memory a row can consist of all row bits
| belonging to bitplane 0, all row bits belonging to bitplane
| 1, all row bits belonging to bitplane 2 and so on.
|
| If this is the bitplane layout used then a single blit can
| only set the values to 0 or 15 (all 0's or all 1's for 4
| bitplanes enabled); note however that the blitter too has
| modulo registers (BLTA/B/CMOD for each input and BLTDMOD for
| the destination) so perhaps best examine how fancy the
| programmer got with it (eg. multiple blits to clear the
| screen to a specific color even if the bitplanes are
| interleaved using BLTDMOD.)
|
| Obviously I'm a bit rusty given it's been a few years, but I
| hope this helps. I'm a fan of your work, thank you.
| fabiensanglard wrote:
| Thank you so much, I am going to amend the "fill" section.
| Are you ok with being credited as "quincunx" or you prefer
| something else?
| quincunx wrote:
| That's very kind, quincunx is fine, or no credit is fine
| too. Glad I could be of help.
| fabiensanglard wrote:
| I had no idea about the BPL1MOD and BPL2MOD. Now that i
| know they exist I don't see why a game developer would not
| use them.
|
| I will try to double check with Eric Chahi but this is so
| much more efficient that it has to be the way he drew
| polygons (instead of drawing into a scrap buffer and
| blitting four times, he used BPL*MOD to draw and blit only
| once).
| [deleted]
| agumonkey wrote:
| so fun to see both of you discuss in depth like old magicians
| jacobush wrote:
| Half-brite was not in the Amiga 1000 and early Amiga 500 and
| 2000. The later "ECS" chipset has included "halfbrite". Most
| games did not take advantage.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Do you know of any games that used halfbrite? I can't think
| of a single game that did.
|
| I think there were like three games that used HAM mode, if
| you filter out "displaying a scan of the box art while the
| rest of the game loads". Knights of the Crystallon, Pioneer
| Plague, and maybe Mindscape?
| jacobush wrote:
| At least Pinball Dreams did and googling suggests Cannon
| Fodder. I suppose a few more must be in there.
|
| Edit: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/196/4616
|
| Also The Settlers
|
| Black Crypt - http://hol.abime.net/126 Links -
| http://hol.abime.net/892 Universe - https://en.wikipedia.
| org/wiki/Universe_%281994_video_game%29
| vidarh wrote:
| To maximize performance you'd tend to _combine_ the blitter
| with a M68k loop, typically using MOVEM to maximize the
| number of bytes copied per instruction.
|
| The reason for this is that the blitter _can not_ utilize
| every single memory cycle.
|
| So if you want to maximize graphics throughput you'll need to
| carefully balance the work between the blitter and CPU
| depending on which CPU.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Targetting 320x256 makes it harder to port to 320x200.
| Meanwhile, porting 320x200 to 320x256 is easy, just add a small
| letterbox.
| asmosoinio wrote:
| I always thought 256 vs 200 was a PAL vs NTSC thing? Is that
| wrong?
| egypturnash wrote:
| It certainly was on the Amiga.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Ya, depends on the system. For example, the NES is 320x224
| (NTSC) and 320x240 (PAL).
|
| I can't speak to why they differ exactly though.
| jacobush wrote:
| The number of lines per second is constant, but you get
| 50 frames per second on PAL and 60 frames per second on
| NTSC.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| I just want to let you know that I appreciate someone showing
| up in threads like this who have such solid knowledge of things
| like the details of the Amiga Halfbrite mode.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| And only a few years afterwards, the Acorn Archimedes (launched
| in 1987!) would achieve comparable or better (especially in 3D)
| graphics and sound via pure CPU power, with little or no custom
| hardware. Cool stuff, but it was essentially a dead end
| architecturally. Even if Commodore hadn't screwed up to the
| extent it did, that whole generation of machines was tied to
| the 68k series, and would have died with it anyway. (Even Apple
| could not save the 68k, they jumped ship to POWER instead.)
| D_Guidi wrote:
| amazing stuff, give a try also to the video from the snes
| conversion programmer
| [deleted]
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