This looks fantastic. Very smooth game engine and quality pre-rendered scaling. Also: ST chiptunes will forever thrill me and this demo boasts a great one.
this looks to have been playtested a huge amount as well as looking very impressive. Seems to reach a level of fun and thrill that back then wasn't usually the thing outside of Lotus and Vroom and even then this looks to be possibly a little more so. Very well done
Thanks - you seem to understand what I'm trying to accomplish with this project :) And yes, I have spent just as much time playing it as developing it I think :)
Cool to hear the full version of the tune! The note volumes could do with being lowered as the sound effects are drowned out a bit ("thanks" to the original STE hardware design mixing the DMA way quieter than the YM). Is the plan to stick with the Lotus sounds or have something bespoke for the final thing? Depending on how the code deals with revs/speed it might also be possible to do away with the 20K+ lookup table that was needed for Lotus STE.
Good to hear from you! This is a recording from Hatari and Dam advises that the balance of the music/SFX should be better on real hardware. I'll try on my STE here this weekend and see how it sounds. Hoping to put in some non-Lotus sounds for the final thing. As you know, I'm not expert on such things so any offers of help are welcome. ;)
Thank you! My dev machine is a M1 Mac, and the game is written in a combination of c and 68k. I'm using the the bigbrownbuild GCC compiler (github.com/ggnkua/bigbrownbuild-git), VASM assembler, GIMP for graphics manipulation, and various scripts I've written in PHP to convert graphics to the formats required by the ST. I plan to release the source soon after the game is released to help others understand what's involved in a project like this.
My initial release won't run on STFM with Blitter as I want people to experience the full STE experience with the additional colours, DMA sound and hardware scroll. However, I do intend to release the source code after the initial binary release and my hope is that this would lead the ST community to develop various offshoots of the game that are suited to their specific needs.
@@gridleaderretro Oh, I see. Back in the day using the C environment on the Atari ST was so clunky. It wasn't until I got HiSoft's 68000 Assembler that I really was able to get anything running at any kind of performance (which maybe reflects my poor C skills, but my recall was it was achingly slow using C back then). I'm impressed it looks so greate before you went down to Assembly Language :D. Did you previously use a Modern C compiler to cross compile the C code to 68k?
With reference to varying anything. You could have different backgrounds, deserts, snowscapes. I guess that needs more graphics assets and may be better for the 4MB enhanced version later. I approve of the new DMA-SC tune.
@gridleaderretro My thoughts are for a version with different locations. Limited number of checkpoints and a finish. Additional points to come from numbers of other cars passed, so no need for podium positions. All for a later enhanced version.
Hi Jim. Hills are very computationally expensive and remove scope for a ton of rendering-related optimisations, so various tradeoffs would likely be required if I was to introduce them. Perhaps in a future version. For this iteration, my two main areas of focus are maintaining the 50fps framerate and showing that the STE is actually capable of throwing a load of stuff around the screen at this framerate. Just as a sidenote, there's a little-known motorbike racer for the OCS/ECS Amiga called Prime Mover that also runs at 50fps. I wonder if you've seen it?
@@gridleaderretro I understand hills are more compute in the vblank, and require sprites to be drawn in rows (for clipping against hills), but the horizon/road drawing remains the same process so was hoping it could get squeezed in :-) As valleys can produce up to 2x the number of road raster lines, I guess I didn't think far enough ahead in my suggestion. I had not seen Prime Mover! It looks like a very nice arcade road engine. I hope to reproduce something similar for my vintage platform someday.
@@easyerthanyouthink All objects are in 4 bitplanes. With the way the Blitter is used, there's very little to be gained by reducing to 3 or 2 biplanes.
Hi David. There are already crash SFX in place but they might be getting drowned out by the music or engine noise. They will definitely be present and audible in the final release!
I've looked at RoadBlasters previously. Sadly the game logic is tied directly to the redraw so optimising the graphics just makes the game run faster as opposed to more smoothy. It would basically require a rewrite of the game :(
I'm afraid what you see here is more or less what will be released to the public - it's very stripped back 80's style arcade action! Not to mention the fact that there's absolutely no CPU time left for anything else while in game. :)
@@gridleaderretro i wasn't talking about in-game. I was thinking of something along the lines of the Great American Road Race on the Atari 8-bit. Faster reminds me a lot of that game.
