From: entity@nsq.uucp (cybernetworx)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.games
Subject: Re: Wolfenstien 3D
Date: 14 Aug 92 20:41:27 GMT
Organization: NSQ

In article <63975@cup.portal.com>, Harv@cup.portal.com (Harv R Laser) writes:
> >In article <63965@cup.portal.com> Peteroo@cup.portal.com (Peter Niel Olafson) 
> w
> >rites:
> >>Apogee/ID has no plans for Amiga stuff, at least at present. However, I would
> >>be at all surprised if someone produces a similar shareware games for 
> >>accelerated machines ..
> >
> > I tried it my brother's computer the other. After 15 minutes of it, I started
> >getting motion sickness. I'm not kidding! I literally had to lie down a couple
> >of minutes! Awesome game, but quite nauseating!
> >
> >Serge
>
> Those comments aside (although I can sympathize, but you should really
> play it with your face a few inches back from the monitor ;-)
> Wolfenstein 3D is an astonishing game. Amiga fans would do themselves
> a favor to find a friend or dealer with a fast PeeCee and check it
> out.  It's a full perspective 3D scrolling "kill the nazis, grab
> the treasures" affair with Dungeon Master-like mazes and can be
> either keyboard or mouse navigated. The scrolling, well, I played
> it for hours on a friend's 386 machine last month whilst on a
> vacation trip, and it was hard to stop playing it even after beating
> all 9 or 10 of the "free" levels. (Apogee gives away the game
> "engine" and these sample levels and then sells other levels 
> in separate packages.. an interesting idea in marketing a game).

Yeah, it's not a bad game but I got bored of it pretty quickly.  I think a
much better game in the same 'genre' is Ultima Underworld.  Much better
atmosphere, a lot more depth, more variety and better music/sound (at least
with the SB pro)  As far as speeds go however:  I played Ultima Underworld on
a 486/50 and it was going at full frame rate and it was absolutely
astonishing!  However, when I turned off the turbo to put it at 16 Mhz (still
a 486 remember, with FPU still much faster than a 386/33) the frame rate
dropped down considerably.  It was fairly clumpy.  Ok, so I figured all this
texture mapping stuff is very calculation intensive and so you can't do it on
a slower machine... well I was wrong.  Wolfenstein runs pretty well on a
386/25 even.. and it has a larger view area too!
 
As far as amiga games of the same type, I've been experimenting for my current
project on this type of texture mapping onto polygons.  Even using very fast
blitter routines with very specific texture mapping code only for rectangles
and stuff, it's still very slow on a 68000.  Slow to the point of being
unplayable.  On a faster machine ie 68030/25, you can probably get full frame
rate without a problem, but for the vast majority of amiga's out there
(68000 based at 7 Mhz) it's pretty much out of the question. 

HOWEVER, this is not to say that a game with smoothly scrolling backgrounds
going through 3d dungeons is not possible... I've worked out some techniques
which give pretty damn good results, although the freedom is not quite the
same as you get in Ultima Underworld etc.  As far as I know at least one other
company is working on such a game, but they require a minimum 68030/25 with 4
megs ram.. and I don't think they were even texture mapping!   Very limited
market appeal from what I can see..  They were supposed to put up a FTP'able
demo a while back.. anyone ever see this?  I believe the group responsible for
this project called themselves the 'Dungeon Simulations Group' or something to
that effect.

> At any rate, this game's soooo good that it WOULD be worth a letter
> writing campaign to get it ported over if there was any hope of
> such a campaign working.

I doubt that they'd do it.  I think one of the reasons for the very fast
speeds on wolfenstein is the mode that they are using for their screens.  On
the PC, you don't have to handle things in bitplanes.. you can also handle
them in byte/pixel format.  This allows for very fast scaling and mapping
routines.