Greetings from Belgium!

[GuyLateur]

Hi all,

I recently dusted off my old A500, and found that it still works, woohoo! Well, kinda.. Half of the keyboard keys no longer work, I can't seem to load anything other than very short intros from my floppies, and my mouse is as good as unusable. But hey, when I finally do get to load some (preferably non-interactive) stuff, everything works fine! Anyway, I hope to get this machine up and running again, and have a jolly old nostalgic look around.

On a side note, I've never succeeded to program anything demo-like in the day -- I might have been too young/stupid at the time. So I'm very interested in how people are programming for the Amiga in the current day. I'm not really looking forward to going back to M68k assembler, but I'm willing to put up with C (mainly working in C#, nowadays). So if anyone can provide some starting pointers for that, I'd be very grateful. I've heard the DICE IDE is pretty cool..

Cheers,
g

 

[GuyLateur]

I replied to a thread on the programming forum thursday evening. It said it was going to go through moderation before it would be published -- which is fair enough, because I am a new member. But it still hasn't been published, and I haven't gotten any message that it has been rejected either (though I wouldn't know why it would be rejected, because it was a legit post, but anyway).

Is this normal? Does moderation really take several days on these forums?

 

[Bastich]

Hello and welcome

I will have approved your missing post

What 3d graphics have you done (DX / OGL)? I am an ex games programmer (Elite Systems) and currently working on a 2d shoot em up called Iridium (https://youtu.be/ZEuZCIwiTys) as well as playing with a Stunt Car type game and a Quadcopter​ thing.

 

[GuyLateur]

Thank you!

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Great, it came through, thanks!

 

[GuyLateur]

What 3d graphics have you done (DX / OGL)? I am an ex games programmer (Elite Systems) and currently working on a 2d shoot em up called Iridium (https://youtu.be/ZEuZCIwiTys) as well as playing with a Stunt Car type game and a Quadcopter​ thing.

Wow, Iridium looks very nice! And cool that you used to work for Elite; I played a fair share of their games, back in the day..

I don't usually go as deep as the DX/OGL level, and tend to use an engine, like MOgre3D (http://www.ogre3d.org/tikiwiki/MOGRE), which unfortunately is no longer actively maintained. I made a 'DataProcessor' using it, which is a node based 3D animation system:

If you press play on the time node, the ninja will circle around Athena.

I've also started developing a simple game in Unity, a top-down 2.5D vertical space shooter (heavily based on a standard Unity tutorial ):


I've developed some addons for Blender (https://www.blender.org/), an open source 3D animation package. Eg I've maintained the Tools for Curves addon (https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?221213-Tools-for-curves), which allows you to create all kinds of geometry from curves (like loft, sweep, birail and so on).

I'm fascinated with old medieval castles, so I made an addon to 'physically' build them (https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?387708-WIP-Drop-Rigidbody-Tool). It builds walls by creating some bricks (randomly selected from a group), and letting them 'slide' into a containing volume, a couple of layers at a time, using Blender's built in physics (Bullet?). The results aren't perfect (walls have holes in them), but it gets the biggest part of the work done.

So, you know, just keeping busy, I guess..

 

[Bastich]

That's very interesting. I've always ment to look into Unity but have never got round to it. Due to the Stunt Car thing I am playing with ATM I will be making a track (3rd one) soon. I wish I had your lofting plugin in as Lightwave is very lacking in that department (or I can't find how). It was very easy in 3dsMax but I have not got that installed ATM. As far as I am awear Blender does use Bullet Physics. It's used in a surprising number of things and has a lot of big name support. Plus it's free

 

[GuyLateur]

I can definitely recommend taking a look at Unity some time. It's a very well thought out environment, and you can have something up and running in no time -- ie, once you know your way around, but there are plenty of good tutorials out there to get you going. It unites (wink, wink) all your resources (audio, models, animations, ..) into a project, and you slap on some C#/Java scripts that make up your game logic. Plus it compiles to multiple platforms, so maybe one day we could be writing Amiga games with it!

Lofting would be very cool to have when creating tracks, indeed. I would have suggested modeling them in Blender, but that addon is no longer supported, I'm afraid. It kept breaking like every other release, and I got tired of keeping it up to date. There are some indications the developers are planning to drastically update their curve related code, and maybe have those operators as part of the main distribution. Wouldn't hold my breath, though..

 

[Bastich]

I've found an old plugin script for Lightwave that may do what I want (Cman's Loft LScript). I will try it out later on

Unity is interesting but I like being closer the hardware / having more control. I do like the cross platform aspect it provides but dislike the requirement for the pro version to integrate C/C++ without using workarounds.

For work / commercial reasons Unity is not viable due to its subscription costs and the very varied hardware integration I have to do. Last project had an Arduino and sensors linked into the client end of the system, so we could access accelerometers, GPS, etc. The work we do is primarily for VR training systems for Military application (air marshalling, parachute trainer, mine sweeping, etc).

 

[GuyLateur]

I do like the cross platform aspect it provides but dislike the requirement for the pro version to integrate C/C++ without using workarounds.

I'm not sure what you mean with that C/C++ thing on the pro version, could you please elaborate? I'm not developing commercially, so I'm using the free/personal version.

Being closer to the metal is actually one of the reasons for me to be looking at programming the Amiga again. I don't think I'll be going the assembler way again, but I've seen some cool things programmed in C, which I assume also use the hardware (copper, blitter, what have you) pretty closely. It's not easy to get started on this though, because the information is pretty scarce and scattered around, it seems. I'll probably have quite a lot of research to do before I can even think about writing a Hello World app..

Good luck with the lofting script!

 

[Bastich]

Due to not using it and only searching occasionally I could be out of date. I found a few references to using C++ instead of C# mainly dating back to 2014.

https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/82518/is-it-possible-to-use-c-with-unity-instead-of-c

 

[GuyLateur]

Due to not using it and only searching occasionally I could be out of date. I found a few references to using C++ instead of C# mainly dating back to 2014.

https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/82518/is-it-possible-to-use-c-with-unity-instead-of-c

Oh ok, I see what you mean. This may still be the case, because I can't seem to add any scripts other than C# or Java. But maybe I have to do something to my setup I don't know about; I'm not a Unity expert by any stretch of the imagination.

Doesn't really bother me, as I prefer C# over the others, but I can imagine it can be very annoying for other people.

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Update: I think in Unity 5 (which is what I use), the differences between the free & pro version regarding C/C++ have disappeared. But it seems like you'd still have to work around it, even in the pro version, doing marshaling and wrapping and all kinds of silly stuff you really wouldn't want to do..