About assets, they are straight from the adf, converted from vector to ordinary triangles. But as with all my releases, assets swap is super easy, I just need artists
Easily, if original game needs you to pick just one, reimplementation can have both at the same time, like in Lotus where you will hear both engine and radio.
I know most people will use the copy that is the most available but I just want to be on the safe side so no mentions or links to pirated copies and no game being bundled. If any publisher gave ma a green light I would release adf-less version immediately
About the shitty graphics, the best part is that with how I handle data means all assets can be replaced with nicer ones. Basically adfs are all read at once and all assets are decoded and "cooked" to SDL digestible forms like in memory file store, so all tiles, sprites are at game init built to modern textures, all quirks like sprites originally made from few separate parts are on the fly cooked to full modern, assembled sprite atlas etc. And there is pak file that is layout wise like a pre-cooked version of adf-based in memory storefile where all decoding happened offline, currently i cook this pak file with no original assets because of copyright reasons but if I put all assets there, game would work with no ADF bacause it seeks assets in pak and if missing, fallback to adf so if i created like remastered hero.png file with all the frog anim frames and put it in pak file, game would use it and just ignore ADF. Basically game seeks all assets from pak and reads from adf only when pak doesnt have equivalent. The same with music where game can use original player or play OGG files with metadata for where to loop.
Custom chip operations are rewritten by purpose. Copper lists, hardware sprites and colour-register writes are SDL texture draws and GPU effects so old calls are basically triggers of intent like „fade this screen to black in 50 ticks”. Paula channel writes become mixer commands (like music fade). CIA/beam-position reads used for timing become a fixed 50 Hz game tick to maintain correct game speed, joystick reads become normal input etc.
For widescreen, Original Superfrog maintains a small scrolling buffer and draws only newly exposed rows or columns. This version keeps the whole decoded level map available in memory, so a wider viewport can simply look up and draw every tile it covers. Coordinates, collision and integer movement remain unchanged. Objects also remain active in the wider view but behaviours based on the original screen distance still use an invisible rectangle that has size of original playfield and act as a proximity trigger. Like in Ruff n Tumble where enemies don’t chase me from across the super ultra wide screen.
I won't tell how long it took to ship Frog as it would raise many eyebrows (and probably make some people upset)
I will write a devblog post about the process one day for sure. What I can tell now is that it is an arithmetically exact C++ reimplementation from disassembled 68k machine code so it is basically fully precise, pixel perfect to a single tick. That's why these game play exactly like old ones, including all the quirks as well. There is no emulation of any kind. Assets are decoded and rebulit on the fly from original (or not really, I can't encourage people to use cracked ADFs on my game page so blatantly) disk images to a modern forms so png textures for atlasses and tiles etc. All copper tricks, blitter tricks, sprite tricks, palette tricks are gone, it is all replaced with proper moder rendering techniques . That means I can render what i want at any resolution and zoom level, while game in a runtime is so light it could run on a potato (if it had a screen). That's basically the gist of it. And while there is no magic AI toolbox that does things on a single click, with each new game there is less and less that is really custom and patterns start to emerge so I can offload more and more to automated processes and agents, There are finite ways to do a game on Amiga and there are finite ways to store assets. After some time it's all same old, same old
I sure do, no game is out of the question, it's the order that is unknown and not really driven by the urgency based on technical state of original game. It's not like these games are going anywhere, right? :)
that's exactly as planned, previously you saw "no achievements unlocked", now you see how many there are, and in what order. It was never suposed to reveal them, just anchor them to rows. The fun is trying to find them all
I know about that whdload of course but my approach to Amiga games is a bit different as i want to reimplement them for modern systems with enough goodies to make them play better while still feeling like an old game so people feel at home. With Zeewolf bigger FOV is naturally something that will happen, so will better draw distance, 4K, any FPS, dynamic shadows and lights. It will look like vector game but only at the first glance. The only real limitation is that game camera won't rotate as many models are simply empty from the other side as they were never meant to be seen from behind.
That's a confirmed bug, great find! Will be fixed in 1.1.2 along with some smaller changes like achievement list showing "LOCKED" for achievements not yet uncovered. BTW there are 10 of them and I will not reveal them but they are doable, nothing like "finish the game not losing a single life".
I'm getting mixed signals, some people are having such issues with older version, some have it other way around. Most people are fine with no alerts at all. It's a new exe so it's probably not "reputable" and triggers some oversensitive setups. Other than buying certificate to sign all my releases there is nothing much I can do unfortunately.
Appreciate it but this one is on the house :) BTW, when I was testing it during develompent, world 4 kicked my ass more times than I'm willing to admit so I feel you.
