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CU Amiga Magazine's Super CD-ROM 06 (1996)(EMAP Images)(GB)(Track 1 of 4)[!][issue 1997-01].iso
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tkgturbopatch
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tkgpatch.doc
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1996-10-31
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***************************************************************
* Alien Breed 3D II: The Killing Grounds TURBO patch *
* *
* Author: Aki Laukkanen (amlaukka@cs.helsinki.fi) *
* with help from Mikael Kalms (kalms@vasa.gavle.se) *
* and Jyrki Saarinen (jxsaarin@cs.helsinki.fi) *
* *
* Download the newest version from aminet or my home page: *
* http://www.helsinki.fi/~amlaukka/ *
***************************************************************
* Read this document, please! *
OVERVIEW
Alien Breed 3D II: The Killing Grounds by Team17 and Andy
Clitheroe is the peak of the Doom clones for Amigas. It was met with
acclaim and criticism in the general public. Most of the negative
feedback geared towards the speed department which was a somewhat
lacking on most of machines and just adequate on top-of-the-line
equipment.
FEATURES
This patch is designed to address some of the quirks and problems.
It replaces the somewhat outdated C2P routine of the game with a
nearly optimal CPU only C2P solution by Mikael Kalms
(kalms@vasa.gavle.se) and modified by me to support chunky and plane
buffer x modulos. This routine is four times faster on fast 030
processors and 040 upwards. The 2x? C2P routine is almost the same but
modified by me to double pixels horizontally.
Just the other day me and Jyrki Saarinen took the task of
optimizing the drawing loops of the game. We got as far as patching
normal and gouraud walls and ceiling and floor mapping routines. At
the moment still unpatched inner loops include sprites and other
lighting effects, transparent walls (if anybody finds them, please mail
me), "water" bump mapping and polygon routines.
FPS counter is one of the most useful features of this patch. With
this you can check what the frame rate really is and not just make bad
guesses. However at this point FPS counter isn't entirely reliable but
the results are still comparable with others.
Other unfinished features are the VGA patch which should promote
the display to 30.00 KHz, 50 Hz one and Exit patch. These patches
mightn't happen for a while too. There are some problems which I have
to solve first.
USAGE
Copy the TKGPatch executable to your AB3DII directory and run it
with your preferred settings.
TKGPatch E=TKGEXE/K,D=TKGDIR/K,C=C2P/S,V=VGA/S,Q=QUIT/S,EN=ENGINE/S,F=FPS/S
- TKGEXE lets you set the name of the TKG executable. (PROGDIR:TKG
is default)
- TKGDIR is needed for the assigns to work. (PROGDIR: is default)
- C2P patches the chunky to planar routines.
- VGA alters the screen mode.
- QUIT adds an "exit" option.
- ENGINE optimizes some of the mapping routines a bit.
- FPS displays a FPS counter during the game.
NOTES
TKGPatch works by loading and relocating the TKG executable into
memory and then adding patches to appropriate places. This is the
reason why TKGPatch absolutely needs the original 4 MB executable
(182820 bytes long) from install disks so no patched or otherwise
altered executable will do. However if you are certain that you have
the correct executable but TKGPatch still complains about incompatible
executable then contact me (maybe there are several versions of TKG on
sale).
If you want to compare the existing and patched chunky to planar
routines download aminet://game/gag/crap_c2p.lha and ask Jyrki
Saarinen (jxsaarin@cs.helsinki.fi) to post his c2p benchmark to you.
You might not notice any significant speedup with the ENGINE
patch. TKG was programmed with slower approaches from the ground level
so the most optimized loops couldn't be used. Also there is fairly
big constant time which consists of outer loops of the mapping
routines, BSP traversal and other game operations.
If you are using the C2P patch in full screen mode, you might
wonder why the screen is shifted 16 pixels to the right. This is
because normally the address where the chunky buffer is c2p'ed isn't
aligned by a long word and then the long word writes would be divided
into to two word writes which result into a two times slower c2p.
TKGPatch can't be started from Workbench at the moment. (It
crashes miserably, sorry :( ) but all the tooltypes are implemented
and equal to keywords from the command line interface. Also I need a
better icon so please send your MagicWB, ordinary and NewIcons ones to
me.
VGA patch doesn't probably work at the moment. I already patched
like tens of places but to no avail. I have to take a look a this some
day.
Quit patch doesn't work either (It hangs on exit). I'll have to
investigate it too.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Q: I got the patch working but TKG still isn't lightning fast in full
screen 1x1 on my <insert computer model here>.
A: There's not much I can do without rewriting huge parts of the
game code, sorry. You'll have to live with it or get a faster
computer.
Q: Will this patch support graphic cards or other screen sizes?
A: Most unlikely. Too much is hard coded in to the executable and
there's too much code to rewrite.
FUTURE
Bug fixes and maybe an MMU speedup feature for 040/060.
Some other features under consideration:
- AmigaGuide documents
- a GUI frontend which would replace the current frontend by Daniel
Hansen. This would be intuition friendly (maybe MUI) and allow easy
access to all options of TKGPatch and the current frontend, adding
several others.
- selectable module playing during the control screen, during game
and when dying or completing a level. Send your suggestions please.
- Ability to change much of the graphics and sounds of the game.
(If anyone wants to draw alternative panel graphics, please contact).
- Some one requested save option for key combinations.
Of course I'm open for all suggestions so please e-mail me at
amlaukka@cs.helsinki.fi.
HISTORY
33.1 22.10.96
- created
33.6 23.10.96
- beta release for Andy Clitheroe
34.0 26.10.96
- first public beta version
- added VGA patch, QUIT patch and assigns patch (though not
all of them working atm)
- removed NOPROTECT because of legal problems
34.4 30.10.96
- first aminet release
- added 2x? C2P, ENGINE, FPS and other patches
34.5 31.10.96
- FPS counter is now always in the upper left corner of the
screen
- some documentation fixes
- added some icons
- large parts of the data needed by TKG are in chip ram
thus slowing things down. Made a little patch which
copied for example sin/cos table to fast ram and patched
all references to it.