Which game would you like to see written?

Interestingly Lander is also on the revivalteam.de site. I’ve been looking for that.

There is a backstory. (Do not read Rick if you prefer there not be one):
http://www.claresmicro.com/fervour/

The demo that I’ve downloaded has different levels to the actual Fervour game.

I got this company name from !help in the demo application folder that refers to Clares Micro Supplies in Northwich Cheshire.

Looks like the business is dissolved (the address is nearly the same just Middlewich not Northwich):
https://companycheck.co.uk/company/03797429/CLARES-MICRO-SUPPLIES-LIMITED/summary
But the website is still out there. Effectively a ghost it seems.

PRINT “There’s practically no backstory that would make sense.”
UNTIL FALSE

(^_^)

I didn’t say it made sense…

Apparently the original game cost £24.95.

I think I’ve found the author:
https://uk.linkedin.com/pub/andrew-hersee/2/153/977

If its the same guy – he is an MD of his own game company http://tactilefusion.com/tactile

I’ll reach out to him and see if its the right guy and if so, if its ok if I use his game concept.

I’m not even sure if it was his game concept per se – there was at least one other, similar game out around that time (on RISC OS). I forget its name though. Argh, I’m getting old :( Sphere-on-a-track was popular for a spell.

Ah, found it… Phaethon. For whatever reason, I seem to recall preferring that to Fervour (might have had a better soundtrack?).

Anthony,

A Fervour/Phaethon-type game would be interesting. I played demo versions of both back in the day, and I remember preferring Andrew Hersee’s effort (although Phaethon had some snazzy demo-like effects; sadly it didn’t sell enough copies to break even). As one of life’s insufferable ‘frame rate bores’, I was impressed at how Fervour ran at a completely smooth, jitter-free 50 fps on my 8MHz ARM2-based A3000. Obviously some nifty coding by Andrew.

If you were to make a game of this sort, would it be a BBC BASIC job, perhaps with some assembly language? Or maybe C?

You probably know already that RISC OS features an in-built fast horizontal line drawing routine which I employed once or twice back in ancient times (but not necessarily to fill polygons!), without any problems (IIRC). And it really is fast! However, earlier this year when deep in my intense coding phase, I noticed that calling it from BBC BASIC would often result in a crash (even though it seemed to work). Turns out that it’s intended to be called from Supervisor Mode (not User Mode). I’d love to know why this is, if anyone can tell me! Could it really not have been coded in a User Mode-friendly way?

I don’t know how you might intend to implement and render the colourful 3D perspectivized grid, but apparently the aforementioned horizontal line drawing routine takes some beating in terms of speed. Just thought I’d mention it in case it’s an avenue you might wish to explore. You might have an entirely different solution in mind.

Incidentally, congrats on the release of ‘Legends of Magic’. I expect to buy a copy in time for Christmas…

Regards,
David.

www.proggies.uk

Anthony> I think the screen res was 384×216 or something wacky (I had to make a mode for it on my Risc PC last night, but I’ve forgotten what it was now :) ). If you open the 50KHzMode file inside it into a text editor I think the text describes what screen res it is.

Fervour is certainly not an original concept. There’s a very similar game I played at least a couple of years earlier on the Commodore 64 called trailblazer.

Andrew & Alex – It works fine on ArcEm! running RISC OS 3 with music etc.

Ooh, interesting! I wonder if my ancient copy has got corrupted somehow :-(

Note re Clares software: Most if not all titles were passed onto and sold by APDL.
The Clares section on http://www.apdl.org.uk/ seems to be yet to come.

n.b. I tried looking on the wayback machine copy of the old APDL site to see if Fevour was listed there but it now gives:
Sorry.
This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.

It wasn’t excluded a few weeks ago!

I’ve always wanted a decent 2d car racing game for RISC OS. Never really been one in my IMO.
Something like Outrun or Powerdrift would very nice.

Hi David,

If you were to make a game of this sort, would it be a BBC BASIC job, perhaps with some assembly language? Or maybe C?

I plan to start with BASIC and then, if necessary replace routines with assembler where required. I’ll package the source code for the assembler routines where I do this in with the game.

I don’t know how you might intend to implement and render the colourful 3D perspectivized grid, but apparently the aforementioned horizontal line drawing routine takes some beating in terms of speed. Just thought I’d mention it in case it’s an avenue you might wish to explore. You might have an entirely different solution in mind.

This is the part of the game I’ll try & code first. I’ve some ideas on how to write the road, but need to try them out. I usually write a demo as a POC and performance profile new required graphics routines.

Re: line routine – Thanks, I didn’t know about that. I’ll profile individual separate approaches and see which ones have the best timings. Re-draw area sizes are usually critical to performance on slower RISC OS hardware, so I may use the old trick of incremental redraws for speed if necessary. This is why Legends of Magic runs at 25fps (whole play area re-draw on each frame) and Overlord at 60fps (incremental re-draws). For LOM 25 fps is IMHO acceptable for that type of game, but an action game absolutely has to run at 60fps. I’d like to get that performance on the Iyonix if I could and plan to target 800×600 as before as a minimum. I have a suspicion that I’ll use assembly code here.

I expect to buy a copy in time for Christmas…

Thanks. There is scope for alternate quests which I could include & If you have any ideas for improvement, I plan to do a free update to existing users in the next couple of months.

Hi Dave/Andrew,
Good. I feel a bit safer now with this game. I’m sure I’d seen something reminiscent on the Amiga years ago, but remember little about that game…

Cheers Chris. Yes it seems to be in Alpha.. I’ll watch that space so I can play the real levels, rather than the demo I have at the moment. Unless anyone could share either Phaethon or Fervour with me?

Hi Alan,
I considered that too. I’ll put it in my backlog of games to write. Again, Overlord provides the required routines minus the road & with a Fervour, Phaethon style game I should end up with the nuts & bolts to write a road too.

Thanks for the other comments. I’ve lots to delve into.

Please would you provide a link to ‘Arg?’

It was an *Info game.

Basically a labyrinth. You need to guide (with mouse) a point outside without touching some elements.

If we’re talking car games, Lotus Turbo Challenge, Chase HQ and Road Blasters were the ones that either ate most of my money in the Arcades, or caused fights getting time on the Amiga :) Don’t remember any driving games for the Archimedes, but think by that point, I didn’t actually know anyone with one…

A Fervour disc image can be found here:
http://ia801607.us.archive.org/zipview.php?zip=/30/items/Acorn_Archimedes_TOSEC_2012_04_23/Acorn_Archimedes_TOSEC_2012_04_23.zip
It’s part of a TOSEC image.
It’s not difficult to get to read the actual code.
Bytheway, is there a new Arcem distribution? Mine (16 dec 2012) gives a zeropage error.

Don’t remember any driving games for the Archimedes, but think by that point, I didn’t actually know anyone with one…

According to the Iconbar there’s (among others) Stunt Racer 2000, Saloon Cars, “Bunny Race”, BurnOut and BHP:

Not Archimedes compatible though as in ARM 2/3 if that’s what you meant.

Apart from a certain retro charm I don’t think they’re worth the effort though.

A Fervour disc image can be found here

Thanks, finally got to play it again after about 20+ years!!

Bytheway, is there a new Arcem distribution? Mine (16 dec 2012) gives a zeropage error.

Not yet, I’m afraid. I want to make a new release with a few improvements (bug fixes, optimisations, etc.) but I haven’t found the time to work on it yet. If I run out of time before Christmas I’ll do a new release with just the zero page fixes (which should just be a case of recompiling with latest GCC)

Not Archimedes compatible though as in ARM 2/3 if that’s what you meant.

Burn’Out (the top one from your two images) was Archimedes compatible – although I think it ran with reduced graphics quality (flat shading on the roads). If you ask me the best thing about the game was the music, but then they ruined it by having the sound effects mute some of the music voices whenever they played. Even if you disabled sound effects in the options it still happened, like they were still playing the sounds but had the volume set to zero :-(

Which game would you like to see written?

Battlezone → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymrYkbEbnEQ
Defender → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PEpDMgR9D0

Which game?

Scorpius ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw1fnarunoA

Regarding Battlezone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVd4n4_Dj30 :)
But as I assume it might not be ARMv7-happy and could use some nice touches here and there, it is a wheel worth re-inventing.

I’ve been thinking about the graphics course I did on my Computer Science degree as I work out how to plot the road in the Fervour style game (which I plan to still go ahead and write).

Rendering of a plan view could also apply generally to 3D in my code library/engine.

As there is interest in + Defender + 3D + a sideways scroller/shooter. I was tempted to try and write a true 3D Defender style game i.e.

Draw the ship and allow it to tilt and roll – then draw the planet surface underneath and animate the aliens over the top. The map/rader view would need to be a cube. But I could then try and use polygons or texture map if possible to render the objects

Just strikes me that a Lander meets Defender (aka Planetoid) game would be a good fusion of ideas.

Does that sound interesting?

Rendering of a plan view could also apply generally to 3D in my code library/engine.

Here are two articles on how to write a 2.5d car racing game. The End results are pretty impressive.

http://codeincomplete.com/posts/2012/6/22/javascript_racer/
http://jsriffs.blogspot.fi/2014/05/making-of-highway-at-night.html