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Redlambs

Creator of the Caftards comics
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Aug 22, 2006
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Officially the best poker player on RAWK.
I'm amazed considering the original and the recent Deus Ex there's not a thread on this (unless I missed it of course)




Although it looks like Deus Ex:HR and probably plays exactly like it, this is definitely one to watch. Starbreeze are doing it and their games like the two Chronicles of Riddick and the criminally underrated Darkness are full of atmosphere, depth and attention to detail.

I hope they capture the essence of the original and the obligatory four player mode is in there, so that bodes well. There still should have been a more updated one in between, but Molyneux stuffed that when he sold out Bullfrog.

Oh and if you haven't, go play the original now!
 
Badunk said:
I have the original on the Atari Jaguar in a box under my bed.

Minigun and gauss gun ftw!
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Good man! It's one game I never owned on the jag.


Name Changed said:
I play the original the whole time on the PC. Still a great game.
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I wonder how this'll work first person though? The original is great isn't it. I remember talking to Molyneux about it and the one thing he still regrets was not getting the grappling hooks to work. Childs play today, but back then the console/amiga versions had to be limited so he just left the hooks out.
 
WeasteDevil said:
Bullfrog were always good game designers, but they were shit coders.
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I wouldn't say shit, just tried to reinvent the wheel when it was already there. For instance I remember the big furore at the time about being able to see the characters as they walked past a car through the windows. Hardly revolutionary, even for way back then!

The grappling hook thing always amused me, but his excuse was they invested so much time in the buildings and how they dissapeared that they simply didn't get the hooks to work without bugs. Though it's obviously simple today, I can't see how much more difficult it would have been back then? You'll have to enlighten me because it's a bit before my time programming wise ;)
 
A lot of the programmers back then didn't bother with optimisation or did stupid things. I've seen disassembled code for games where they would scroll the whole viewport the size of the tiles and then draw all of the new tiles in one go for example, where they could simply draw a few each scroll, be it a software or a hardware scroll.
 
WeasteDevil said:
A lot of the programmers back then didn't bother with optimisation or did stupid things. I've seen disassembled code for games where they would scroll the whole viewport the size of the tiles and then draw all of the new tiles in one go for example, where they could simply draw a few each scroll, be it a software or a hardware scroll.
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Ha, even on the Psx and Agb I was sticking to the classic redraw only what you need! But yeah, I have seen people blit entire screens of tiles everytime a character moves, what a waste :( Then again even to this day if I work in 2D I shift x/y values for movement rather than float, it's the scrooge in me ;)

As for the hooks, maybe their tile system and collision for it was expensive? Maybe they bubble sorted the buildings :lol:
 
WeasteDevil said:
I mean look at it, about 3:20 in!


It's a technical disaster! As for the going behind the buildings etc. they can't even mask the software sprites properly - that's easy!
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:lol: It's a great game though!

Luckily it's not Bullfrog doing the new one (well at least lucky on the engine front, though Starbreeze are pretty good at gameplay). I remember the engine for Riddick being great at the time, and it still looked good on the update.
 
The thing with the Amiga bilitter was that you supplied it with a mask per blit. All you need to do is as always take a copy of what is behind the sprite, and then blit it in with the appropriate mask and it would appear behind the object. You never know with Bullfrog though, maybe they used the 68k to do this shit so that it could run on the PC or ST or whatever.

You can clearly see in that video where the sprite appears through things that it should not appear through. So if that's the case, then yeah, god knows what they were trying to do with the hooks. Looks to me in that video and from memory that the game was doubled buffered, so it wouldn't surprise me if they drew the whole scene in the back buffer each time rather than simply shifting it. They could also have moved the HUD to the bottom of the screen and hardware scrolled the thing. Copper could only change one register each 4 horizontal pixels as far as I remember, but you could with a black bar as a separator easily hardware scroll two viewports side by side. Easier to just move the control hud to the bottom.
 
I can never forgive EA for destroying BullFrog...I shuddered when they took over BioWare too :(

As for this, well I loved the Chronicles of Riddick game so will be watching this eagerly.
 
RedKaos said:
I can never forgive EA for destroying BullFrog...I shuddered when they took over BioWare too :(
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Molyneux was mainly responsible for that.

I was just looking through the list of games, I remember Hi-Octane! I need to reinstall that, they didn't half do some cracking gameplay :)


As for this, well I loved the Chronicles of Riddick game so will be watching this eagerly.
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Yeah, it certainly was a good game. I haven't played the sequel yet, but the Darkness was also top.
 
Ah I loved the original on the Amiga. One of my disks never worked though so I couldn't progress :(
 
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