Acorn Arcade forums: Single Effects

On this page: Comanche, Delirium, FQuake, Iron Dignity demo, Landscape

By Peter Teichmann

Comanche

Yet another voxelscape! Peter Teichmann's one is rather good, though. 24 bit colour, and the detail is really high - the landscape fades out to a horizon a very long distance away.

Comanche's maximum resolution is only 320x256, so one would expect it's quick - but the sheer complexity of the graphics here slow it to less than 10fps on a StrongArm machine! Lower resolutions run pretty smoothly though.

Comanche requires landscape data to work - Peter Teichmann suggests this one.

Nice - but I have the nagging feeling that any game based around this would require a RiscPCII...

By Kulture

Rating: GOOD

Delirium

It's here at last, after spending literally ages annoyingly sitting on every screenshot Paul Wheatley puts in his page in Acorn User magazine, we've actually found out what it is!

Delirium is a screensaver, and a pretty good example of the genre: it actually includes some decent effects! Wow, rarity! :-)

The authors have very usefully written a plug-in protocol for Delirium, so it's possible for anyone to add an extra effect to the screensaver. The ones supplied are pretty good though - more than one taken from the demo, Icon.

For downloads, screenshots and the latest on this, see the Delirium web site.

By Jan Vlietinck

FQuake

This is Jan Vlietinck's proof that Quake can run at high resolution, high speed, on an Acorn machine.

FQuake simply plots some Quake scenery - level 2 of ID's original shareware episode, to be precise. It does so as fast as possible. FQuake runs in 640x480 resolution, and averages over 18 frames/second on my 240MHz StrongArm RiscPC. This doesn't sound like very much nowadays, with the stunning speeds GL-Quake can achieve on PC's with 3Dfx cards, but FQuake is over a year old and plots graphics far faster than ArcQuake can achieve even in 320x256 resolution.

There was a rumour that this was to be developed into a full game, but unfortunately this seems to have fallen through - it's a shame, but we've still got the demo.

Iron Dignity, part 1

Iron Dignity, part 2

By Frank Fohl

Iron Dignity - the demo

Iron Dignity is a game in development - but I'm talking about the preview demo here, the one that came third at the Siliconvention '97 demo party.

The preview can run in any resolution, any number of colours, but going below 24bit colour is not recommended - it looks a mess! This demo includes a prototype landscape plotter, some 3D objects, and visual effects. (Oh, and a pretty good soundtrack as well). I'm told that this demo is rather un-optimal but it runs quite fast in 480x352 resolution, particularly if the AutoVCache module is loaded. If the final game is anything as good as this, it'll be a real hit!

One point though: it really does require 2Mb of VRAM to run properly... And remember to set triple-buffering on instead of the default double-buffering, there is a noticeable speed improvement.

By Living Colour

Rating: COOL

Landscape

Now downloadable from Argo FTP!

This was originally distributed on a Clan disc before being included on the StrongArm CD-Rom. (The link is to the downloadable Clan disc). It doesn't seem to be very well known, which I've always found rather surprising.

Landscape is similar to Comanche - it's a high detail landscape plotter, running in 24bit colour and fairly low resolution. However, this one is texture mapped - making it much more spectacular - and the landscape data isn't fetched from a file, but is calculated mathematically: this is a fractal landscape. Not only is the area to explore huge - and I mean huge - but it is both faster and more graphically impressive than Comanche.

It does look more than a little odd though, because the inaccuracy of the fractal algorithm means the landscape is always wobbling up and down a bit, like jelly... but this doesn't spoil the effect. Wow. Have a look at the screenshot and you'll be convinced!