Wings Remastered

@Marko
@Joeled
@pepe
@Hans
@Elwood
@lazi
Thanks for your support

@trixie
No, there's no deadline. But when it's sold out it's sold out.

@lazi
My own hiscore / update / download server stats all indicate that it looks somewhat like 50% AOS4, 47% MorphOS and 3% AROS when it comes to potential customer distribution among systems.
But yes, I also thought / hoped that with all forces united and with such a title those 300 would have been possible. Well, at least more than 50% of it.
But well, people can only spend that much money. And we have x-mas which already creates a hole in the avg. portemonaie. And it's of course not the only current Amiga game project around. Most likely even the Defender Of The Crown campaign running in parallel reduced the number of Wings preorders. And the campaign itself was certainly not optimal, for example nobody thought about putting an ad in the last AmigaFuture issue.
So there are many unknown variables here, I guess you cannot derive the market size just by looking at this campaign.

@LiveForIt
Yes, that's also true. The avg. Amigan of today is most likely no hard-core gamer (anymore ). But since this title is somewhat special I would have hoped for more. But maybe that was a bit too optimistic (see above).

@all
Thanks to all who preordered so far!
The minimum amount of 150 preorders has been reached by now which means: I'm working on the port again
However, 300 are the amount we really need to fully cover all costs, including my development costs. Since this here is a complete rewrite and no "simple" port like for example Tower57 will be, those sum up.
The 300-calculation was meant to cover about three months of full time work on this title (plus production costs plus some other Cinemaware outlays, and taxes of course).
As you may guess with 150 preorders things look different. I am not able to work full time on this title for now. Consequently it is unlikely that the Feb. 2016 release date can be achieved.
I'll do as much as I can, but I'll have to take care first that my warchest stays filled to a certain level.

Because forum work eats up my time too I decided to keep a small development diary instead of answering question X over there and talk about progress Y somewhere else.
That way you can always check out the current progress. I'll also answer (technical, gameplay related) questions there when I see some on any forum.
Just follow the link in my signature.

I'll also update the demo version from time to time, of course.

Cheers,
Daniel

I cannot help but think that you should release this on Amistore as well. It seems that they are doing rather well by Amiga standard, so it would surely bring in more sales.

Keep on selling the boxed version as preorders but release on Amistore when it is ready.

@Daytona675x

Really cool project! Thanks! After Christmas ill probably pre order the boxed version. I did some testing on the demo and here is the result:

machine: Bplan Pegasos 2 w/ Os 4.1 u6 , Radeon 9000 pro, 1gb ram, Sb Live! soundcard


Graphics:

Everything is great graphically, textures, shadows, rendering, etc looks lovely! (1360x780 32bit)

Sound:

Sound works Only until the missions start then I get this weird High pitch squeal every few seconds (makes it unplayable) I tried the onboard sound same problem...

I notice that in certain OS4 Scene demos with heavy 3d this happens as well.

Anyone know whats up with this? Very weird because the intro screens and the diary music works great.

Joystick/Input control:

I have it WORKING With Catweasal MkIv and a TAC 2 joystick! (Through Amiga lowlevel.driver) so that's cool.

From what I understand its a one button game, but I cant figure out how to drop bombs.

If the sound issue was working it would be perfect I cant justify buying it yet until that works :( Ill try the demo for morphos to be thourough.

@magnetic
Thanks

That "high pitch squeal" issue is most likely a known Pegasos-2-plus-Warp3D-problem I am about to start to investigate just now.
No joke: 10 minutes ago a Peg2 with a bunch of Radeons arrived over here, lent by Evillord himself, so that I have a chance to find and fix the driver issue that's causing that problem (or, maybe more likely: to find and build a workaround for that hardware-issue triggered by the driver).
Check out this recording here which illustrates the problem. Is it more or less the same as yours?

Quote:
No, in the bombing sequences you have 2 fire-buttons, one for the bombs (default assignment B) and one for the machine gun to fight enemy airplanes (which don't appear in that demo ). Somewhere in the options menu you can map this to whatever key / button you want.

MorphOS-demo: be aware that, depending on your setup, you may see all-black 3D models and some fog-color issue. That's due to a driver bug in MorphOS that has been fixed already (but not published yet AFAIK), thanks to bigfoot.

@Daytona675x

Hey thanks for the reply. YES that youtube vid shows the bug! Its beyond annoying. Hopefully if you fix it the developers can fix the driver in the os as well.

I'm trying to remember if Catweasel driver support more than 1 button?? anyone?

how many boxed copies are left? I wont be able to buy one til after the holidays..

@Daytona675x

Hey thanks for the reply. YES that youtube vid shows the bug! Its beyond annoying. Hopefully if you fix it the developers can fix the driver in the os as well.

I'm trying to remember if Catweasel driver support more than 1 button?? anyone?

how many boxed copies are left? I wont be able to buy one til after the holidays..

@magnetic

Taken from the Catweasel User Manual

Page 40, Technical Data
Quote:
So, the hardware seems to support it, if Ian's driver does, i don't know

@magnetic
Quote:
I'm not fixing anything in the game here, I'm trying to fix it inside the driver.
However: while I was able to somehow narrow the circumstances under which it happens, I have no idea right now why this effect really happens and how to fix it. I found ways how to avoid it to 90% (at the cost of reduced quality) but that's no solution of course.

@magnetic
@Raziel
Quote:
While I think Raziel is right and it supports more than 1 button I guess it would be a good idea to add support for single-button-joysticks to the game. After all it should adapt to the Amiga as good as possible and I'd still like to support single-button-joysticks. As you can read in the dev diary I just added an additional controls-option that doesn't exist in the original Wings Remastered. It allows you to drop a bomb by holding fire and pulling back, if you want to, the way it was back in Wings OCS.

look at atiradeon.chip component (for the problem with high resolution screen from your development diary : Worked around various AOS4 R100/200 Warp3D guard-band related clipping issues that caused some stuff not to be drawn when using high display resolutions)

@Daytona675x
Quote:
Since it's an audio problem, you may be trying to fix it in the wrong driver. My best guess for this problem is that the graphics system ends up hogging both the CPU and PCI bus too much, thereby starving the audio card of data just long enough to trigger squealing or stuttering. On the A1-XE (and I think the Sam440 too) this can manifest itself as stuttering.

In MiniGL I set up the "smartlock" to deliberately unlock the Warp3D context periodically to minimise the stuttering without totally killing performance. This inserts frequent brief periods where the graphics system is unlocked and the audio drivers/system have a better chance of sending the next block of data to the sound card. With pure Warp3D apps/games you can minimise the chance of stuttering by minimising the time that Warp3D is locked (so, precalculate rendering data as much as possible, lock W3D, submit the work, and then unlock ASAP).

However, some sound cards are worse than others. IIRC, those dirt cheap sb-live cards are pretty bad, but other sound cards have less trouble. So it's quite possible that changes to the audio drivers could reduce or even eliminate this problem.

Hans

@shadowsun
@Hans

Thanks for the input
It's too early to really say for sure which part is the culprit here.
However, from first experiments it looks like it's caused by the gfx-card / -driver. And alas it doesn't seem to be caused neither by hw-locking nor command buffer size or things like that (those were the things I checked first, have to test more though), although the symptoms are similar to what you'd get when locking the hw for too long.

@Daytona675x

The one button support would be great as the traditional Atari style jostyicks typically only have 1 button! And yes I was trying the old fire button and down to drop the bombs lol.

Audio bug: I tried the onboard audio too same problem. The good news is if you fix the driver it will fix other issues as well as I get this problem with some 3d heavy scene demos.

How many boxed copies left? I want to order one after holidays.

@magnetic
Quote:
Yes, is (optionally) working that way now.

Quote:
Great!
Not so great (at least from my perspective ): lots of boxes left. Since some days presales seem to have stopped completely.
Check out the dev-diary-link in my signature. On that page you'll find a link to the preorder-page too.

@all german readers
Speaking of that dev-diary page: I just kept my promise and made it bilingual, you can switch to german by clicking on the coresponding icon located at the top-right of the page.

@Daytona675x

Quote:
Don't worry, there will be more early next year. This Christmas budget is really tight for many people.

@Daytona675x

I`d like the boxed version. I tried to pre-order from the Cinemaware site, but I couldn`t complete the transaction, probably due to the economic situation here ( bank capital controls, since last summer ). I hope this resolves in 2016.

@trixie
Yes, most likely. And after all the current number of presales, although not being what we hoped for, is pretty good nevertheless.

@Cass
Don't worry. PM sent.

@Daytona675x

Hey man hope you had a nice Christmas. Yeah money crunch for holidays is slowing sales also you probably peaked with orders from these forums from the fanboys lol. Also being a "pre order" doesnt help. Once people start getting their boxed copies other amiga pals and UGN buddies will probably purchase it! If you need help beta testing drop me a PM :)

I've been experiencing trouble with the sound on the Juli@ sound card (Envy24HT) with sound being stuck now and then on every title that uses some kind of acceleration (which also mean Candi), however with Wings I can't play half a minute before the sound breaks down - compositing worse than Warp3D.

@Srtest

Im sure he needs to know what your configuration is.

Daytona you still around? :)

X1000, Southern Islands Composite+Warp3D_si compatible card, Envy24HT Juli@ PCIEx1.