Atomic Bomberman Fan Rewrite

Hi, dear bombing aficionados!

A blast from the past! Literally
Daytona675x, the best equipped man in code business, is proud to present his latest lucubration:
(sorry Andreas, I couldn't resist when I saw the Hollywood news )

Some weeks ago I released my fan rewrite of the Win95 game Atomic Bomberman (originally from 1997 by Interplay). And just yesterday I released an update which fixes a few issues and also adds some extra features.

It has been coded from scratch, just by watching and playing the original game on an antique Win98 machine. Much care has been taken to make the gameplay feel exactly as if you were playing the old original game.
Actually I coded this "rewrite" in 2011 already, so that we (my old university friends and I) could meet at my place every quarter of a year and play it on the big screen again. The problem was that the original game didn't properly work on modern Windows machines anymore. That was before I even knew about NG Amigas and such

End of 2018 I quickly ported it to AOS4. It was meant to be a contribution to Amiga Ireland 2019. Later in 2019, at the Amiga Future's stand at the Gamescom 2019, it was the audience magnet. It really attracted hundreds of people to the stand I also carried it to Amiga34, Amiwest 2019 and Amiga Ireland 2020. It's really the definitive party game Note that it's not meant to be played alone. While there is some rudimentary AI, it's just no fun.
Friends and booze and bombs, that's the correct setup

This rewrite / player program is free to use, at your own risk, maybe your computer just explodes, who knows.
However: The original game data files of the original Windows CD are required to play this game!

If you don't own it yet then you may buy it here or here for example.
Check the game's readme for further instructions.

Requirements:
+ lots of USB joypads (Geeekpi SNES style pads work well; be aware: many of those cheap pads DONT work with Amigas!)
+ original Atomic Bomberman game CD
+ one of the following:
- AmigaOS4: >= 4.1 FE, Warp3D
- AmigaOS4: >= 4.1 FE, Compositing (if you don't have a Warp3D-capable card)
- MorphOS: >= 10, TinyGL
- AROS: x86, e.g. Icaros >= 2.2.0, Mesa 3D

Or get it from my homepage. There you'll also find the Windows version.
And here's the dedicated Youtube playlist which contains all the dev recordings so far.

If the game doesn't start on Amigas: make sure the executable flag is set (protect AtomicBomberman +e).

One question to those who give it a try:
on ddni's X1000 (and so far only on this machine) the W3D version produces a tiny frame of uncritical but ugly pixel garbage around the picture. If this happens on your system too, please drop me a PM with your specs! Thanks!

Tchatching,
Daniel

Version history



v2.10:
- new gameplay option: no sleepy players. If a player has been inactive for 15 seconds, it will auto-drop a bomb... Highly recommended, especially for network games!

- networking: the master can now manually increase / decrease the waiting-for-clients-countdown by tapping left / right. Yesterday we had a situation where I missed exactly that feature: ErnstEiswürfel was about to join but only 15 seconds remained, so he just missed it and everybody had to quit and rejoin.

- Fix (was uncritical, but...): "toilet mode" isn't a configurable input mapping anymore Forgot to set the non-editable flag for this fixed mapping, which is why the auto-configuration system of my framework made it configurable in the controls menu.

- (maybe) fix, networking: ddni and ErnstEiswürfel reported a weird issue that to me looks as if their network connection was sometimes so instable that some crucial state change packages would pile up - and then suddenly be executed one after the other without any delay. That resulted in situations where it looked as if the scenery was changing all of a sudden - although other players experienced it as what it was: matchend, result-screen, next round. But for them it was more like matchend (or shortly before matchend) -> next round, the result-screen would essentially be skipped or visible as a black screen for one frame. Well, that's my guess because I don't have another explanation So to work around that I extended the network protocol by dedicated sync-commands for those screen-changes. Crossing fingers, untested
Thanks to ddni for recording a video of that phenomenon!

- (maybe) fix, networking: for some Amiga players at least a hard master drop would result in their client to appear frozen. It didn't crash though, it was simply waiting for a TCP timeout on the socket which was closed by the master. Apparently it's no good idea to rely on the TCPIP stack's error handling here. Therefore the master now sends an explicit "server-death"-message to all clients before shutting down. Only tested on Windows so far.
Thanks to ErnstEiswürfel and ddni for reporting!

- made 4711 the default network port for no particular reason other than that I chose it for testing Yes, I know that it's used by other services (just like probably every TCP port) and I don't care at all.

- Windows, auto-updater: the self-deletion of the update installer eventually triggered some stupid antivirus software :P Disabled the self-deletion step, hope that does the trick.
Thanks to Valentin for reporting and analyzing!

- Windows, auto-updater: now 64 bit executable.


v2.9:
- Fix, networking: the master was allowed to continue even if not every connected client selected at least one color. This in turn resulted in a deadlock when starting a level. This bug could be trigger only if multiple players shared one client machine.
Thanks to aPEX for tapping into it

- Fix, networking: the master was still listening when the game had already started. This could cause undefined behaviour on the server if another client made a connection attempt on an already running match, which in turn resulted in the clients to appear frozen (in fact the clients survived when the server was restarted, but well, academic ...).
Thanks to nujack for tapping into it

- Fix, cosmetic: the last used text input field remained active (cursor blinking) even if you already moved the row-selection to another input field, controls and network menus.

- the win screens are now being displayed for at least 2-3 seconds. Before that it was possible to practically skip them by an "accidential" button-click...

- "About Atomic Bomberman" section extended

- networking: the master can now hit F9 to toggle some sort of "on the toilet" or "baby doesn't want to let daddy play a few rounds" mode... This has the effect that the win-screens etc. are auto-skipped after some seconds so that the session can go on without delay.

- networking: for joining there's no need for a password anymore. The password is now meant as a key for the master only - so that only he can start new sessions for that game name. Otherwise somebody who wanted to join the game but accidentially hit "start" effectitvely hijacked the session.
Note: the web-server component has been modified, older versions won't anymore!

- when we now played the first online matchs yesterday I found it pretty hard to get people to join in time. And sometimes one client connected but soon quit again when nobody else joined. Most of all this is a matter of timing: we tried to arrange our sessions via Facebook events, not by direct live chat. So naturally people would join at slightly different times. To make it all a bit easier I added a timer: the master can set a countdown which every client sees. When it drops to zero the game begins.


v2.8:
- Fix: a debug-relic caused the game to always try to enter fullscreen mode on startup even if you previously chose to use window mode. This one slipped through because I always play in fullscreen
Thanks to jabirulo for reporting!

- in the following I added some more game-play options. Unfortunately there wasn't enough space left in the level select menu. The only option for lazy coders was to decrease the vertical gap between those menu items. But this again reduced readability too much. Which is why I added an orange row highlite. For consistency I added this to all screens (only exception being the main menu because I didn't want to change the original look here).

- Default bomb countdown was 3 seconds whereas the original's is 2. No idea how this difference could remain unnoticed for 10 years
Thanks to Valentin for reporting!

- However, those 3 seconds don't feel bad at all. Therefore I made this a new game-play option and 2 seconds is the new default value, possible values range from 1 to 4

- In the original certain considered "powerful" extras don't appear for the first 40 seconds of a match. The golden flame and the trigger are considered "powerful" in that context. IMHO this behaviour is questionable. E.g. personally I find the red glove to be at least as powerful as the trigger. Anyway, for "original-purists" I added yet another game-play option so that you can adjust that delay. Values range from 0 to 50 seconds.
Thanks to Valentin for reporting!

- the red glove punch action is now also triggered if you don't simultanously press a directional button. This was a another significant difference to the original game. So you can now punch away a nearby bomb without sliding into it.
Thanks to Valentin for reporting!

- extended the About / Credits area and added a donor-thanks section

- all Amiga lha archives are now patched so that the executable protection bits are set. Also, the AROS version is now also packaged into an lha instead of a zip. From now on this is also true for all my other projects.


v2.7:
- new disease: invisible. Well, a little bit of your shadow remains visible
Apparently this one was planned for the original PC version (there are sound effects for it, which are now used too, of course) but never made it into the final game AFAIK.

- one second after the last opponent has been blown up, the hurry-wall stops and bombs don't explode anymore. The idea is to reduce the chance of draw-games especially in very tight situations (which most likely means that an intense battle happened). The original has something like this too, thanks to Valentin for reporting!
Until now the game simply waited for 2 seconds before it would end the match and switch to the end-screens, so this is a subtle change. Can make quite a difference though.


v2.6:
- Trigger bombs are now converted to normal bombs if the player who planted them dies or picks up an extra which makes him lose the trigger.
Thanks to Valentin for reporting this pretty significant difference to the original game!

- Fix: shadows weren't correctly premultiplied by alpha. Only the trained eye should have noticed though

- added one of the original's cheat-modes Well, at least it was planned to be inside the original game, however I didn't manage to actually activate it. But, yeeeehaaaa, this remake supports it (I modified the joypad sequence a bit though, have fun looking for it ) Thanks to Valentin for pointing me at that one


v2.5:
- punch animation is now played no matter if there's a bomb to punch away or not. This was a minor difference to the original game. This behaviour has one benefit: you can easily check if you still got the puncher... Thanks to Valentin for reporting!

- team mode: original player colors are now being used during the first seconds of a match before they are being switched to white / red team colors. Before you had a hard time figuring out who you were...

- somewhat adjusted explosion segment offsets, those were a bit off. Well, they still are, but less than in the original and less than before. The thing is: unbelievable but true, they are totally off in the original: it's all shifted by some useless pixels to the right and some asset the segments often simply don't fit well.

- explosion-animations are now repeated once and played at twice the speed. Closer to the original.

- detail: if you have the kicker you cannot stop kicked bombs with the 2nd button anymore if you also got the jelly!

- new disease: swap player position with a random opponent. For whatever reasons I forgot about this one, saw it in a Youtube video of the original game now

- disease timing modified to be more closely to the original. Especially the duration decrease when you pass a disease has been changed: before it was 1 sec., now the remaining disease time is cut in half for you. Thanks to Valentin for reporting!

- improved texture modes, depending on your hardware. In general this improves the playfield's and animations appearance. If possible the washed out bilinear filtering is avoid in favor or an filtered scale2x variant.

- some graphics, namely bricks, use purple as a transparency indicator. However, for some this color-key is slightly off, so that here and there a single purple pixel remains. Was very well visible for the lilys in that trampoline world. The purple-check is now somewhat fuzzy so that stuff like that is gone.
Windows users: the game will ask for UAC rights elevation to create a new set of patched decrunched assets.

- angel death animation: angel now flying upwards

- death animations fade out on last frame, simply looks better than those original abrupt endings.

- extras explanation screen: extra-icons now without bilinear washed out filter look.

- for upcoming updates the online update mechanism has changed. Before the game would only check for an update once per day. Now it does always on startup. The reason is that for an online session all players have to be on the same update level...

- teleporter sound effects added.

- trampoline sound effects added.

- many more generic extra-pickup voice-overs added.

- many more hurry voice-overs added.

- many more frag taunt voice-overs added.

- sound when punching a bomb.

- sound when picking up bomb.

- sound when a thrown bomb is bouncing around.

- generic disease voice-overs added.

- poops sounds added.

- even more sounds added

- new sound effects manager to gracefully handle this giant amount of sounds even on low end hardware.

- put original's dedicated tune in the waiting-for-net-players screen.

- optimization: extra color analyzation to avoid creation of sometimes rather useless secondary textures (useless in terms of: you won't spot the difference...) -> less VRAM used, faster texture generation step.

- optimization: if the hardware supports it, the game will now create and cache NPOT textures, which means less VRAM used and faster texture generation.

- optimization: tuned texture atlas generation parameters for the different atlas types (animation, world preview, playfield, extras). Makes quite a difference, until now all used the most effective but most costly variant best suited for the animations, which is overkill for the other variants.

- optimization: texture atlas creation moved to the initial startup phase.

- textures now with premultiplied alpha if the hardware supports it (should be pretty much all but Compositing). Above all this gets rid of those little filtering artefacts here and there.


v2.4:
- online update server has been configured and activated for this game for upcoming versions (for all but AOS4 the game should auto-update to this version already, forgot to enable a special-treatment-build-flag for AOS4 which is necessary because of the extra Compositing version for Polaris users and other poor souls without Warp3D).

- Trigger bombs can now be triggered one by one instead of all at once. No idea how this significant difference to the original could survive for so long Thanks to Valentin for reporting.

- network sanity check improved.

- new option in level-select menu: optional short "get ready" message before match start. Its only purpose is to reduce the probability that people accidentially plant a bomb immediately on startup because they are still tapping the fire-button to begin the match. The playfield is also darkened a bit during that time.

- more start position options (N is the number of active players):
0. map default ignore colors (like before)
Linearly uses the first N start-positions in the order defined in the map.
1. random ignore colors (like before)
Radomly uses the first N start-positions in the order defined in the map.
2. original map default
Uses the start positions dedicated to the respective player color.
3. original random
Random positions, but only picked from the set of active player colors.
4. fully random
Randomly uses all available start positions.


v2.3:
- Fix: conveyor belts didn't transport players anymore
This bug was introduced with v2.0 when the core logic was modified to use fix-point math instead of floats for networking and slipped through unfortunately. Thanks to Valentin for reporting!

- when fixing the above bug the player movement logic was improved too. Funny enough all this also made the rewrite a bit more exact by "accident": in the original the conveyor belt has no impact if you try to move in an orthogonal direction, this is now correctly replicated.

- new gfx option "stretch" to disable the aspect correction. For those who prefer blown-up bombermen and no black borders like Valentin.

- network sanity check: only identical program versions can connect for an online match. If you try to join a session with a different version, you'll be kicked immediately.


v2.2:
- further improved network game join behaviour.


v2.1:
- cleaned up the network menus.

- join-online-session won't block if the server isn't yet reachable.

- Windows installer: readme is installed and gets its own start menu entry.


v2.0:
- due to the Corona crisis I had to add this: online matchs
*** BETA *** There may still be flaws, only tested a bit

- credits, thanks and greetings added.

- disabled some random backgrounds pictures which aren't well suited for text.

- Erhard asked for it, here it is: a pause function (via pause or help key, or F12 on Macbooks which don't have any of those other keys ). The intermediate result-screens can be paused too.

- Fix: default key mapping was wrong, up and down keys toggled Thanks to Erhard for reporting!


v1.2:
- team-mode added! In contrast to the original game this rewrite also supports kills-win-matches in team-mode. Consequently the kills of all team member are accumulated and presented on the result screen too. In team mode the players are either part of the white (odd player #) or red (even player #) team. Btw.: the crappy AI tries to avoid killing team members

- new game-play mode "Annihilation". If this is activated, then every player has the glove, the punch and a 10000 jelly bombs stock from the beginning Also, if you lift a bomb then you'll immediately throw it away again ( = autofire). This is truely hardcore!

- Player-select-menu now with clear-all-assignments-button.

- Player-select-menu now with unused/AI-toggle-button.

- Player-select-menu now with assign-by-fire. Consequently a dedicated "Start"-button has been added to this menu.

- Fix: Match-select-menu, ?translation mixup. It wasn't the conveyor-belt's size but the stomping wall's size

- Fix: Results-stats-screen now shows the correct dedicated background picture.

- Fix: the explosion's last "south" element was missing Forgot to adjust one layout file. Funny enough nobody noticed so far Added that one when I prepared the new Amiga ports for public release...

- Fix: the punch-up animation was wrong, it was the same as the punch-down animation. Reason was that there are several name conflicts with the original's unpacked asset names. This was one of those (a redundant set of punch-down anim frames would overwrite the true punch-up anims...) and in this case I forgot to set a patch. Now I did Funny enough nobody noticed so far Added that one when I prepared the new Amiga ports for public release...

- Fix: the internal multi_frame command eventually didn't load all anim frames. Affected some death animations.

- Fix: it could happen that two (or more) floating bombs ended up resting on the same field. I made a subtle logic change to prevent this. However, this had some interesting side-effects which I had to compensate for. Let's hope I cought'em all!

- Fix: bouncing bombs outside the actual playfield eventually made it into the next match.

- Fix: last Windows-installer was broken, files missing.

- Fix: Windows-version now correctly handles UAC when it comes to decrunching.

- RAM and VRAM requirements massively reduced.


v1.1:
- CD DATA detection improved.


v1.0:
- initial release.

What about Wings?

@Raziel
If you'd not derail this thread instead of asking in the Wings Remastered thread over here (which somebody derailed into some sort of minigl thread... ), then you'd actually get a real answer, thanks.

The game is awesome and really easy to hook into. It is more than necessary for every amiga party. Thank you Daniel for bringing us this great game and for all the hard work you do.

@walkero
Thanks mate

@all
Some videos:

- X5000, AmigaOS4
- Tabor, AmigaOS4
- PowerMac 3,5 (G4, 512 MB, 733MHz), MorphOS
- Dedicated low end PC, AROS x86
- My cross development system, Windows10

And for comparison:
- Gameplay-Music-Video of the original PC game; accelerated and modded, but cool thanks to Celldweller
- Some matches with the original PC game (you can spot the hickups and distortions it also suffers from)

This game is great fun! Excellent port too. It went down a treat at Amiga Ireland. Thanks Dan.
Be great to see if any X1000 users get the minor trash around screen borders.

Works nicely with my Sam 440ep Flex

Atomic Bomberman Fan Rewrite 2.2 Corona Edition

Because Corona and social distancing suck hard, I decided to somewhat help to make the latter easier to handle. That's why this new version got an online gaming feature! And actually a pretty nifty one:
not only can you run a mixed shared game-session with AmigaOS4-, MorphOS-, AROS- and Windows- (and maybe Linux, Wine should do) machines, no, you can also do e.g. a 6 player match with 4 players on machine A and 2 players on machine B.

Note that, just as with the previous versions, this here is a "player" application which requires the original game CD data from back then, check the readme for further details and instructions.

Also note: the network code is a quick shot, done only in a couple of days with only minimal testing. Internally the whole core game logic has been modified to become float-free so that the logic is now 100% deterministic no matter which machine / system. This in turn allowed me to only transfer player inputs and frame timings around, each client then runs the game as usual.

Anyway, I uploaded it to os4depot and AROS Archives (it's still in the upload queue, watch for version 2.2 to come available!) and Papiosaur already put in on MorphOS storage (thanks mate).
You can also get it from my homepage, there you'll also find the Windows version.

And now: tchatching!

@Daytona675x

Whooot no "special" Polaris build?!?!?!

THAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANKS A LOT mate!!!!

@Daytona675x

Thanks!!

Thank You Daytona!

Me and my four year old son are very pleased!

All Amigans, please stay safe from that damn virus!

@jabirulo
Quote:
That's what the "compositing" version is for

@Joeled
Cheers

@Breed
Quote:
Great, that's what it's meant for Have fun!

@all
New version 2.3 available (or available soon, depending on where you get it)...
Only minutes after the 2.2 release I was informed about a dumb bug:

- Fix: conveyor belts didn't transport players anymore :P This bug was introduced with v2.0 when the core logic was modified to use fix-point math instead of floats for networking and slipped through unfortunately (I had commented out some parts and forgot to reactivate them). Thanks to Valentin for reporting!

And while I was at it:

- when fixing the above bug the player movement logic was improved too. Funny enough all this also made the rewrite a bit more exact by "accident": in the original the conveyor belt has no impact if you try to move in an orthogonal direction, this is now correctly replicated.

- new gfx option "stretch" to disable the aspect correction. For those who prefer blown-up bombermen and no black borders like Valentin.

- network sanity check: only identical program versions can connect for an online match. If you try to join a session with a different version, you'll be kicked immediately.

@Daytona675x

Thx so much, Bomberman is the number one for party game, playing nice (solo thought) on my X5000.

data files from french CD are indeed working, although the game is still in English !
Game seems abandonware and CD can be downloaded from AbandonwareFrance :
https://abandonware-france.org/ltf_aba ... jeu.php?id=2773&fic=liens

@Daytona675x

Many thanks for this !!!

@K-L
@Lio

Cheers

@Lio
Quote:
I didn't even know that there was a localized french version. I know that the original game's texts are inside its MESSAGES.TXT file and that it can be easily localized, but I didn't know that it was actually done. I bought my own CD in Germany back then and it's english nevertheless (and IIRC that's true for all my university friends' copies too), AFAIK there was no German localization.

But I didn't care about that MESSAGES.TXT file anyway, mostly because my rewrite has different / improved menus. E.g. the original has no profiles mechanics / menu at all. And I also didn't care about localization in this case, that's why it'll always be English no matter what (too lazy ).

Quote:
Aaah, solo is no fun. I didn't put any effort into the AI, just enough to have "something", mostly for when I'm test-playing alone. It's pretty much equally useless as in the original, maybe even dumber (but well, its "ThinkAndMakeDecision" function is less than 100 lines incl. comments, so... ). Depending on the map it can be okayish but most of the time it's plain dumb.

@all
It can also be run on Android Thanks to Valentin for trying and recording.

And here's the dedicated Youtube playlist which contains all the dev recordings so far.

@Daytona675x

thanks Daniel!!! weather getting nice soon to take the Daytona out

@ DDNI

no issues here on my X1000 witth HD7950

@328gts
Cheers, mate! Year round driver here

Quote:
That remains to be a really weird mystery. I think I will simply counter this with an artifically reduced scissor rect (by one pixel at each border). This would simply cut the pixels that would otherwise later remain as garbage I will make that an optional feature, to be explicitely enabled by tool type.

Version 2.4 available now!
Version info
Downloads and other info

Cheers,
Daniel

I was trying the demo version from https://archive.org/details/BOMBDEMO
but the SCHEMES directory is missing...