Developer's meeting #2

Yesterday it was a great day! Myself, Nooly and MarK met together, to discuss additional details for music and sound setup of Chaos Guns. In a nutshell - you will hear music only during menu, intro & outros. During the game, audio channels are going to be used exclusively for sound effects and environmental sounds. You can expect some extra samples announcing, when your character level up, find secret area and similar. I was personaly surprised, how many options regarding mixing sounds we have - but of course it costs some computing power as well, so we have to be very carefull. Unfortunately - I'm no musician at all, so can't really properly explain all advanced details. What I can say is, that MorpOS version of the game will use high quality MP3 music, while classic Amiga will use high quality XM ;). Nooly demonstrated on fly differences between formats and I have to say - I was personally really impressed by quality of output.



Then we moved to MarK's Amiga with Blizzard 1230/50 to do some testing of current game engine. Optimisation is still not perfect, but even now, in fullscreen mode, with turned off air objects, it shows around 10 fps on average, which is very close to playable status (note: my Amiga with 060 shows around 25 fps with all options ON). There is a space for further optimisation, however implementation of air objects is currently mostly because of decoration purpose. In case we will make game smoother on 030, air objects will serve also for game mechanics (in such a case you wouldn't be able to switch them off, obviously).

Nooly is creating track for the game -  it was great to see him working live! ;)

Beside that, we have discussed future development, besides demo. Editation tool will be expanded, because currently we have to insert each little object manually, directly to TXT file, which is very cumbersome - so there will be brand new tool for it. With many people on board I have to redesign current progress tracing sheet, to improve work organisation. I'm very excited, that MarK is seriously considering release of full game also on nonAGA Amigas with apropriate accelerator - I was surprised by his great idea, how to handle palette brand new way, allowing us to use palette with lower number of colours. It is too soon to confirm anything, we are all focusing on polishing demo right now, to demonstrate main features of the game. I hope you will be blown away, because I certainly am ;).

And because you were so nice to read full article, here are some new screenshost from WinUAE!