Which games really pushed the Speccy?

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ZXDunny
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Re: Which games really pushed the Speccy?

Post by ZXDunny »

AndyC wrote: Mon Jul 09, 2018 6:44 pm
ZXDunny wrote: Mon Jul 09, 2018 9:28 am Yes, games that pushed the hardware to do things it wasn't supposed to be able to do. KL was not one of these. But even if we were to include games that pushed people's expectations of what could be done then KL still won't make the grade - Isometric 3D was really nothing innovative by the time it came out, whereas Freescape was innovative; it hadn't been done before on the Spectrum to that degree.
I'm not a fan of Knightlore, but when it came out it certainly did raise the bar considerably in the overall quality of Spectrum games. Isometrics had been done, but not with the level of graphical finesse that Knightlore had. Indeed most games had to up there overall effort with graphics after Knightlore came out.

Now it looks dated, has clunky controls and massive gameplay flaws, but you have to look at it from a contempory point of view. If you don't then really the only things that come close to counting are some of the multicolor games of recent years, Freescape and maybe a Doom demo game. And it's entirely possible that you'll have to ditch those in a year or so when someone out-does them.
I bought it when it came out - I was a massive Ultimate fan and after Atic Atac, Jet Pac, Sabre Wulf I felt they could do no wrong. I grabbed Knightlore and found it massively disappointing. Very sparse colour, awful gameplay and dull, dull, dull. I almost skipped Underwurlde the next time I was in town; I'm glad I didn't as it was a great return to form. I was however quite young (10 or 11 iirc) so I was probably not the target audience for KL unfortunately.

It wasn't until HoH that I got back into the isometric genre - and although again it was not particularly colourful, it did at least have a game in there.
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Re: Which games really pushed the Speccy?

Post by Ersh »

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Here's what Jon Ritman had to say about the game. (Taken from an interview here.)
"They gave me a copy of the game, I put it on and was just blown away. It was a Disney film you could play. It was just...great." The game was what many still today consider Ultimate's finest hour: Knight Lore. "I was just going 'how the f*** do they do that?'" smiles Ritman. "I didn't even understand how they made the graphics overlay on each other. Cleanly, and not in straight lines, in diagonals too. So I went home and started to try and work out how it was done, and work out a system that did it better."
No Knight Lore, no Batman, no Head over Heels. It paved the way for a sea of games in the same vein and to me that's at least pushing the envelope if not the hardware.

Not a big fan of the isometric games on the Speccy myself, The Great Escape being an exception.
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Pegaz
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Re: Which games really pushed the Speccy?

Post by Pegaz »

I cant believe Jon Ritman said this, for such a dull and disappointing game...
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Juan F. Ramirez
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Re: Which games really pushed the Speccy?

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Pegaz wrote: Mon Jul 09, 2018 9:23 pm I cant believe Jon Ritman said this, for such a dull and disappointing game...
1000 lines, Eric!!!
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Re: Which games really pushed the Speccy?

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Pegaz wrote: Mon Jul 09, 2018 9:23 pm I cant believe Jon Ritman said this, for such a dull and disappointing game...
Me neither, but there you go.
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Re: Which games really pushed the Speccy?

Post by Wall_Axe »

was knight lore the first game to have that quality of character sprite/animation?
you also had the transformation which did remind me of a cartoon and expressions on the character's faces.

if KL had been a boring character sprite I dont think the game would have had as much impact.
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Re: Which games really pushed the Speccy?

Post by beanz »

Knightlore and doom are the only games that really gave me a 'wow' moment when I first saw them moving (Rather than just still images)
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Re: Which games really pushed the Speccy?

Post by stupidget »

Don't get me wrong, KL is indeed a great game and for the time was an amazing achievement, but, can you compare it to Castle Master, Driller, Doom or Carrier Command with regards to what it was actually getting the Speccy to do?
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Re: Which games really pushed the Speccy?

Post by AndyC »

Wall_Axe wrote: Tue Jul 10, 2018 11:37 am was knight lore the first game to have that quality of character sprite/animation?
you also had the transformation which did remind me of a cartoon and expressions on the character's faces.

if KL had been a boring character sprite I dont think the game would have had as much impact.
It's certainly the first one I remember, it stood out amongst the other games of the time as being vastly superior graphically compared to other titles.
stupidget wrote: Tue Jul 10, 2018 3:28 pm Don't get me wrong, KL is indeed a great game and for the time was an amazing achievement, but, can you compare it to Castle Master, Driller, Doom or Carrier Command with regards to what it was actually getting the Speccy to do?
Don't get me wrong, KL is boring as hell, the controls are terrible and it was vastly outdone by the Ritman games. But it came before those and a long time before the Freescape titles and had an enormous impact.

Honestly I think it was more impressive at it's launch than Driller was at its. Which might seem weird from a technical perspective, but as time went on people became more confident of what could be achieved on the machine and Knightlore was one of, if not the, tipping point when developers really started to see that the machine was capable of a lot more than the relatively simplistic titles that had preceded it.
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Re: Which games really pushed the Speccy?

Post by Morkin »

Juan F. Ramirez wrote: Mon Jul 09, 2018 12:16 pm I of the Mask seems to be another candidate. Technically amazing by that year (1986) but boring as hell.

[media]https://youtu.be/kueN2DMN0J4[/media]
Sandy White himself admitted it was more a tech demo than a game.

Regarding Knight Lore, I enjoyed playing it at the time, and thought it was quite a novel idea, an iso platformer, rather than it just being about the graphics. Though I agree it hasn't aged as well as other Ultimate games.

I think that's why I wasn't a big fan of Batman, HoH etc. - there had been so many imitations by then they didn't really grab me, however well they were executed.

I was very impressed with Driller & Freescape, though it did get a bit sluggish at times.
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Re: Which games really pushed the Speccy?

Post by beanz »

Horses for courses etc. I still love and play knightlore and was never really impressed with Ultimates other fare (other than sabre wulf). Never got into head over heels or batman...seemed too long winding...knightlore could easily be completed.

Driller and Castlemaster were slow as hell which makes them dull, by then though I think I'd moved on the the 16bits (I think) I enjoyed castle master on the 16bits and looking at driller etc the speccy it's painful, it's hard to go back etc. Still I probably would have put more time and effort into it if I'd still been glued to the speccy.
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Re: Which games really pushed the Speccy?

Post by stupidget »

Were the Freescape games sluggish and slow because there was no way of squeezing any more out of the Speccy, or were they badly designed?

I think what I'm after is what games squeezed every last drop from the Speccy? I know that games such as JSW, KL, DeathChase etc etc were impressive when they were released, but, as they were released relatively early on in the Speccy's life span they probably missed some potential tricks. Tricks that later programmers would use for stuff like Freescape games, the big sprites and use of colour and activity on screen in Savage and Dan Dare 3 or something as impressive as Hero Quest.
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Re: Which games really pushed the Speccy?

Post by Ralf »

I was unable to enjoy full 3D games like Driller on Spectrum. They were just too slow, with framerate of one or two frames per second.

But yes, I can imagine it was impressive when it was released. Maybe more impressive to watch for a moment than actually play it ;)
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Re: Which games really pushed the Speccy?

Post by Joefish »

I don't think Freescape used any 'tricks' - that's the problem; it was all just plain maths, no matter how long it took.
Starstrike II and I, Of The Mask used shortcuts, pre-calculated stuff, limited views, etc. so they ran a hell of a lot faster.
Being able to roll your view left/right in the Freescape games was the biggest waste of programming effort imaginable.

A good one for optimisation in large 3D environments is Damocles, the sequel to Mercenary, on the ST. It has obvious grand changes like from space with round planets, to atmosphere with a horizon and islands, then city street plans become visible, then down to an intersection with a wide road and one or two buildings visible.

But it also has subtle things like when you're in a vehicle the windows of buildings are solid so you can't see in, but then your craft might be able to bank and roll, so having less to draw makes the calculations quicker.
When you're on foot, you can see objects inside buildings through the windows, but everything is always upright so the maths for drawing them can be optimised.

Even Mercenary has its tricks - you can only get out of your craft by descending underground, and then there's a completely different 3D engine for doors, rooms and the objects in them. Notice that the rooms are simply cuboids with decals; you can't open a door and see the room beyond.
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Re: Which games really pushed the Speccy?

Post by 5MinuteRetro »

Have any games using the Bifrost/Nirvana engine yet been mentioned? Some of those surely 'push' what the Speccy can do, given that its hardware was not designed to do what some of those titles actually achieve, colour-wise; and certainly I never expected it to be capable of such feats. Indeed, some of those effects seem to me like literal magic.
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Re: Which games really pushed the Speccy?

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5MinuteRetro wrote: Thu Jul 12, 2018 10:42 am Have any games using the Bifrost/Nirvana engine yet been mentioned? Some of those surely 'push' what the Speccy can do, given that its hardware was not designed to do what some of those titles actually achieve, colour-wise; and certainly I never expected it to be capable of such feats. Indeed, some of those effects seem to me like literal magic.
That's a really good point. I suppose Einar Saukas is the guy that could tell us considering he built the Bifrost engine.
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Re: Which games really pushed the Speccy?

Post by Joefish »

Well, clearly multicolour engines are a step up from what was done before. They're 'pushing' in the sense that someone's had to sit down and work out exactly what the CPU is doing for each tick of its clock and making the most efficient use of that time to do whatever it is you want it to do, i.e. shift colours to the screen. But that's the engine, not the game. That only applies for the chunk of time it's actually doing the 'rainbow' processing.

The games built on that multicolour engine are not necessarily the most efficient things that could run on it precisely because they're using a generalised engine to do their rendering. To properly push it you'd need to see custom sprite and rendering functions and very tightly written game code wrapped around a multicolour renderer.

On the subject of efficient coding, one big 'push' was Joffa's scrolling in Cobra, which exploits loads of careful tweaks and optimisations to do its scrolling at speed.
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Re: Which games really pushed the Speccy?

Post by Pegaz »

stupidget wrote: Thu Jul 12, 2018 1:34 pm
5MinuteRetro wrote: Thu Jul 12, 2018 10:42 am Have any games using the Bifrost/Nirvana engine yet been mentioned? Some of those surely 'push' what the Speccy can do, given that its hardware was not designed to do what some of those titles actually achieve, colour-wise; and certainly I never expected it to be capable of such feats. Indeed, some of those effects seem to me like literal magic.
That's a really good point. I suppose Einar Saukas is the guy that could tell us considering he built the Bifrost engine.
I agree.
The problem is, that football in Brazil is almost religion and therefore at the time of each World Cup, Einar literally disappeared from the forum. ;)
I'm glad it all ends on Sunday and I hope to see him soon here on sc, where he belongs.
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