A Door Re-Opens (Atari Owl Project in M!Games)

Hello Everyone

Sorry for being so quiet. Fear not... work continues on the project, in quiet but pushing on.

For the moment we have some pleasant news... of particular interest to our German friends.

Now back in February I mentioned a rather pleasing email we'd received - in fact this was from our wonderful friend Daniel (108stars) who was writing a Retro Console article for the leading German Gaming magazine M! Games.

Such are the vagaries of publishing, the article did not appear when expected.

Now the Good News... Daniel's excellent "Alles Repro?" article was published in the M! Games 8/2010 issue published on July 2nd (page 92) ... and one will find therein mention and a screenshot of the Atari Owl Project.

M!Games Website
German
English

Many Thanks to Daniel .. and we hope our German friends can avail themselves of the magazine and read his excellent article. We shall be having a copy sent over so that we can enjoy the magazine too.

All the Very Best,
Joe (Atari Owl)

Moving Forward

Hi Everyone

Well a couple of weeks ago I alluded to some good news, its probably now time to partially elaborate on that.

Firstly, coding... it's funny how something that seems like it should work doesn't and yet something that seems like it shouldn't ...does.

After the failure of the previous engine optimisation experiment, attention was turned instead onto an attempt to achieve an approximation of perspective correct texture-mapping (beyond that already applied to the floors) at an acceptable frame rate.

SUCCESS! The approximation substantially achieved its aims AND it's even a TINY bit faster than the pure affine mapping. This should put it beyond many of the affine only games of the Jaguar's time period.

Secondly, the other point to which we alluded before has unfortunately been delayed by outside factors. Hopefully we can talk about this at a later date.

All the Best
Atari Owl

Atari Owl Project Video Demo

Well finally here is the official Demo video, its our first youtube effort so it's a little rougher than we'd like, but hopefully it will give a good idea of the project in motion. Just click on the image to link to the video.

Hope you enjoy it.

All the Best
Atari Owl and Raven

Atari Owl Project at €-Jagfest 2009

Well, the €-Jagfest in Kaarst is over or nearly over now, the attendees have had a chance to see what we hoped they would. I'm therefore going to post some screenshots of what was hopefully seen (barring technical glitches), and hopefully also give those of you unable to attend an idea of how the engines are progressing.

First of all there was an improved version of the poly/voxel engine seen at JagFest UK. This included an improved version of the lighting engine and an improved terrain following control system as well as using some more of Raven's textures.

In this demo, at Starcat's suggestion, the figure was turned around to provide a more interesting focal point so if anybody wonders why she's facing towards the camera and gliding around backwards - this is the reason. In the final game all the figures will of course be animated and facing in the correct directions.

This was followed by a demo which should be new to everyone and I hope would have been a very pleasant surprise.

After all, what use is a poly/voxel outdoor engine if you can't go indoors? - So here it is!

I have to say I'm thrilled with how Raven's floor, wall, door and window textures have worked.

In this final shot the figure appears to be levitating because although the camera has been tilted only the matrix affecting the world view and not the figure has been modified - eventually of course both matrices will be changed and the figure and world will rotate appropriately.

I'm very happy with all Raven's Textures here, but I have to say the capture card has not done justice to her glorious Stained Glass Window texture which, to my mind at least, looks better on a real Jaguar.

I very much hope that people will feel the wait for €-Jagfest has been worth it in order to see the revised and improved engines.

All the Best

Joe (Atari Owl)

€-Jagfest 7th November 2009

Just a reminder to everyone about the €-Jagfest in Kaarst, near Düsseldorf on Saturday 7th November. The €-Jagfest history is long and rich and thankfully much of it is documented online. We're therefore very glad to be able to demo some more of the project at this event.

I've sent Starcat (Lars) a couple of demos for show, they are improved from the JagFest UK demo and hopefully will give people a good idea of the current status. Once this is over, I intend to (at last) post a bit more of the Project History here and a little more about what can be expected of the project in the future.

Thank you everyone for bearing with us over these last few weeks between JagFests, Its given us some time to fix issues with which we were unhappy and add some more features to the demos in order to illustrate the direction of development. In the meantime, here's a brief reminder of what will be seen.

All the Best,
Joe (Atari Owl)

Atari Owl Engine on Atari Jaguar (Youtube)

Hi Everyone,

Well although we're not putting up any footage ourselves of the engine until after E-JagFest in Germany, there is now a short Teaser Trailer from the UK JagFest put up on youtube by one of the JagFest UK attendees.

Cheers
Joe (Atari Owl)

JagFest UK 2009: After the Party

Hi Everyone

Well JagFest is over for another year. As in previous years I was only able to attend for the single day. It was a good JagFest though with lots of fun, gaming and interesting coding discussions.

As promised, a demonstration of the engine to date WAS made, and as promised it was more advanced than the previous screenshots we have shown.

I think the general consensus was that the engine was smoother, prettier, and all around better than expected. The large draw distance seemed to draw favourable comments.

I was generally happy with the presentation, the brightness of some of the landscape and a glitch in the sound engine slightly disappointed me but overall I think it showed what I intended.

Furthermore it was great to see Stephen Moss at the JagFest and for people to get a chance to see his PS2 adapter connected to a Jag, and via a skunkboard, the Jag reading the Analogue controls and controlling the motors.

Its probably worth mentioning therefore that I have one of these adapters and I'm SUPPOSED to have been helping him with the coding, my lack of activity is something I can only apologise for, but I will say that I thoroughly intend to support the controller for the game, in addition to the standard and pro Jaguar Controllers.

I'm intending to post some footage of the engine moving eventually, but I would rather like the E-JagFest attendees to get a good look first without knowing EXACTLY what they're going to see too far in advance.

Cheers,
Joe (Atari Owl)

Raven's Graphics

Just a quick note to let everyone know that Raven (the lovely Mrs. Owl) has a new Blog up to show some of her excellent graphics both connected and unconnected with the game project.

All the Best
Joe (Atari Owl)

JagFest UK 2009

Just a quick reminder to everyone that I shall be attending JagFest UK 2009 at the Chiltern Hotel in Luton on Saturday September 19th, and that I shall be demoing a recent build of the project.

Once this is over, I intend to post some more of the Project History here and a little more about what can be expected of the project in the future.

I will also post a few more technical posts covering some aspects of Jaguar coding and explain why I chose the current development platform... and what the future may bring.

Finally, early feedback has shown that some readers may feel I have been a little techy (thankfully not tetchy) in my posts to date - I have therefore revisited old posts to attempt to make them a little less opaque. In addition I have added a section to allow readers to group the posts into the groupings that interest them most (Announcements, Project History & Technical) though of course there will be some crossover.

As always any feedback on how we can make this site more useful is always appreciated.

All the Very Best
Joe (Atari Owl)

Thank Goodness for Calico

Well there's a new link on our blog... for Calico, our wonderful musician.

Calico was the first person added to the Owl & Raven team and has been involved on this project behind the scenes for quite some time.. and now she has now given me permission to link to her myspace page.

I'm always grateful to have been able to add Calico to our team, she's phenomenally talented and creative, and her beautiful music always inspires me to push harder on the project - to try to make it live up to her contributions.

Here is a fantastic arrangement she did of the Beyond Good and Evil Music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8QQVmRV87k


All the Best
Joe (Atari Owl)

Absolutely beautiful. And she's ours...mwahahahaahaah (Raven)

A Start

Hello Everyone

Well I guess its finally time I made a start on telling people about the homebrew project.
Some of you may know I've been around the Atari scene for a while, firstly with the Falcon and CT60, and then the Atari Jaguar (Atari's Last Gaming Console), but keeping rather quiet.

I started coding the Jag a few years back but didn't really know what I was intending to do, I knew I wanted to do 3D but that was about all. I therefore began thinking what kind of graphics engine would be suitable. In coding parlance, the graphics engine is the part of the computer code which determines what is to be shown on the screen, in a 2D program this will be layers of oimages, in a 3D program this will be geometric objects transformed via perspective calculations into images suitable for display on a TV or monitor. In modern game developments these sections of code, these "Engines" are often licensed from other devlopers, you will frequently hear for example that a game is based on 'the Unreal engine'. This means that the major part of the code determining what will be displayed is a licensed version of that contaned in the game 'Unreal Tournament", theree are also many other examples. For the Atari Jaguar there was example 3D supplied to official developers, but when I began coding i did not have a copy of this, and so I began to write my own.

In the end, impressed by Phase Zero on the Jaguar, I started on a voxel engine (from scratch) - for those unfamiliar with the term, Voxel is short for Volumetric Pixel, I could give a lot of background but the essence that you need to know is that it's an extremely efficient method for displaying convincing, shaded, rolling landscapes such as that shown in the attached screenshot.

Shortly after that I began coding a 3D polygon engine (also from scratch as I had not seen the Atari demo code). The Polygon engine is what current gameplayers will be most familiar with, essentially it is a section of code which uses a large number of geometric shapes (usually triangles) to simulate the shapes of the objects, characters and vehicles seen in the game world, it will simulate the direction of light on these objects and their ability to reflect this light, it will also draw pictures onto these, to give them texture, which may be skin, or rock, scales or hair, bricks or slime, anything the game producer desires.

For a while both pieces of code (engines) ran entirely separately, but I demo'd the voxel engine on its own at JagFestUK in Rochester in 2004. Finally the polygon code was added to the voxel engine and they merged successfully in time for JagFest 2005. I'm attaching a picture of what was shown then, including a coloured voxel landscape, fogging and a whopping big textured triangle in the foreground poking out of the voxel landscape.

I hope this finally starts to answer a few of the questions that people have been asking about the project and as time rolls on (and depending what we show at JagFest this year) I'll talk about it some more.

Cheers,
Atari Owl