Yasu's MorphOS Blog

Daniel asked me to show how the game looks like with more mountains, so I added that to my latest blog post:

I also added a link to the Hungarian magazine Amiga Mania, who have written an English article about Cherry Darling, Wings Battlefield and it’s technical challanges. You can download it here.

I also added that you can donate via Paypal for their free games. Click on their free games to reach the pledge buttons: cherry-darling.net.

[Edit] Added a picture with some mountains, a link to Amiga Manias latest issue about Cherry Darling and noted that you can donate via Paypal.

In my last blog post I described that one of the perks of being part of a small community is the ease in getting to know the important people. Last time it spoke about the porting wiz Szilárd “BSzili” Biró. This time it’s Daniel Müßener, also known as Daytona675x. He is the main programmer at Cherry Darling, and they have released several games like Ace of Hearts, Voxelbird Saga and Voxelnoid. He is also the programmer for the remake of Battle Squadron.

I got to know him in 2013, when Battle Squadron was announced for AmigaOS 4. I asked him if he would consider a MorphOS port and he said no because he didn’t have a working compiler. So I dug up a working one for him and he promptly changed his mind. Both Battle Squadron and their later releases have MorphOS support, and I feel a little boostful for playing a big part in it. Lately, Cherry Darling has started to port for AROS too.

The 10th of December the remake of the Amiga classic WWI flying game Wings was successfully funded at Kickstarter (after several failed attempts). One of their streatch goals was possible ports to NG Amiga systems, but in reality it wasn’t possible from the start. Wings Remastered was based on Unity, and could not be used on NG Amigas. This annoyed Amiga users, including Daniel.

I also donated to that kickstarter and the game was released last year. It’s not terribly bad but not terribly good either. And the graphics look cheap. And of course no NG Amiga release was made or been announced. So Daniel decided to do something about it himself.

He told me his plan to make a similar game and we started to exchange ideas. One was to make it a WWI 3D dogfight game from the perspective of Russian pilots. The reason was that Russians always play the villains but never the heroes. But as the game progressed it became clear that you couldn’t be too ambitious. So the idea was dropped in order to concentrate on the game element.

A couple of weeks ago I got my hands on the first beta version, and it is still in the beta stage but getting closer to an official release. With the permission of Daniel I’m gonna show you the game as it looks in it’s somewhat unfinished state.

When finished, the game will be sold on CD:s, and exclusively for MorphOS, AmigaOS 4 and AROS. Note that the game will probably be too heavy for you Classic Amiga users with PPC cards.

Installing the game is simple. Just copy the game where you want it and double click on the icon.

You will then be asked what resolution you want to use. Since I’m playing on my 2.7 GHz Powermac G5 with the R400 generation X800 graphics card I can play on the highest solution of 1920×1200 with no lag. But for the sake of this blog I have chosed window mode so no such requester will appear this time.

The Cherry Darling Logo.

This is something cool. Since AmigaOS 4 is pretty behind on it’s 3D drivers Cherry Darling made their own for the RadeonHD cards. Just to show “them” it can be done.

Since I’m a gold user (for being a beta tester) the logo is not black but golden.

There is a different message depending on what NG system you use. This is the one I get for MorphOS. If you click on the flag you can change language:

German.

French.

Hungarian.

And Swedish. Translated (poorly?) by me.

This is the Main menu. If you look at the top and bottom you will see different messages pass by. I also get a greeting in there.

In the Options menu you get the usual choice of settings.

In the Graphics settings you can choose quality and other related settings. The Yoko (Japanese: side) settings means that you use a normal screen, and if you change it to Tate (Japanese: stand) you can turn the monitor 90 degrees, which is better for a two player game.

Gameplay settings is what it sounds like. At this point, even with the best CPU Intelligence the computers are pretty stupid. We can hope for improvement there.

Rankings from the Main menu shows high score. This is from an earlier game with one of my friends who came over to try the game out.

And this is the online version.

Now we have looked at that we can start to play a game. You can chose to play a local game (Start) or a LAN (network) game. We chose Start LAN Game.

The settings are very simple. Change the settings as you please and press Start. But before that we take a look at the Map settings.

This is the Map settings. It’s the same for LAN games as well as local games. Now we start the game.

I do have another MorphOS computer connected via a router, but it’s off right now so there are no player joining this game. I press Cancel.

This is the Join LAN Game. I press Join and let the computer look for a game for me.

Of course, there is none so I will not get pass this point. I click Cancel again.

So lets play a single player game instead! I set the game as I want it and press Start. You can also play up to 4 local players on the same keyboard. You can change the control for the players in Main menu –> Options –> Edit Players.

Get Ready! Note the Wonderbaum scented tree at the top. It made me giggle the first time I noticed it.

Looking at the radar at the bottom I can see that one of my enemies is on my left.

There he is! And he got company!

Playing cat and mouse here. But they are very elusive.

I fire, but miss badly.

Note the sun flare. And also the FPS metre on the bottom right.  Not bad! You can also turn the metre off.

[Edit] Daniel asked me to show a gameplay picture with some mountains since my pictures are so flat.

That didn’t go to well now …

This is also another scene you might see a lot. This is what it looks like when you crash. Daniel has told me he intends to make it look better. It is a beta version after all.

Victory! I manage to beat the computers despite the misfortune above. Not that difficult since they are, as noted above, still pretty stupid. My impression of this game at this point is that it needs some tweaking to make it more fun. The problem now is that you tend to just run around in circles until you smash into each other, or some player finally start flying straight.

But Daniel is very much aware of this so we can be sure that the final version of the game will be a formidable dog fight game. The difference between the earlier and the later betas are noticable (for once, the computers where a lot more stupider before). Cherry Darling once again show us their skills.

[Edit] The Hungarian magazine Amiga Mania has an article about Cherry Darling, where they talk about this game and it’s technical problems. You can read it in English here (PDF).

Also, if you like their free games, don’t forget to donate. Paypal pledge is found on their homepage (click on the free games to reach it): cherry-darling.net.

[Edit] Added the Portal part of Mari0

[Edit 2] Final version has been released

[Edit 3] You can download the games at BSzili’s homepage

One of the really cool things about being part of a very small community is that it’s relatively easy to become pals with all the cool cats. One such pal is Szilárd Biró, better known as BSzili, and famous in the NG Amiga camp for porting a lot of games to AmigaOS 4, AROS and MorphOS.

His latest project is LÖVE; a Lua based 2D game engine. And he let me test it on MorphOS before everyone else. The engine does have some problems. For starters, LÖVE games are very picky about which version they can run on. Games made for older versions might not work on newer ones and vice versa. To make it even more complicated for MorphOS, never versions uses C++11 features not present in the latest MorphOS compiler. So the latest version Bszili can make at the moment is 0.8, limiting the amount of playable games.

I got an unfinshed test version, but if the final version works as simple as my version does, then all you need is to copy LÖVE and it’s data files to where ever you want, open a shell, go to the folder in question, type “love” plus the name of the game you want to play. If it doesn’t work, you will get an error message like this one:

In the final version you will be able to can load the games from icons instead if you prefer.

BSzili was nice enough to provide me with four working games. The first one is Duck Marines, a Chu chu rocket clone:

The point of this game is to direct a bunch of ducks (?) to your goal. The one getting the most ducks inside your goal wins. I used the arrow keys to move around and when I wanted to add a “direction arrow” (that will tell the duck where to go) I held space and chose direction with the arrow keys. It sounds easy but it gets pretty darn confusing quickly. I loved Chu chu rocket, but this game really doesn’t fare well with a keyboard. I tried to get it to work with a joypad but it sadly didn’t work. Also, the game lack sound:

Next game is a silly little time waster called In your face city trains. The backstory is simple: you are a office worker who have missed the morning train. So you decide to run to work. On the train tracks! Can you make it to work?

Run Forrest Run!

To survive you must jump trains and avoid cliffs and flying birds. You can also run through trains with open doors. Here I’m about to die since I’m bigger than the tunnel:

This will happen. A lot!

Next game is an odd one called Mari0 (with a zero instead of an “o”). It’s a mixture of the classic Nintendo game Mario Bros. and the action puzzler Portal. You play as Mario, armed with a portal gun. The portal gun opens two different doors and whatever falls into one of the doors comes out in the other. It’s a good way to dispose of enemies (teleporting them into a cliff for example) or clear a hurdle. But it’s still basically Mario Bros, with mostly identical rules as the original.

You move with WASP, fire the two portal holes with left and right mouse button and jump with space. Here I have created two portals to teleport an enemy back to the right (the blue light on the floor and the orange light on the celing to the right):

Frankly, I have not gotten myself in a situation yet where this gun is useful. Then again, I didn’t play that much. But it is a neat idea.

But there is actually a Portal version of this game that utilize the gun just like the Portal original, and it’s also a lot more fun to play. You reach it by pressing Select Mappack in the main menu:

Here you can chose gameplay (there are Downloable contents (DLC) at the top which you also want to take a look at):

Chose Portal:

Now chose 1 Player Game:

Here is Mario in the Portal world. If you can never tried Portal, I suggest you do it! It’s a great game. If you have played it before you will understand what you need to do here. If not, I will give a short explanation. You start at the beginning of the level and need to get to the other side. Problem is that the door is closed on the far right:

Here is Mario testing the portal gun. Remember that you can only create holes on light gray surfaces:

Mario jumps down and press a button. It opens the door:

Lets create another hole and get out of here:

We jumped through the hole. But oh no, the door closed again:

Lets create a new hole right above the button:

See that little cube there?

Create a hole there and let it fall on top of the button. Presto, the door opens again!

Now you can go through the door to the next part of the game. When you pass the blue beam all your portals will disappear and you have to start from scratch again. Now it’s up to you to figure out the rest. Good luck!

Last but not least we have Ortho Robot. This is a very interesting perspective based puzzle game.

The goal is to reach the green area. The first level is easy since you can just move with the arrow keys:

You can change the perspective by using the mouse:

Before reviewing this game there where two “suns” you could also grab if you did change the perspective like this. The reason is that if you just move in the third dimension like the first picture you will either miss those suns, or you will take too many steps in order to reach the,. But changing the perspective like the picture above you can grab them with a minimal amount of moves, because you eliminated one dimension. Sadly though, once taken the suns doesn’t come back when you replay. Anyway, we do it like in the picture above and move to the right:

Next level. Now we really have to start using the switch of perspective if we even want to reach the goal:

We do it like this:

We can’t reach the sun like this, but at least we can reach the goal:

LÖVE will be released in the near future was released on 18th of April and is downloadable from BSzili’s homepage: http://bszili.morphos.me. Also, the games mentioned in this blog is downloadable from his homepage. LÖVE will also be available for AmigaOS 4 and AROS.

If you (like me) appreciate all the hard work he has put into his various ports you should consider donating a little money (Paypal button can be found on his site).