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Saxonia Issue 01 Part 012
Why not use planar
By Rumrunner/VOID
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A little while ago, while I was wisiting a friend of mine, he showed me
a new game called Need For Speed 2 something. Even I, who really dislike
the pc for all it is, had to admit that the game looked good, and it was
fun playing it.
However, the screen where you selected tracks, cars, and all that, was
very disappointing. There was a scroll on the top half of the screen,
telling about the different cars and tracks. And the scroll looked real
ugly. It flickered, and now and then, it also lost the bottom lines
of the font.
Remember that this game is a commercial product costing quite a lot of
money. And then, even when you have a fully up to date computer, you
cannot get a simple scroller that looks better than that. Even if the
scroller had no effects on it. It was single colour, no bouncing or
things like that. It simply moved from the right to the left.
Now, this brings me to the point of this article. Maybe is's not so
strange that the scroller looked as if you had programmed it in on
your pocket calculator (although it would probably had looked better then).
What I'm heading for is the chunky mode the pc uses. Think of how much
memory you have to move just to scroll a text in single colour across
the screen. After all, if your screen is set up to show lots of colours,
then you will not have the possibility of just moving just the single
colour as you can with planar mode. So, it seems that even fast processors
come up short here.
This also strenghtens my opinion that Amiga people should not use
chunky mode with chunky to planar converters for every single effect
they code. I think that the planar mode is much betters at certain tasks,
such as the mentioned scrolling. So why not use it?
Also, not just in the way of putting something onto the screen, but even
in the looks of effects, it seems like people try to make something
that looks like an effect on pc. Why? Sometimes, I get the feeling that
they are sorry that they are not coding on a pc instead of on the Amiga.
Certain effects can look good, even if they are in chunky mode, and
inspired by pc effects, but the traditional Amiga effects also looked
good. Why not work more with them and expand them, continuing the old
Amiga feeling? I'm sure that many of the good coders out there could
make something real stunning things that is never seen before.
I have (more or less recently) started to code myself. The code for this
mag is the first big project I have made, and now I'm working on a
musicdisk. I have taken a look at old effects, and tried to make my
own "twist" on them. No coder that has been in the business for a while
will think that they are even remotely revolutionary, but maybe they will
be at another point, when I have enhanced them somewhat. Who knows?
The one thing I DO know, is that there are still many secrets hidden in
the planar display mode and all the other things that is special for the
Amiga.
