Power of FreePascal for Amiga Systems
Raycaster compiled for all my Amiga computers available and it compiles and works nicely… mostly (turned map off for A1200, for the other does not make much difference in speed).
Online FPC with FPU
You know the online FPC compiler, right? Until now it was only with soft float because usually that is enough. But I added now a possibility also compile with FPU enabled (therefore the resulting program will need a FPU, but will run much faster). For example the raycaster I presented the last days only runs this fast with FPU. And because it’s just a single file, it is perfect for the online FPC compiler, Have fun!
Raycasting mirror floor
With normal raycasting the floor and ceiling looks kinda boring (like in Wolfenstein), I was trying to introduce texture mapping floor but it was always too slow for my 030 Amiga. New Idea some easy reflection effect should be easy to make and not eat much resources. an voila.
I proudly (?, more present in shame) present the most ugly and nasty reflection like floor.
Also introduced push-able block and switches on the floor, when you move the blocks over it the block changes the color. In principle one could make a sokoban like game with this mechanic, just in 3D, would be much harder to solve, especially if you do not have the map 😉
As always the download with source (still a single file 😉 ) Raycaster3 (source + exe compiled for m68k-amiga 68020+68882, OS3.0+)
Ask Your Amiga 0.3
I did a big mistake on the last AskYourAmiga release, by accident the MorphOS binary was missing and instead the OS4 binary was copied as MorphOS binary. Sorry for the confusion. Therefore I made a new release. But the MorphOS release is somehow strange (or better MorphOS is) after some picture loaded some pictures look wrong, wrong colors and seems also the size is wrong calculated. But not all pictures are affected only some but when it appears all these type pictures will become wrong. restart AskYourAmiga and try the same question try to load the picture and it works. Very strange, seems like something is crashing inside the datatypes system (but the log does not show anything related).
To be honest I did not try AskYourAmiga very much on the other Amiga Platforms, only on Amiga OS3.x m68k because on all the other you could theoretically use the browser for wolffram alpha. So I concentrate to make it run nicely on classic m68k Amiga.
Other changes with this version are pure internal, some little redrawing problems I got report from OS4 and some bugfixing I found myself (not cleared buffer, such stuff).
You can use the Update function of AskYourAmiga 0.2 (in Suggestion/History Window, it will download the archive and save it to where you want, you only have to unpack it) or you download it from this page.
Have fun!
Raycasting Textures
A little bit improvement of the raycaster engine, now with simple texture mapping included. I had to invent some fixed point mathematics to make it fast enough on real m68k Amiga but still it works nicely and just a bit slower. I found a little bug in FreePascal when using functions Trunc() or Frac(), but Charlie thankfully saved the day and made a super quick fix of it.
Again a little video on my Amiga 1200 (68030/50Mhz, 68882/50Mhz, 32 color AGA Screen) and it’s still a single source code file of less than 20kb size (many of them are comments 😉 ). and the executable is less than 100k, not bad especially because I did not optimize for size, just for speed
Again the source to download: raycaster with Texture executable for m68k Amiga and FPU with source code.