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ICOA - Game Master System
Protoze jiz zrejme pod ICOA funguje prvni pracovni skupina (WG - working
group, rozvinula se zde nyni diskuse, zdali ma cenu primo v RTG systemu
noveho OS pocitat s podporou pro gamesky, stejne jako treba u Win nebo
Macka, no a to je uvodni slovo do pranice, zda se totiz (alespon podle
toho co jsem to zbehle precetl), ze jiz vyvijeny system abstrakce by
mohl byt pro amigu velkym prinosem.
PS: nikdy jsem zadnou GAMESu nenapsal, takze klidne muze mit nekdo i
jiny nazor :-)
Baj,
Pekr
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
I noticed that on the RTG working group web page, that they plan to long
into whether Games will need there own API.
There is already an API in development for games, and it's pretty much
hardware independant. I included some sections from the web site (
http://gms.ethos.co.nz/gms/ ) and the amigaguide documentation below, so
you can get an idea of the system.
Please don't direct questions to me - I'm nothing to do with this.
The email address given on their Web Page is: Paul Manias
(paul@ethos.co.nz)
Sam
--From the Web Page--
INTRODUCTION
The Games Master System is a solution to one of the biggest problems the
Amiga community has ever faced. What problem? Games support in the OS!
Windows has it, the Apple has it, and the poor old Amiga has none. This
lack of support has brought up some quite serious problems when it comes
to hardware compatibility in games. Every Amiga owner encounters them at
some time, if not often. There have been efforts made towards libraries
specifically tailored to handling graphics cards, but none of them
address
some of the most important aspects of games programming, such as why
direct hardware access is done in the first place.
Hardware access is fast, often many times as fast as an equivalent
system
legal routine. However direct hardware access is not very compatible
with
other hardware types, resulting in unpredictable results on other
systems.
Many existing games and demo writers have been reluctant to move to
using
libraries, because they don't offer the necessary speed. To combat this
you have to upgrade all of your hardware to something faster - but it
only
avoids the problem, not solve it. It has already happened to the PC,
forcing users to pay large amounts of money for over-powered systems.
The problem also goes deeper than just graphics. How about sound? User
support? Networking? Joysticks, JoyPads, Analogue joysticks, 3 Button
mice? Adequate debugging facilities? Where is the real support for
writing
games in an OS? Could we ever expect to support have all of this and
more, while still keeping the environment fast? Well after a lot of
design
and investigation into this, the answer is yes!
The Games Master System
GMS solves all of the problems that have just been outlined and beyond.
It
is a fully grown development system, providing comprehensive
documentation, developer information, lots of source code, a user
prefences program, an official system debugger and more. All these
things
have been designed to work together and will achieve the following:
Erradication of the need to bash the hardware from within games.
Make it easier to migrate from the current Amigas to the new Power
Amigas.
Make games programming, easier, faster, and more productive.
Give users the ability to modify any program to suit their
requirements.
On top of all this, GMS also features resource tracking, object
orientation, multiple-platform capabilities, CPU assisted drawing, and
loads more. If you want to see how easy GMS is to program, just look at
the source code available on these web pages.
Lastly, one of the most important features of the Games Master System is
the level of support given to the user. The Preferences program allows
the
user to select levels of mode promotion, type of joystick used, C2P
routines, task priorities, screen properties, and much much more. This
solves a lot of the moans and gripes that users have had in the past,
and
since this is all transparent to the programmer, user support is easily
achieved. Hopefully this news will make you all very happy!
--END--
--From the Amiga Guide documentation--
OVERVIEW OF THE GAMES MASTER SYSTEM
Project GMS started in the beginning of April 1996, in an effort to
provide games support in the Amiga OS. The overall aim is to write the
best games interface we possibly can, which should eventuate into a
system
that everyone can enjoy. Although the development of GMS is largely
controlled by myself (Paul Manias) I would like people to see it as a
project of the Amiga community and I am completely open to ideas and
comments. The prime objectives of the project are:
1. To erradicate the need to bash the hardware from within games.
2. To make it easier to migrate from the current Amigas to the new
Power
Amigas.
3. To make games programming easier, faster, and more productive.
4. Give users the ability to modify any program to suit their
requirements.
GMS has been designed to be fully extendible in ways that will make
future
improvements very easy to implement. The system is split into a number
of
sub-sections: The kernel, the modules, the debugger, and the
preferences
program. This is further enhanced by identifiable data structures,
which
allow us to write new structures in future, without overhauling the
functions. GMS has no problems with future compatibility, since
hard-coded structure definitions are disallowed and tag-lists are very
well supported.
Looking to the Future
There will of course be a version of GMS for the new Amiga's, so an AGA
game written now could still work on these new machines! The great
thing
is that this library really closes the gap between differences in
machine
architecture. Even games written for a PPC could work on an Amiga with
a
graphics card, granted that you compiled a 680x0 conversion.
In the future I hope to have available:
* Support for graphics cards.
* Support for sound cards.
* Vector and 3D functions.
* Support for all the new hardware capabilities in PPC Amigas.
This is looking quite some time into the future of course, but GMS is
already designed for these things so it's all possible.
--END