Are most people familiar with the GameSmith development system from Oregon Research?

It included a set of software libraries for C and Assembler to write powerful amiga games, with sprites, collision detection, its own animation and sound engine.

The GameSmith development system was the result of 5 years development work on Amiga platform.

So now here comes my idea:

Rewrite the libraries of GameSmith, to use the new features of the NatAmi amiga board.

Create the Game Development System of the FUTURE!!!!!

If the Natami team is looking for project manager.. I hereby propose myself candidate! :)

/Pascal

Are you a coder?

Have you ever actually used Gamesmith before?

It ended up as Public Domain in the end. See below:
EXTERNAL LINK 
I have written some programs for Amiga, but can't call myself a an Amiga coder. Never used Assembler and C on Amiga.. only AMOS.

However I have done embedded software in C for 4 years, when I worked as Software Engineer for Set-top box company.

I bought the GameSmith system on Ebay last week, and received it yesterday. The manual is astonishing well documented, so I regret that I was not aware of the system back in those times.

GameSmith's central feature is CPU-assisted blitting.  It's worthless on the NatAmi because the NatAmi blitter will be so much faster than the CPU it isn't even funny.

The second fault of GameSmith is that it tried to be Kickstart compatible from 3.x all the way back to 1.3.  This includes AGA support on 3.x and OCS on 1.3.  Once a friend and I tried to make a game with GameSmith on 1.3 and its IFF loader crashed the program.  From that day on, we knew we'd never use GameSmith in production code.

One thing I WOULD like to see from GameSmith is its expanded macros for making Copper lists.  Only I'd like to see more than GameSmith had.  Macros for loops and leaf subroutines.  This way it would take less effort to implement and test new features in the chipset.

Do you have the source code of GameSmith?

Without the source code how would you rewrite the libraries to take advantage of Advanced Natami Features?

Note that the source code for AMOS is available.
So this could be a valid alternative as well! :)

The only good parts of Amos were the programming environment.  The compiler generated terribly substandard code.  The only optimization it did was bit-shifting optimization.  The parameter passing was strictly stack passing.

Mike Ness and I were the same coders that were going to try to write an Amos-compatible compiler called Mattathias.  Development on it has thoroughly stalled due to lack of manpower.

If you really want to help out, learn to code.  We'll even help you learn.  I've been teaching AmigaE classes on IRC and have now shifted the efforts to PortablE on ArosWorld.org in it's PortablE forum.

Programming in C/C++ is no issue whatsoever.
I have worked 4 years on embedded software.

Just never did any low-level coding on Amiga.. only in AMOS back in that time.

I do have access to all the Amiga Reference manuals,
but now that I discovered GameSmith it seemed a better abstraction level to start, as one did not have to reinvent the wheel for animation and sound, and parallax scrolling, etc.

Do you or other people organize actual seminars on programming on the Amiga platform? Are these organized in the US, or are there some in Europe? Preferably Nordic region :)

It would be cool to get insight in the Amiga platform, start of with the OCS, and be ready to be part of future coding team for the NatAmi board.

Pardon my long silence.

I think its very important that we Natami/Amiga lovers pool our efforts and resources whenever possible to ensure that our endeavors are as sucessful as possible as quickly as possible, with everyone benifiting from the strength and efforts of everyone else.

By this I mean:
Anyone who wants to make a high quality game for classic Amiga's
Anyone who wants to make a high quality Natami game
Any Amiga/Natami lover who wants to make a High quality cross platform game(including platforms like PC, Mac, XBox etc.)
Anyone who wants to develope Libraries or game authoring systems for Natami/Amiga

We should all comunicate and collaborate...sharing benifits from all our efforts and expertise.

A Specific Example:

I've created a very powerful modular sprite animating tool which currently runs on PC, BUT the data (animations etc.) that it exports could be used in anyones game engine on any platform.

Please check it out here:
EXTERNAL LINK 
This tool can be used minus the stretching and rotating aspects to create highly optimized animations for classic Amiga games, or used with all its features for powerful next gen 2d games for Natami and any other powerful platform.

I'll also be co-creating a very powerful level editor(tile support included)which can similarly help anyone who wants to make the highest quality games wit hthe most comfort.

I'm also commissioning Amiga programmers to program some routines to handle all the great tricks that the Amiga is capible of like instant palette fading and changing, Copper color tricks, and Sprite tricks to create a back playfield.

Instead of so many of us all trying in a vacuum to do similar things, lets work together so all of our projects get done faster, easier, and drastically better!

Here is a sneak peak of what will some day be a classic Amiga demo, and hopefully eventually a full blown game and game engine that other people can use to make their own super high quality games that rivel all of Amiga's classics (and even most Genisis and SNES games ;) )

EXTERNAL LINK 

I proposed in in the sprite thread and it got shot down by Gunnar, too complex and too costly to do in hardware....

worse the 3d core can do the work rotation work afterward. ;)

Trying to rotate the screen 8 times with a 50Mhz 060 is not fast enough.

I was speaking of Amiga 500, AGA, with NO enhancements when I mentioned "Classic Amiga's" in regard to no rotation.  The point was that even though Spriter can be used to make next gen 2d games, it can also be used and still offer massive optimization benifits for very humble systems like Amiga 500.