Here's some interesting news for the weekend as German developer 'Cego' is creating "Neo Turbo Challenge," a new AGA Amiga racing game designed to be a worthy homage to the Lotus Turbo Challenge series. The project aims for 50 FPS gameplay on 68030/50MHz hardware, featuring network multiplayer, a level editor, and streaming audio. Currently in alpha, the engine is being fine-tuned to faithfully reproduce and improve upon the classic's driving mechanics and feel. To coincide with this news, provided below is the first alpha footage of the game viewable below.
Driven by a passion for Lotus Turbo Challenge, this new project aims to create a worthy successor, reproducing and improving upon the original’s driving sensations, maneuverability, and visual aesthetic. Currently in an early alpha stage, the engine achieves roughly 30 SPF on an A1200 Vampire V2 in Turtle mode and is undergoing a lot more refinement before its eventual release. In fact here's what the developer told a1k.org who sourced the news.
"I've been working on a new project for a while now. As a big fan of the Lotus Turbo Challenge, for me this is a project that is particularly close to my heart. The goal of this project is not simply to design a ninth racing game called "pseudo-3D" or "2.5D", but to create a worthy successor to the series, who follows in its footsteps and is as good as this grand model. In other words: the driving sensations, maneuverability as well as the appearance and feel will be faithfully reproduced and improved. Engine is running pretty good but still needs some fine tuning. Everything is still in alpha version and was done quickly. It's currently running at about 30 SPF on the A1200's Vampire V2 in Turtle mode (which corresponds to roughly 68030 at 50 MHz). »
And that's all there is to say about the game, so far now, here's the Youtube Channel
Very cool, wonder if they can do an OCS/ECS version as well.
ReplyDeletecan't even do A1200 / CD32 version without thunderous acceleration :-D
Deletelooks amazing, just would be nice to target a A1200, even if it was a fastmem version.
Awesome! :) really
ReplyDeletenice one!
ReplyDeleteNice project! The YT channel is empty though..
ReplyDeleteProbably private vids for now :(
DeleteCorrect me if i'm wrong, but didn't the lotus series achieve 50fps on a 7MHz 68000?
ReplyDeleteyes. And you can continue playing those old ones, while others can enjoy more colors on AGA
Deletei think the point being, how the hell do you need the equivalent of a 68030 to get 30fps on something that looks no different to a 7mhz 68000? That is not good for a mere bump in colors (which isn't apparent)
DeleteI hope it does well, but there's clearly optimizations needed
Lotus 1 (the smoothest of the three Lotuses) has 32 colors on screen simultaneously and restrict the gameplay to just the bottom 1/2 of the screen for single player - making the race track feel a bit flattish. Lotus 3 attempts to utilize the entire screen for single player, giving the game much greater depth but also suffered lower frame rate on the Amiga 500. IT also seems to use less colors (24 by my count)
DeleteNeo Turbo Challenge utilizes the entire screen for single player, and seems to have more than 64 colors on the screen at the same time - possibly closer to 100, while running at 50FPS. Then there's the network multiplayer thing going on as well...
But after some optimization I'm sure they'll be able to get it running on standard A1200 at 50FPS in single player mode. That should be a happy middle ground.
problem when you use A.I. to generate the code of your game, optimizations are much harder to achieve. I'll judge when I see it running on real hardware.
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DeleteI know the author of this and had some discussions with him about it.
ReplyDeleteHe did the whole thing with Claude AI, and intends to go on with it, trying to produce a whole game somehow.
Guess that clears up the issue of this working only on bigger setups. But then, why not.
With game engines, people say "more games is always better", so I guess this should count for AI generated games as well. YMMV of course.
Yes, the game is coded with the assistance of Claude Code. Due to multiplayer/network support it can't fully takeover the hardware, which will automatically result in lower performance. This engine is still at the beginning and there will be improvements along the way. This is just a first glimpse. Stay tuned
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