Hollywood forums

Hi everyone,

I am new to Hollywood and I have some questions regarding its use and viability for developing games for classic Amiga 1200 systems (with turbo cards).

A) Getting it to run

First, I noticed that in order to get examples compiled on the pc to run on the amiga, the folllowing manual installations steps were required:

1. Download and install codesets.library into Libs:\
2. Download and install planamarana
3. Download and install guigfxlib_nofpu into Libs:\ (and Libs\Hollywood\?)
4. Download and install renderlib, rename and install the correct file (in my case 68020) into Libs:\ (and Libs\Hollywood\?)
5. Since I was using ClassicWB, it already ran FBlit, otherwise I would have needed to download and install it
6. Add the name of the compiled program to the FBlit Bitmap-List

Regarding these requirements, my first question is how theese steps can be automated (maybe using an install-script), for when I want to publish a game to end users. I think its not trivial, especially determining the right renderlib file and the FBlit stuff? Has anyone already tried to create such an installer?

B) Performance

My second question is around performance. I would like to assess wether or not this is a suitable development platform for developing games for the classic amiga systems with good performance before investing too much time into learning all the details. I noticed that all the examples ran very slow on the amiga, but i also read in the planamarana readme file, that performance should be ok if only graphics drawing routines and no transparancy is used.

Lets say, I wanted to create a game with 20x20pixels wide sprites/tiles and the target screen resolution is 640x256. This would mean that for every frame about 400 graphic drawing operations would be required. Are the routines in hollywood fast enough to achieve that with good performance?

- What graphic file formats and functions should be used in order to achieve the best performance in this scenario?

- Does anyone already have some example code that I can use in order to test the performance on my amiga?

- Has anyone already released a game with hollywood for classic amiga system that performs well on them?

Thanks very much for your input!

The bytecode interpreter included in every compiled application is very weak on less than an 040. I'd try to limit it to puzzle games or something an 8 bit machine can handle. If you haven't bought Hollywood yet you can download the Hollywood Player runtime and try out the Hollywood applets on the download tab of http://hollywood-mal.com but you will need to alter a tooltype on the player to get it to use the Plananorama plugin.

Thanks.

After some further testing I have come to the conclusion that BlitzBasic2 or AmiBlitz are better options for what I am looking for.