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Lambda Update. |
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Heres the full announcment from the Lambda page saying how things are going.
I'm sure many of you feared this would happen. I'm also quite sure many of you even expected it to happen sooner or later. Well, now it has happened - Lambda development has been moved to PC. I can finally break the limitations of 060 AGA and work in a more up-to-date manner. Hell, I could even break the limitations of current Amiga PPC and 3D hardware and write Lambda solely for the equivalent of a modern(ish) PC. But that would make no sense, since the PC market is simply enormous with space games dozens of times better than Lambda appearing every now and then. This is why I am still planning to target the Amiga, namely the PPC equipped with 3D hardware. Software rendering is still going to be supported, but it will not be the primary concern anymore.
Some of the changes we are planning to make include dumping the 256 colour limitation. The new engine will be truecolour based. AGA should be supported through dithering the internal 16 bit images into a static 256 colour all-purpose palette, which will of course look worse than before, but is better than nothing. Standard graphics boards will get real 16 bit rendered graphics, and 3D hardware will be supported through Warp3D.
Among the utopistic features of the new engine are fully coloured directional, point source, and ambient lighting, and better special effects. I am also considering optional bump-mapping (for 3D chips that can do or fake it: ViRGE and Permedia 2 most probably cannot even fake it, but Voodoo 1 can, although it needs two rendering passes). On the audio side I'm planning to support 3D sounds, although on the Amiga these will be reduced to normal panned sounds with surround encoding.
With this much changes about to be made I guess the already very long development time will extend to near-eternity. I estimate Amiga NG will have been around for quite a while before even a new demo version can be released...
f you wanted a normal industrially manufactured game, you were barking the wrong tree. Lambda is an experiment. One that has even gone wrong a few times...
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