"Another World" preview (not by me) and a color study (by me in 2022)

[cpcitor]

Experimental port to CPC6218+ by Jean Aipas

Poster by @XeNoMoRPH on Youtube.

Another World experimental - Amstrad CPC - Short gameplay

(310) Another World experimental - Amstrad CPC - Short gameplay - YouTube

This is the result (for now) of quite a few instructions and coding (and yes, I do some coding too). The goal is to stay as close as possible to the original version and follow the scripting language established by Eric Chahi in 1992 for the MS-DOS version.

Author: Jean Aipas

The youtube video also has a link to a CPR file. I downloaded it. It works! Download aw_cpc_EXPERIMENTAL_TEST+2.cpr

Is my “siouper sekret” project of porting Another World to the original CPC doomed?

For years I’ve been toying with the idea of porting Another World to the Amstrad CPC. The original CPC, not plus!

I read by Fabien Sanglard:

• 2011 "Another World" source code review
• 2020 The polygons of Another World

In February 2022 I played with GitHub - fabiensanglard/Another-World-Bytecode-Interpreter: "Fabother World" an interpreter for Another World (Out of this world). · GitHub

Another World runs on a simple engine (kind of bytecode virtual machine). In theory port the interpreter to the target, have it open the original data files and you’re done. I’ve been studying this and thought that for performance and memory requirements it would be better to not use the original data files which have 16-bit numbers everywhere, but reduce to 8 bits wherever possible (in particular drawing coordinates, a reduction of data by a factor or two is always welcome, isn’t it?).

I found also last month by Dmytro Arkhypenko some videos Another World for Speccy which AFAIK are only cinematic scenes, not a playable game, still interesting.

Humble color study by me (cpcitor) targeting original CPC, 2022

In January 2022 I made a basic color palette study from screenshots of the original 16-color graphics (not the modernized ones of a reedition with better graphics). Load them in gimp and try to see which limited combination from the 27 CPC colors into 16 would lose not too much details and be not too ugly.

I found the result encouraging, but … busy with life and other priorities, not enough time for this. Maybe later?

Hope you liked it.

[rexbeng]

Now, that is a faithful conversion. No compromises (from the looks of it there is room for improvement on speed) on the graphics, animations, cutscenes, no flickering, no tearing, no ‘stamp sized’ play area. It would be interesting to find if hardware sprites are being used or not.

In any case, if this ends up being a an example of how to use AI to bring games from other systems to the CPC/+, then this is the benchmark for others to compete with.

Also, good job @cpcitor on those mockups. I think the game should be doable on standard CPCs, but the more code-minded people around here would weight this better than me.

AW has been a thing on various platforms, even the more, well, archaic ones.

"Another World" for Apple II+ -- With Commentary

[Gryzor]

Oh wow this is beautiful. Hope it gets completed - and as @rexbeng said, that is an example indeed of how to do things.

Also, the poor Apple II+ looks more like a fun PICO8 demake, but oh well

[SagaDS]

That was a thing that I had behind my head from several month now… As I liked the virtual machine behind Another World, I was hoping to check if I can do it by myself.

Nice to see that it is at least doable.

[Anthony_Flack]

The Plus version looks very nice. I think dithered colours would be needed for the regular CPC to have a hope of retaining the original game’s atmosphere.