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Amiga Fire > Previews > Earth 2140 work-in-progress report 2
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Earth 2140 work-in-progress report 2
The work goes on.. 2000-10-19 After the release of the first public demo of Earth 2140 we have had a massive amount of positive feedback. We have of course also received further information regarding how well the game will run on a broader range of machines. One of the first things we realized was that the greatest bottlenecks out there are graphics cards on slow busses. This means that the game will run a lot less smooth on machines with Ateobus and Zorro 2 graphics cards. As a matter of fact it won't even help much to have a ppc version when you only have Ateobus graphics cards as the transfer rate is about equal to that of Zorro 2 which means that only about 3-5 frames per second is possible on these cards. We have implemented double buffering after the public demo release, which speeds up Zorro 2 a little bit and if you really want to play the game it is possible on Zorro 2 and Ateobus machines. Only time will tell how well it runs on the new PCI boards, but they should be able to run it just fine. We have also added further optimizations to the game, and the game is now running much better - especially on 68k based machines. I've been playing it to death on my A3000 with Cyberstorm MK2 and Cybervision 64 and find it very playable indeed. Some certain configurations had problems starting the game in 800x600 mode and these problems should also be fixed now. In the time since our last progress report we have found solutions to some of the remaining issues with the final game. First of all we have found a solution which allows us to play the video scenes in the game in full speed even on slow 68040 based machines. This is great news, as these look really good and everyone should see them... We have dropped the IPX support since it's a very messy standard, but we will have null-modem multiplayer support in the final game. If it's possible we will later release a patch which allows at least two people to play via the internet. If this is possible it will most likely be released at the time when the mission packs for Earth 2140 are released. A new public demo will be released at the time when the demo is put on cover CDs of Amiga magazines. It will be available as an update which contains only the executable files and will be a small download. We will of course also update the full demo with the new files. This will be the final demo release before the final game. If you have any problems which are not connected to the above mentioned things feel free to email pagan games with bug reports on trez@pagan-games.com. Remember to include information about your machine with accelerator card, graphics card and software versions. A big thank you to everyone who has helped us track down bugs we could never have found with our limited access to a variety of hardware.
Thomas Würgler
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