Livewire...

Livewire was a game title developed by BSS around 1996-7 for the Atari Jaguar. It was designed to be fun and easy to get into, but to make it look distinctive and use as much of the new Jaguar hardware as possible.

Quite a lot of tech was built for this game and it barely got a chance to be used. Graphics were produced for 4 levels - 3 of which can be seen in early screen previews below.

One of several early LW tracks composed by Greg - this one for the titles.

A different track was used ingame for the demo.

We were in discussions with Atari UK for a while, attemping to get development support for the project but they were only willing to consider publishing finished products and while being generally supportive, were unwilling to commit to anything substantial. Atari US were the next stop and we got bizarrely mixed signals from them - everything from 'all go', to 'no way'. Unable to get the game finished with the cash we had left, that was the end of Livewire.

The game engine had several interesting features:



> HOTH: virtually paged, hierarchical AI with serialized weaklinks (enemies may be constructed from smaller objects with contributive behaviour and then detach / act independently)

> PARA: unusual hybrid (Blitter polygons + OP tiles) parallax playfield. 2 levels used in the demo but the system scaled up.

> PCL: Blitter & GPU-based particle engine, with chained, rule-based particle seeding

> NEMESIS: 8 channel audio mux using the DSP, with 4 channels dedicated to music (MOD player) the rest being SFX



The game ran at full framerate even with a lot of action on screen.



I worked on AI, particles, polygons, audio mux, Apex & sprite/texture tools. Several other programmers were involved in the project, including Neil Stewart (playfield/OP work, playfield & data tools, COF tools) and Dave Murphy (100% map tools, contributions to audio).



Graphics were made and rendered in POVRay (and I think 3DS was involved at some point) by Philip Matthews (PCM).



Sprites were rendered in 3D, imported as sequences of 32bit TGAs into Apex Media, processed into sprites with sprite-cutter reference points and exported as FLCs for the sprite cutter tool.



All development was done on our Atari Falcon030 machines, including a series of custom data conversion/management tools required to put everything together:



> MAPEDIT/MAPCONV - GUI map editor for tile and AI placement, AI links

> PARSELVL - parses .LVL files containing map, playfield and scene game data

> REDUCE - texture format conversion and mipping tool

> MODSONG/SAMCAT - create .NEM (NEMESIS) song files from MOD tracker format, create indexed sample libraries

> OBPARSE/LIBCAT - tool to prepare object processor data from descriptors, create library of OP objects

> BTCONV/FTCONV - playfield tile processing tools

> TILECAT - tool for creating playfield tile libraries

> DICER - converts FLC/FLHs from Apex Media into sprite objects with user defined per-frame annotation

> DAC2CRY - colour processing tool

> COFLOC - COF file relocator

> DATAMAKE - data library compiler for all level and game data



More updates may follow as I dig up bits and pieces...





Related concept art by PCM, rendered in POVRay:

Screenshots from test level builds:





