Crysis (Prototype)

Introduction

Can the Amiga run Crysis? Let's find out.   (V1.02)

The idea for this game came to me towards the end of development of Trans-Pennine Express Simulator. I figured all I needed to do was record some game footage, and pause and display a picture whenever there was something for the player to do or shoot. The idea floated around for a few days until Amiga Cammy announced the Amiga Game Jam 2024, and then I had no more excuses.  After installing the Open Source PC version of the game, all of the saves from the last time I completed it were still on my hard drive.  I wanted to use the beach area, so I recorded (one master take, and several false starts), and converted the final frame of each video clip to a HAM6 image. Then just the small matter of making a mouse tracking routine and a series of hit boxes to fire at. Sadly, the game wasn't suitable for the game jam after all.

The videos are in NTSC to ensure they play at 20fps, but the target screens are full screen PAL, so you'll need a PAL machine to play it. If you have an emulator, click the Filter Tab and choose Automatic Scaling mode from the panel on the far right. This means the whole game now plays in full screen!

Aims:

1. To make an interactive video demo of what Crysis might look like on an Amiga.

2. To make a gallery shooter using stills from that footage.

Requirements

• Any PAL Amiga with Kickstart 3.0+  (does NOT work with KS1.3/2 roms).
• 0.6 MB Chip, 1.11MB Fast  (i.e. A500+ with 1MB chip + 1MB trapdoor ram)
• Any CPU, but 030+ is recommended.
• 380MB free disk space.
• (Optional): A way to copy the files onto a real Amiga hard drive.
• Emulation Users: (optional) Filter-->Auto-scaling mode.

Features:

• 1 HAM6 video at 320 x 240 @ 20fps - The Introduction video.
• 22 HAM6 videos at 320 x 216 @ 20fps - The walking videos.
• 23 HAM6 images at 320 x 512 interlaced - The shooting bits.
• 7 Hi-res images at 640 x 512 @ 16 colours - The menu
• 9 different mouse pointers.
• 3 Difficulty Modes

Install and Loading

If you are using the HDF 'Creators Package', just press F12 in UAE and select to mount a new hard drive file (HDF) from the hard drives tab. Click the file, then Ok, and Start. You dont need to run the Assign Crysis tool, everything will just run natively.

If you are using an LHA or ZIP. Unpack the archive to your destination. Then run the Assign Crysis tool. This will make all the assigns and also copy any missing Libs files and/or the font to your system. After that, you never need to use the Assign Crysis tool again. Everything is now installed to your hard drive (and without the need of the pesky Commodore Installer!!)

The game can be launched from either of the two menus, or directly. The Quick Menu has a Workbench GUI, while the Full Menu goes through a fancy intro and game menu. If you run the Crysis Game directly from the icon, but have never played the game before, the game will default to the Easy mode, using an example crosshair. If you want to change to a crosshair, these can be changed with the Quick Menu or normal Menu tool.

Quick Menu

This tool has a Workbench GUI and performs the same functions is the Full Menu, only without the fancy graphics. You can launch the Full Menu from the Quick Menu by clicking on Start Crysis. Otherwise, if you have played the game before, click Continue.

Controls

This game uses a mouse.

* - Mouse Movement = Move the pointer around the screen.
(note: the mouse pointer is disabled during the Full Menu boot sequence)
* - Left Mouse Button = Select item or fire gun.
* - Right Mouse Button = Throw a Grenade (in-game only).
* - Double Click Left Mouse = Launch Crysis or Explorer from their icons on the Win10 Desktop screen.
* - ESCape Key = Quit the Game (or the Full Menu) without waiting.

Playing The Game Instructions

After a cut scene, the game will display a static image, where guys jump up and shoot you. Shoot them all. There are 3 on each screen on Easy, 5 on Normal, and 7 enemies on Hard mode. If you get stuck, press the Right Mouse button to throw a hand grenade, and destroy an enemy (and usually anothing else on screen). If you make it far enough, you will be given a de-brief screen, and then it's game over.

Upgrading 1.00 - > 1.02 etc

If you have the game installed already, just download the latest HDF, and copy over the Crysis and Menu from the main directory, to your installation. That's it.

Assets Used:

CanDo V3.0 from INOVAtronics (Dallas,TX) - from EAB file server.

HAMVIEW - by DANGER_X/TJ Edmister
http://aminet.net/package/gfx/show/hamview

10MARC Doug Instructions for Video Convert.
http://www.10marc.com/p/fun-ham6-and-ham8.html

Graphics:

Crysis Open Source - CComrade V6
https://github.com/ccomrade/c1-launcher/releases

Duck Image
https://in.pinterest.com/pin/birding-in-klamath-county--334814553520862258/

Music:

Title Music from FarCry Instinct Predator (XBox360) by Jonathan Gosselin

Other Software:

FFMPEG.EXE and AVI4HV.EXE (on PC)

PPaint 6.4, Dpaint 4, and ImageStudio. (GIMP on PC)

MegaloSound, AudioMaster IV (SFX editors), and Octamed 4. (Goldwave on PC)

Editing The Source

With the 'Creators Package', it also contains all of the source codes, and my install of CanDo. First run the Assign Crysis tool to tell the computer where the game is. Then go to the CanDo drawer and run it. Click Design, now use the pull-down menu to load a file. Go back to the HDF main directory and click Sources. Anything after V0.7 should be fine to look at, but before that, they might need some extra assigns.

Browse Mode - click this to run the game and play with it.

Design Mode - press this to edit the game. If you click on a button, CanDo will automatically go into edit mode for you.

There are only 5 main buttons, and you can ignore the rest.

1. The stack on cards button is to the far left, next to the screen button. If you click on this button, and click to edit the first card, there are two boxes highlighted. The top one (before attach) sets up the directories for the game. Clicking the lower highlighted box (on attach) is a list of things the game does when it starts up. The Startup-sequence, basically.

2. Routines - this is where all the Do "XYZ"s go to. Click Routines, then double click on the routine names to edit them. CanDo will auto save as soon as you click OK in the routine editor. If not, press Cancel.

3. Variables - this is a list of numbers and data contained within the game, currently at that time. You can set up most of these variable figures (although not all of them) by listing the Variables routine in Routines.

4. Button - these are things the user can click on, on the screen. Click Edit first, and then click Button, otherwise the app will try to add a new Button. There is only one main Fire button, which is the size of the enemy spawn area, so not full screen. The others are just for quit and restart.  Editng a button will automatically blank the whole screen, unless you click Cancel.

5. Timer - There are 4 timers in this game, these are all switched off to start with, but are attached and dettached as needed. Click Edit first, and then click the Timer button. The main one is called Timer, and handles most things. When the player is waiting around, it recharges health with the Waiting timer. If a duck flies, its the ducktimer, and the final boss is the start fight timer, which simply uses the BOSS rountine.

Back To Start - This button is the first one below the stack of cards button, with a bar and arrow pointing left. Press this to restart the game from scratch.

Bugs list

• jeep door lock-on text is pink / Broken?   (totally fixed)
• NTSC mode?? (abandoned)
• Full Menu panels disappear when moving between menus. (abandoned)
• Full Menu analogue clock appears in the Crysis Menu if switched on.
• The game can give unpredictable results of the cut scenes are skipped too quickly. Please wait 2 seconds before skipping the cut scenes!! (clip and flip bug)
• The bird can leave block trails behind them with CPU caches on. - Solved by using cycle exact and/or switch caches off.
• Only 3 bullets left at the end of the game (should be 4) (partly fixed)
  
• Final Boss flickers with a green box sometimes. (abandoned)
• RTG Report "I run HDD script and also the binary but nothing happens. I can only invoke menu. EDIT*  It Works now, needs to be invoked from WB PAL mode, for RTG systems."
• No health counter on boss screen.
  
• Unlimited ammo on boss screen (to fix)

Development Diary

It didn't take long to get the hang of a new way to track hit boxes thanks to discovering and making good use of the Timer function within CanDo (at last!). Now it was possible to accurately keep track of mouse movements, and define context-driven hit boxes around the screen without having to use more than one full screen sized fire button.

Then I started to get more creative, and came up with the idea of booting the game from a high resolution menu, and adding my Window 10 Nav Bar idea to make a virtual Windows 10 desktop. Suddenly the idea got out of control. The menu was made in 640 x 512 high res interlaced mode (so this might flicker), and there had to be a separate program to the game itself; which is 320 x 512 100% pure HAM mode! The idea was simply to be able to write some difficulty and pointer option to disk with the menu tool, then loading the game itself, and somehow hiding the gap between them. The menu and virtual desktop idea ended up with 10 buttons, and began to get a bit too complicated to keep track of constantly having to move buttons around, and on and off the screen as needed.

So I kept the Game program as simple as possible, and just had one enemy on the screen at any given time, one hit box, and one full screen fire button (and a few Quit and Restart buttons). The original idea was to put gun flashes over the enemies shown in the static footage screens, to make it look like an interactive movie. But these gun flashes were small, and got lost on the screen. So instead I drew my own enemies, using a template of the guy in the third screen of the game (with the red beret), but this introduced colour clash and bleed on the HAM backdrops.

Late in development, the enemies got random elements; delays, gun noises, and positions; and the background enemies appearing as Commandos on ropes. I also added the HUDs from the game Crysis, some blood, and a few birds flying. This caused a lot of extra issues, but it made the game feel more alive. Add in some wave sounds and a dying noise, and you have a game. Last thing to be added was a Duck Boss, as revenge for all the ducks the player shot, in a Hitchcockian 'The Birds' kind of way.  The birds have huge colour clash issues unfortunately.

V0.0 -12 June 2024 - Gathering raw materials and converting to Amiga.

V0.1A-V1F - 13 June - Mouse position detection, and x3 section demo.

V02.0-V02D - 15 June - Collision working, and x3 enemies on screen.

V03A-3C - 16 June - Full game now running with x5 enemies.

Menu A1-VD4 - 18-19 June - Booting into menu and virtual Win 10.

Menu D5-D6  - 20 June - Added scrolling menu panels.

Menu VD7-E5 - 21 June - Finished the menu program to 80%.

V4-V4E - 22 June - Added gun flash, health and damage. Death sequence.

Menu F1-F4 - 23 June - Added island zoom, music and light bar to menu.

V05A-V5D - 25 June - Added sounds effects. Random pitch enemy guns and x4 different player gun sounds. Also x3 enemy taunts.

Menu F5 - 7th July 2024 - Added Win10 boot pic.

Menu G1-G9 - 8 July - Added Game Options panel and 9 mouse pointers.

Menu G10-H1 - 10 July - Added bullet holes if no item selected. Menu 95%.

Menu H2-H4 - 11 July - Hi-res pointers, and localised to current directory.

V0.6-V0.6B - 12 July - Added HUD bar and damage counter.

V0.6C-V0.6E - 13 July - Added Game Over texts and looping. Menu H5.

V0.6F - 14 July - Gun flash added. Created a debug QuickMenu. Beta 1 Release!

V0.7 - 18 July - Added an auto font installer. Added pointers to main game, and screen shake on firing. Fixed most of the enemies on medium mode. Added random enemies after the jeep, and a random delay, in hard mode. Beta 2!

Menu I1 - 22 July - Fixed broken loading of game from menu. Fixed difficulty boxes appearing on other screens. Speeded up the response time of the menu, and light bar by 10%.

Menu I3 - 24 July - A windows analogue clock now working in the menu.

Menu I4 - 25 July - Fixed booting into the game from the menu, and returning to the  menu again afterwards!  Updated HUD icon slightly Menu now 99% done.

V0.7A-0.7E - 26 July - Added commandos on ropes, blood, randoms, looping.

V0.7F - 28 July - Guys now pop up or slide in. Rope guys swing in or drop down.

V0.7G-I - 29 July - Wasted far too long getting a bird to fly over the screen.

V0.7J-N - 30 July - Map hotspots. Ammo. Waves. Cheat mode. Grenades. Lock On text fixed. New Death screen. Game Complete text now correct.

V0.7O - 31 July - Added enemy moan. Balanced damage Vs health, fixed restart.

V0.7P-V0.8A - 1 Aug - Fixed some bleeding and Gun flash. Game Over sample.

V0.8A-E - 2Aug - More debugging of duck flight, and ammo counter. 90% done.

QuickMenu V1E - 3 Aug - Two intro demos, and a random sweep or fade in.

V0.8G-H - 4 Aug - Hidden debug menu. Shield is working. Enemies avoid HUD.

Menu I4C - 5 Aug - Snapshotted quit menu, so it stays when using menu panel.

V0.9A-D - 5 Aug - Fixed zero health bug. Fixed texts. Added final DUCK BOSS!

V0.9E - 6 Aug - x2 more crosshair pointers. ReadMe. Assign Crysis tool.

V0.9F - 7 Aug - Fire anywhere to enter jeep. ESC to quit. Menu Pointers fix.
Menu I4E - 7 Aug - ESC to quit. Menu Pointers fix.

V0.9G - 8 Aug - Rating & death note on game over screens. Diff tweak.

V0.9H - 9 Aug - More small bug fixes. Bullet colour changed to whiter.

V1.00 - 10 Aug 2024 - Fixed death from duck boss. Added music if player beats the game on hard mode. V1.00 released.

V1.01 - 13 Aug 2024 - Force player to see full menu on first boot. 1 extra bullet for chain gun on hard. Fixed red boxes at game complete. Fixed (most) bullets to be white. Fixed health counter on boss screen.

V1.02 - 19 Aug - Removed 'Lock' text on game over. Easy chain gun bullets now 97. Fixed unlimited ammo on boss bug.

FAQ

(36 items)

Booting and Menus

• Do I have go through the FULL menu each time I want to play?
  No. The game is split into the Menu and the main Game. To get the full experience of Crysis, I made a high resolution menu, with the intro to the game. The Full Menu package will cut directly to the Game Menu if there is a game in progress.
• Is there a quicker way to launch the game?
  Yes! There is a Quick Menu also included, which has a Workbench GUI. Launch this to gain access to most of the Full Menu options and game tweaks (although not all of them), and then click Start Crysis to boot the Full Menu, or click Continue to launch the game. The game can also be launched without any menu options by launching the Crysis app. Note: the icon for this app is hidden, so people will normally use one of the menus.
• Why does the Quick Menu Introduction sequence seem broken sometimes?
  The Quick Menu comes up with either an Amiga Boing Ball type of effect, or it plots the word Crysis all over the screen using a similar effect. Then the screen will flash for a second so that the app can take a photo of itself, and this photo is inserted back on to the screen with a random wipe or fade effect. This is normal.
• How do I use the Quick Menu?
  In the middle of the page, there are three toggle buttons. Press these to toggle the three options. Difficulty is 1, 2 or 3; for Easy, Medium or Hard. That is, 3, 5 or 7 enemies. The Fast Menu option is used to toggle the Full Menu either showing the full boot sequence (Fast Menu Off) or just the Crysis game menu (Fast Menu On). The game will use this variable to return to the Crysis Menu again if you click Quit during the Game.
• The Full boot sequence has stopped working, and it goes stright to the Crysis menu?
  See above. Launch the Quick Menu and select Fast Menu Off.
• I cant launch the game from the Win10 destop?
  Double-click those icons to launch them.
• Why is your virtual Windows 10 not working when I click the start button, search button, and VLC player etc?
  The idea was just to give the illusion of something. The volume slider is not connected to the audio. Most things dont work. The analogue clock only updates itself every 5 seconds, and 5 mins, so it can lag behind the real time by 4 seconds, and 4 mins.
• Moving between menu options on the green Crysis Menu makes the texts disappear, but the previous page hitboxes still work as before?
  Yes, if you move to select a different menu option, the current option will be removed from the screen, but the game will think that this option is still selected, until you click on another option. Maybe I will fix this at some point, as I know it can be annoying to select an option, only for the mouse to slip and another is option is highlighted by mistake, wiping everything off the screen.
• What are the dots on the Quit menu?
  It is supposed to say Visit Lemon Amiga.
• I can still use the gun, even outside of the aiming box, and on every screen!
  Yes, I added this back in as a bonus feature of the Full Menu, because it is fun to shoot up the menu, even though this can cause glitches with menu options, such as essential buttons being hidden behind the Fire button box, which covers most of the screen area. Just click the top left corner of options boxes if this happens.
• Hi-res pointer stays on after I Quit
  This is a bonus option. I could make a flag to detect this toggle, but I didn't. You can turn this off manually by running the LacePointer tool in the hidden tools drawer.
• Why is the game so large in size?
  The videos were encoded at 20FPS this time, instead of 15, to give them more smoothness. Although this increases the file sizes by quite a lot.

Game FAQ

• WHY DO I KEEP DYING!!
  The game has limited ammo on hard mode, and if you reach zero health or zero ammo, you blow up! The game allows for a couple of misses, but no wreckless shooting, or you'll run out! Otherwise, you can use grenades to save ammo.
• Can I skip the Movie Cut Scenes??
  Yes, just press the left mouse button. However, please wait a second or so before doing this, as sometimes it causes glitches with the multitasking nature of the code (no joke, it's trying to do stuff in the background).
• How can I pause the game and take a breather?
  Wait until a cut scene is in progress, then press the right mouse button to pause and unpause it.
• How come your sprites are drawn so badly, could you not rip them?
  Each screen in the game has it's own unique HAM palette, so it would mean each sprite would have to have a unique palette. So the solution I went with was to use a common image based on the first 4 colours of the palette only, where those colours are fairly similar on most screens (except one, where the enemies turn blue). My drawing skills are pathetic, but you can change the sprites yourself if you want, within a paint program.
• Why dont the enemies have legs???
  It looked bad when guys are supposed to be learning behind rocks. The dark colors created more HAM streaks all over the area. Plus the fact the hit boxes are only the size of the body.
• How come the sprites make coloured streaks over the screen?
  This is HAM bleed. I tried to add solutions to cut this down to a bareable level, even drawing extra lines on the screen to cut the bleed lines, but it will never be perfect. I should have gone with a 64 colour EHB picture mode, to avoid HAM completely. The graphics would be 85% just as good, but without the bleeding.
• How come the enemies dont move?
  This would make the graphics flash, as the screen is refreshed with each new movement. There is a basic pop-up effect as the enemies appear, but this means everything else on the screen has to Stop moving, while this happens. AnimBrushes could have solved this, but I could not get them to work in HAM without using a solid background.
• Why do BIRDS LEAVE STREAKS over the screen?, and sometimes the HUDs go semi-transparent!
  If using a real Amiga, try disabling CPU caches: either using the pre-boot BIOS screen, or using the CPU command. If using emulation, Cycle Exact Disabled casues the Bird Streak effect, so both Cycle-Exacts (and approx cpu speed) must be ON. Quickstart mode for A3000/4000 does NOT enable Cycle-Exacts (causing glitches), wheras the A1200 Quick Start option does.
• Why does the Shield go down in chunks, but refeshes itself from 0 to 99 in just 1 second?
  For some unknown reason, the game code refuses to allow me to build up the shield power after it has been depleated. The shield and health use identical code, and I spent hours on it without finding a reason for this simple issue. So in the end, I cheated, and just reset the HUD when the player gets full health back.
• Is there a Cheat mode??
  Of course! This is me making this game for you guys. Click on the top leftmost pixel (0,0) to toogle Damage on and off. This means the health will be restored but not taken away.
• Game Difficulty seems to become much more brutal after the Jeep sequence, even on EASY!
  Yeah, the game difficulty depends on the time it takes to recharge the health bar. After the jeep, the enemies respawn much faster, giving less chance to recharge the damage caused. These gaps or delays between enemies respawning are random, so players might find an easy or a hard time playing it, at random. I've added in some 10% and 20% energy recharges at the start of some screens along the way to help players out, but these are halved in hard mode.
• Why are some enemies in obscure places, or are small and HIDDEN?
  Enemies in later modes appear in random places, but on Easy mode they are always fixed in the same places, each time you play it. Some distant medium and hard enemies are in-fact Commandos on Ropes (the idea came from playing Worms in the SuperLeague recently), and they drop in from the top of the screen. They are smaller and sometimes they blend in to the scenery, like camouflage. This is deliberate, to make the game seem harder, although these enemies still have the same size of hit box as the regular enemies. I wanted to have small single gun flashes in the distance for some enemies, (like the game P.O.W), but I think this felt a bit cheap to tax the players eye sight rather than their reflexes.
• Is there a way to NOT DIE from not being able to spot an enemy in time?
  There are two ways. First, look at the radar on the map, so you can see where the enemy is, and move the pointer to that area. Secondly, you can press the Right Mouse Button to lob a grenade, of which you have 5 on easy, but 2 on hard mode. Birds will fly away from the blast, unless they are vapourised.
• The birds dont make any sound when flying or when shot?
  Yes, I didn't want the duck shoot to be a pay off for psychos. Please dont kill our remaining wildlife folks.
• Why ducks? Or is it a Seagull?
  It's a duck, seagulls dont have thin necks. I just wanted to add in some duckies, to make the screens feel more alive.
• Why does the speech in the cut scenes cut off mid-sentence? This is BAD editing!
  The cut scenes always stop just before the gun is fired. Then the player takes over, and the cut scene continues after they beat the screen. I edited out the enemy speech when the cut scene starts again, to make it less jarring on the players sense of time passing.
• Blood isn't working on Easy mode?
  Yeah, the Easy mode is more kiddie friendly.
• Some birds drop poop on the screen?
  This was a bug that I left in, as it looks nice.
• Enemies are flickering!
  I tried to include a way to remove most of the HAM bleed by pasting in the scenery to the right of the sprite, but his only had the effect of making the bleeding flicker in and out.
• Why no branches? You should have made Crysis 2 instead!!
  The footage I recorded for the brances ended up being in ultra low resolution in the corner of a QHD display, due to a mistake I made in the screen settings. The only footage saved from these branches was the death sequence, and this moves so quickly that the lack of clarity is not noticable. As for Crysis 2, the aim here was 'Does it run Crysis?'. I've never seen or played Crysis 2. If I had my time again, and better equipment, I always dreamed of converting FarCry Instincts Predator from the XBox 360.
• The final enemies on each screen do not have a death sound?
  The final enemy is killed during the next cut scene. If they make a sound when dying, it will be in the video clip. With the final enemy in the game, it just skips to the end boss.
• How to kill the final Duck Boss??
  At the end of this game, a duck will exact revenge on you by flying towards the player like a kamikaze. Shoot the head of the duck if you have any ammo left, or use a grenade, and either way the duck will blow up! The duck boss does not fire (of course) but if it hits you it's an instant kill... as is running out of bullets.
• The Duck Boss is glitchy, with solid green backgrounds?
  Yeah, I had a go with making my own auto sprite scalling code, but it seems this causes some issues with larger sprites moving at high speeds. Sorry.
• Do I have to read any more of this text??  I'm bored!
  This is the end. All that remains is for me to thank everyone reading this, and for being such a welcome and loyal Amiga lover for all of these years...