Authors:
Rot was the first realtime 3d texture mapping demo on the Amiga -- inspired by the game Wolf3d (Apogee Software) on the IBM which set a new technological trend for interactive realtime games. Rot3d runs at 13-25 frames/second at 288 X 144 X 32 colors on an Amiga 3000 (with FPU and a Motorola C68030 and 2M fastram). On a 68040 Amiga, rot3d runs at 320 X 200 resolution above 20 frames/second.
Note that these are all 320 X 200 32 color screen shots. Color number 0 was copper-listed for a floor/ceiling effect which doesn't show up in these screen captures.
Rot was the first (AmigaWorld, December, 1994) real-time texture mapping
demo written for the Amiga. It used vertically symmetrical walls mirrored by
a simple copper list. It also introduced a chunky graphics mode emulation
for the Amiga's planar graphics screens. The method pre-converts planar
graphics into a semi-chunky style so that the usual 30+ logical operations
needed to write a single pixel to a random location on the screen are reduced
to only 4 or 5.
Rot2 introduced a two-fold major speedup. By this time, a few slower imitations
of rot (Noteably: tmappdemo by Chris Greene, Commordore Graphics) had been
released. Rot2 also doulbed the pallete to 32 colors, which destroyed the
code that relied on the 32 bit architecture of the Amiga for it's chunky data.
This was accomplihed by using the blitter chip to write blocks of 1's into
columns where the wall used the top 16 colors in the palette. This way,
the chunky data stayed in 32 bits and a zbuffer could be used to note when
to xor-fill the fifth bitplane.
Rot3d is the final version. This demo, released in April, 1994 introduced
light sourcing, speedups, animated walls, and modular wall parts so that
each wall can be unique. Around this time, a boom of approximately 20 wolf-style
demos appeared on Aminet from all over the world. Several of them have
developed superior techniques and achieve much better results than rot3d, even
on inferior Amigas.
