Another World | Hacker News Reader

Another World

filfre.net

183 pointsdoppp37 comments

This is also interesting game from technical side: vector graphics, runtime is virtual machine interpreting custom bytecode.

There is also runtime for modern platforms using SDL, reverse engineered from DOS binary: http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/

Thank you SO much for this link.

I was going to come in here and mope about how hard this is to play. (As in "get running", not even mentioning in-game difficulty! :P)

First I tried a random Amiga ROM I found, which seemed like it was trying to cooperate but couldn't (the game kept freezing after the intro but before the interactivity began).

Next I tried the DOS version, which fared better but was still a little glitchy in terms of latency (old computer).

Both versions had the silly code wheel thingy as well. Completely respect it, but it's VERY annoying to deal with. ("another world code wheel" has a very very nice result from oldgames.sk.)

This VM emulator is awesome. It Just Works™ on Slackware, only uses 12-16% CPU on a decade-old machine (very nice!), happily picked up the resources from the DOS copy I'd found, and the transparent load/save system works very nicely to a) make the code wheel (which is built into the game bytecode, not the runtime/EXE) less of a nuisance, and b) deal with "30 deaths per minute" syndrome :) (I've been meaning to find the full version of this for years.)

And it's also really impressive that this was reverse engineered like this... heh.

Btw, the original bytecode system was all Forth, wasn't it?

Another World was re-released on Steam by Eric Chahi a few years ago for Windows, Mac, and Linux: https://store.steampowered.com/app/233550/Another_World__20t...

I'm very much looking forward to poking both the 20th Anniversary and 15th Anniversary versions on a newer machine at some point.

(On a related note... I typed the line above during heavy swapping/a frozen browser, and this is the ~2nd time I've not made any mistakes :D)

The VM trick is old hat. Even Infocom used it to allow their games to be playable across a range of micros. Oh and they developed their games on a PDP.

Still, that it was done by one single person, such an immense game, before the Internet. I could pull it off now, (hi google), then, not in a million years.

Also Infocom games were text, much simpler things.

Speaking as someone who's spent a lot of time reading the Zork source code and the Z-machine spec that allowed it to be ported to an huge variety of ancient platforms (http://gunkies.org/wiki/Zork), I have to say, your dismissive attitude is wildly inaccurate.

Both the game and its VM platform were incredibly intricate works of genius.

There is a "surprising" number of one-man shows in the early gaming world.

Also, even though the net didn't exist books did. Not was Another World his first game.

And do not belittle the Infocom games, they had perhaps the best parser of any text adventure. And they were able to cram those games into 8-bit micros.

Did not mean to dismiss or belittle Zork or its machine.

How did they get this engine working on sprite base systems like the SNES?

You can put a coprocessor inside the cartridge. I believe that Another World used the Super FX coprocessor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_FX

Since Another World wasn't listed on that wikipedia page, I searched and found this interview with Rebecca Heineman who ported the game to SNES: http://www.grokcode.com/106/interview-rebecca-heineman/

"Since Interplay wouldn’t pay for a SuperFX chip, I found a way to do it with static RAM on the cart and DMA which got me a great frame rate. Interplay wouldn’t pay for the static RAM either, so I ended up using Fast ROM and a MVN instruction. Interplay wouldn’t pay for a 3.6 Mhz ROM either. So, frustrated, I shoved my block move code into the DMA registers and use it as RAM running at 3.6 Mhz. It worked. I got fast block moves on slow cartridges and made a game using polygons working on a 65816 with pure software rendering."

Hm, I found that interview but the link to it said it was a SuperFX chip so I didn’t watch it. That teaches me.

The style of graphics is superficially similar to early Super FX games, but the cartridge is just a basic ROM+CIC board with an 8-megabit ROM. Based on the fact that it has considerable "load time", I think it basically chopped up the game into working sets and pre-rendered any missing frames when transitioning between them, possibly with some extra streaming code for cutscenes.

I suggest reading Chahi's own telling of making the game : http://anotherworld.fr/anotherworld_uk/another_world.htm

I came across it last week and it's very subjective and personal and I quite enjoyed the descriptions of the VM and ports.

That article series is great!

You might also appreciate this video interview with Chahi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PLLDpzwwUI

He also did a postmortem for the game at GDC: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014630/Classic-Game-Postmortem...

This brings back such good memories of playing this for this first time on my Amiga 2000.

The article offers a wonderful breakdown of the fairly astonishing amount of invention that went into development. Especially given that it was primarily the work of a solo developer.

I also enjoyed the observation that the Amiga's hardware-level support for a laserdisc peripheral (which was never released) was repurposed for the rotoscoping work used to develop the incredibly smooth character animations that still look AAA, even today.

I love this blog. Can't wait to read the book.

Oh my, that game is art. I believed that was the future of games. Instead we got decades of murky textures stretched lazily over too few polygons to look good, too many to look abstract and evoke imagination.

So all the genlock magic and TV station usage was the unintended result of a never released laserdisc peripheral!? :-)

He has been breaking down the blog into ebooks by year covered, been reading them almost as fast as he posts them.

Played the remastered version of Another World a couple months ago, after ages of staying in my list of "pending classics". Good game, controls weren't much of a problem to me (unveilable how much people complain about this, I felt them okayish), very cool aesthetics. Took me like two hours to finish. A HUGE shame that Steam doesn't include the original soundtrack in the game but they don't warn you in the game's description.

Also, THE most disappointing ending, ever. Yeah I know there was a sequel, not made by the original author and only released on Sega CD. That doesn't change the feeling it left on me... I want my three-act structure, had a Setup, had a Confrontation, now I want my Resolution! :)

It had a resolution! It just wasn’t the cathartic, neat, hero-walks-into-the-sunset resolution that so much American storytelling ends with.

It’s a more thoughtful, open ended, resolution. One that leaves you asking questions rather than nodding in conclusion.

Lester has escaped. He’s not alone anymore. He’s (potentially) sacrificed himself for the freedom of another who helped him.

Does it wrap everything up? No. Does it have to though?

To be honest, it was a mismatch of expectations we have based on prior knowledge of a medium, and what the game had actually to offer. Just like you know that after being 45 min into a movie you're reasonably not even close to its ending, it didn't even cross my mind that what I was seeing was the game finale.

I sat down there, looking at the screen like a fool, not understanding that the game had ended. I won't deny it, I wanted to bring Lester back home, through many more adventures! :)

Prior knowledge of the medium based on certain cultural expectations yes.

But it’s hardly the first or only game to do so. Hell Monkey Island 2 played with expectations that way too and that was released a year before.

It’s just that it was t until the early 90s that we really started to see games as a legit artfom generally.

MI2 is also in my list. I recently purchased the special editions... yeah, I might be a bit late to the party, I know!

Echoing the feeling on the ending. I finished it ages ago but never knew there was a sequel. Wonderful game.

The "lion" in the first level scared the hell out of me as a kid. More than the flying masks from Super Mario Bros 2.

There was something really magical about that game the first time I tried it. It gave you no direction, no instructions, the world was hostile and ready to blast you away at the smallest mistake. This is going to sound cliche' in 2018, but it was somewhat Dark Soulsesque in its nature.

> For a long time, saying a game was French was a shorthand way for an Anglo to say that it was, well, kind of weird, off-kilter in a way that made it hard to judge whether the game or the player was at fault.

Pff. This is only true for about 0.1% of French games, most of the other ones were typical generic games you'd find everywhere else and not particularly original at all. It's like judging Japanese movies by taking Kurosawa's movies as representative.

The point is that the boring run-of-the-mill stuff doesn’t get exported.

Western film audiences got to form a highly positive opinion of Japanese movies from the works of Ozu, Kurosawa, Oshima.

Similarly American gamers in the Amiga era got a handful of the most original French games and formed their opinion of “Frenchness in gaming” based on those.

Would you say that by example Ray man was weird/unusual ? It sure has exported itself. Also raving rabbits.

Rayman definitely fits with the “quirky French” narrative. The other game I don’t know.

Funny that I didn't see it (I'm french). What do you find quirky in it ? (Talking about the first 2d one by example)

I think it is like when people in the USA say that all BBC shows are of such high quality compared to all the garbage we have here. We only get the best of the best from those countries so we think everything from them is amazing.

First had this for DOS, was blown away that even just the intro could fit and run off a floppy disk. Also the first game I played that got my 486SX's PC speaker to create grainy but decent sounding music and SFX!

while the thing did fit on a 5" 1.2MB floppy and ran fine on my 286, i do recall bringing this to a friend on multiple 360KB 5" floppies, and being amazed to discover it ran, albeit with serious framedrop, on his 4.77 Mhz PC XT computer after unarchiving the game to his 5MB HDD.

Ha, good times! Missing from the article were the amazing “manoir de mortevielle” and “maupiti island”. First games with speech synthesis. All the character sounded like Stephen Hawking but they were great!

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