The World of Amiga show was a big success, or at least from what I have heard as I was unable to visit the show this year. This means I'm unable to do my own show report, however I asked a few of the companies and developers who were there to show of the latest in Amiga gaming to give Amiga Flame readers and me an insight to what was apparently an amazing show.
I would like to thank Stuart Walker and Michael Flaherty of Digital Images, Paolo D'Urso of Darkage Software, and Jason Hayman of Pagan Software, for their contribution to this article, especially as they wrote more than I thought they would. Their reports prove that the World of Amiga show has regenerated morale of all those Amiga developers and companies who attended; the organisers should be congratulated. I think you will enjoy the big games news that is also contained in their show reports.
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Paolo D'Urso of Darkage Software's Report
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 Darkage Software was present at the World of Amiga, in London, to show the beta version of TALES FROM HEAVEN and also a demo of a project we got as top-secret, LAND OF GENESIS, a platform game with shoot'em up elements.
Me (Paolo D'Urso) and Ruben Alkaniz, main coder of Tales, went to the WoA show, at the Epic Marketing stand to represent Darkage Software. We showed the beta version of TALES FROM HEAVEN and a demo of a project, which was top-secret until now, LAND OF GENESIS. Surprisingly, there was a lot of new software on sale, from the games (T-Zer0, Moonbases, Turbo Racer 3d, Star Fighter) to the programs (IB2, V3, Amirc3, Photogenics 4.1, PowerMovie), and also much hardware like the Melody Pro. Amiga's conference was full of news, but to be honest I like more the idea of Phase 5's AmiRage than Amiga's plans. They are for sure more commercial (and will sell a lot, contrary to AmiRage), but I don't like the idea of making games on Java on a hardware-independent platform.
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WoA Report by Jason Hayman of Pagan Software |
WoA is important to us, as it is for many developers, it allows us to meet 2 kinds of the people, the kind that play our games and the kind who publish them. Last years show was huge, full of excited Amigans. This year we thought the venue might have been smaller but upon arriving we realised we were wrong.
This year the show was split up into three levels, a games and user group arena (known affectionately as the basement), the Great Hall where many of the exhibitors had set up, and a Cyber Cafe/ Cafe/ Bar on the top floor. Unfortunately no matter how hard (or drunk ;) Neil Brothwick got, the IDSN boards refused to work with the BT lines...shame, I wanted to lock the web browsers showing the Pagan site ;-)
We arrived a day early to just set up our mega stand in the "basement". We had been told there may be a place in the Hall with BRAINIAC, a federation of small developers, run by Andrew Korn but only if someone else besides us was to use the stand. Unfortunately, no one else wanted to take up this FREE offer a stand in the main hall, which was a shame. In hindsight however, we were more productive in the basement than we would have been in the busy and cramped Great Hall. Thanks goes to Andrew and BRAINIC for helping us out.
 We had set up chairs around our demo machine for people to sit, play and talk about Dafel: Bloodline. We could not have done that upstairs with all the noise and bustle going on, so being in the basement was the best thing for us. I want to thank everyone who came to our table to play Bloodline and give us feedback. We had something like 100 people come up to us and play the game on the Saturday with lots of people hanging around and watching. We took feedback from them all and already many of your ideas have been implemented into the game engine!
The turn out of user groups was impressive however the vast majority came from London and the south east of the country, maybe a sign that WoA should move further north in the future to allow the other 99.9% of the Amiga population to attend ;-)
As promised, T-Zero was on show from ClickBOOM. Personally I saw no difference to Team 17's Project X, there were lots more colours, gfx and action on the screen but its just not my sort of game. Many people played it however and it was a popular stand so people must have liked it. Gotta say something good cos the guys running the stand game me a free Quake guide. Thanks guys ;-)
I've heard people complaining a lot this year that it only took them 20 minutes to walk around the stands before they had covered the lot. Well I've been to quite a few "high profile" PC shows in recent months, they were smaller, and I walked around them in 10 minutes! People in the Amiga community should wake up and be a little bit more optimistic. Ok, we've had some knocks in the past but its no need to go around spreading doom and gloom. Accept what has happened and enjoy the present or else you'll dig the whole community into a depressive hole.
On a brighter note, the exhibitors in the Great Hall seemed to be doing brisk business with queues around the stands with people buying and asking for advice. Its great to see so many hardware and software vendors there offering such good wares at excellent WoA prices. But could I get my hands on a BVision gfx card? Oh no, seems there's no more shipments till about September and talking to others at the show, they had heard the same as well...
The video wall was excellent, a nice addition this year, however, I thought Wildfire was given to much exposure (even though its such an excellent package!) with what seemed a continuous presentation cut in with a visual and spoken demo of OS3.5. The OS3.5 presentation could have been more frequent as I kept missing the shows though I know many of my team members who caught it.
As for Amiga, I saw Petro stalking about the stands but saw no one else though I heard people had caught glimpses of Jim Collas, more than likely he was busy with showing presentations. I at least expected Jim Collas to be more visible but then again maybe he was avoiding the QNX lads roaming the halls asking Amigan's their opinion of the OS split. QNX seemed very interested in us and our products asking if we would like to release our games on QNX machines (it seems Phase5 and Boxer may come shipped with QNX built into the chips - now that's an interesting split). It would have been nice to have had some Amiga representatives doing what the QNX guys were doing and talking to Amigan's, in fact I never saw anyone from Amiga ever come into the basement to see the user groups or games arena...strange... ;-)
Sunday was much quieter with a slow trickle than the torrent of Amigan's coming to the show. It was also the day we talked business with many of the publishers there...expect some cool announcements from Pagan very soon:-) Keep an eye on our website...
Overall, I think the Pagan Group would agree that we left the show with smiles on our faces, not just for the deals we had made, but for the bright future of the Amiga we saw. We look forward to the next WoA...
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Michael Flaherty Writes Digital Images WoA Report |
 Saturday, 24th July, 1999 was Digital Images first World of Amiga and wipEout 2097's first public showing, so naturally, the wipEout beta stubbornly refused to work until about 20 minutes before the show...
 Of course, when we got the right libraries in the machine, the sight of wipEout running in 640 x 480 on an A1200 was comparable to Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights, in terms of beauty.
On the Sunday, we took the opportunity to announce our first game for the AmigaMCC, Sabrina Offline.
As anyone present will testify, the first minute and a half of the announcement was perfectly professional =^) and the Question and Answer Session that followed it was even better...
In brief, Sabrina Offline is a 3D Platform Game packed full of fresh and funky ideas, based around Characters from Sabrina Online, by Eric Schwartz (www.coax.net/people/erics). As a more detailed document covering Sabrina Offline will soon be appearing here and elsewhere, we won't go into the Game too much here, except to say that it mixes fast platforming, shoot-em-up action and point-and-click puzzles with an original and fun plotline and a *secret* Level Structure so great it had to come from us =^)
We were asked, "will this game make PC owners sit up and take notice?" The fact is, graphics aren't going to get much better than they are now, Sabrina Offline will be gorgeous, but it has got to a stage where so many companies are capable of producing a good looking 3D Engine that polygon counts on their own aren't enough to sway people any more. We are concentrating on the Gameplay and we solemnly believe that Sabrina Offline will grab everyone that plays it and will earn itself several "Best Videogame Ever" accolades.
A big claim? Yes. But we wouldn't make it if we doubted at all the potential quality of this Game.
Another question was that with Amiga courting the Big Software Companies, are we afraid that we'll be swept away?
Not at all. We welcome anyone with quality software to port it to the AmigaMCC. W98/ Mac/ Console Applications and Games will encourage people to buy the AmigaMCC, thus increasing the size of the market. MCC Versions of Ppaint and Photogenics would go down a treat and while they may not be successful overnight, they are more than good enough to compete and in time become the most popular applications of their kind.
Likewise, we are confident we can compete and we're sure The World Foundry, Delsyd Software and others will also. Our teams aren't as large, but then again Digital Images have more Development Staff than id Software (Quake3: Arena has 16 people working on it).
Large teams are wasteful and difficult to co-ordinate (note that M$ employs over 28,000 people), a small, hardworking team can produce far better results.
About the MCC... Only one thing to say about the Casing - please do a Widescreen Version of the Monitor!!
As for AmigaObjects and the MCC itself, we are excited about the possibilities and satisfied that the Spirit of Amiga is present.
How many of you are suddenly coming over all indignant?
Amiga Spirit to us means two things:
1) Elegance through Simplicity and Efficiency
We'll skip lightly over this one, because if you're still not convinced Amiga aren't shipping a full Gigabyte of Linux distribution then you're either cynical in the extreme or sick in the head, whichever the case there's little point talking to you. Allan Havemose is on the case, and since he was responsible for our favourite OS (AmigaOS3.x in case you were wondering) we trust he'll do what needs to be done to ensure the MCC earns the right to be called an Amiga.
We're not expecting it to fit on a floppy disk, in fact, our major disappointment with the MCC is that it supports those wretched things at all. We were looking forward to a 250MB Zip Drive being the removable media drive...
2) Excellence through Innovation
In 1985, the Amiga1000 did something nothing else could - multimedia. That's what it was about. As Amiga users matured, they realised that their machines could multitask and autoconfig as well.
Ten years later and Windows95 made an attempt to catch up. Amiga was so innovative, so ahead of it's time that it took 10 years for M$ to even try and be an Amiga. It failed miserably of course, these days W98 can do multimedia at an acceptable level, it's multitasking is an unfunny, unproductive joke and it's autoconfig is a kludge that should be called 'autoinstall' (the obligatory reboot isn't automatic).
The QNX-Amiga that Jeff Schindler proposed would've been very 'Amiga1985', but wouldn't have been any more innovative than it was back then. To be the best and stay the best, you have to be prepared to change, Amiga needed a new innovation and AmigaObjects is that innovation.
Fifteen years after Amiga revolutionised Desktop Computing, Amiga will revolutionise Network Computing.
Phase5/ QNX can do what they like, in our opinion, if it doesn't innovate, it's not an Amiga.
Small OS on good hardware with no industry support? We've seen it all before...
Vive la Revolution,
Digital "Le Roi est Mort! - Vive le Roi!" Images
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