alien breed 3d
amiga, games, retro October 1st, 2009Alien Breed 3D (AB3D), published in 1995, is the fourth game in Team17‘s classic Alien Breed franchise. As the title suggests, AB3D breaks the 2D mould of the previous games; it’s a 3D first person shooter much like DOOM but with a more advanced graphics engine. It’s also one of my favourite Amiga games, if not my actual number-one-with-a-plasma-bolt favourite Amiga game, even though I was never much of a fan of the 2D games in the series.
Alien Breed 3D
In March 1997, Team17 released the source code to AB3D’s sequel, “Alien Breed 3D II: The Killing Grounds” (known as TKG), on the cover CD of Amiga Format issue 95. It was megabytes of undocumented, disorganised, messy assembly language. Andy Clitheroe, the lone programmer of both games, must have been some kind of genius, I think.
The official release was of the TKG source code. However, when poking around the CD I found the original (and equally messy) AB3D source too. Based on this code and what it revealed about the internals of the game and its data, I started four AB3D modification and remake projects. I thought I’d list them here for posterity.
Gloomy Breed
Gloomy Breed is a partial manual port of the AB3D levels to the Gloom game engine. Gloom is less capable that AB3D (think Wolfenstein 3D vs. Duke Nukem 3D) so some compromises had to be made, but I finished six levels and they can be downloaded from girv dot net.
Alien Breed 3D RTG
I got the AB3D source code from the Amiga Format CD assembling (a major effort in itself), then started modifying it so it would be compatible with expanded Amigas fitted with graphics and sound cards, be “OS friendly” and run in the background like any application or game does on Windows today (this would have been a big deal for an Amiga game back then!). I called this project AB3D-RTG.
RTG is an acronym for “ReTargetable Graphics”, referring to the ability to redirect graphics output through any attached video hardware and not have to rely on the Amiga’s inbuilt custom chipset.
I got as far as rewriting the graphics engine so it would render through the operating system rather than “hit the hardware” directly, but it was in low resolution and wasn’t fully working. Also, I was concerned that some data and parts of functionality were missing from the source (in game keys, objects) and decided to abandon the project.
 QBreed Level 1 (WinQuake) |
 QBreed Level 1 (glQuake) |
 QBreed Level 1 |
 QBreed Level 1 |
Based on what I’d learned of the level data structure from the source code, I wrote a set of utilties that would convert the basic structure of AB3D levels to maps for id Software’s Quake 1 engine. Combined with a Quake mod to implement the AB3D game logic, this was QBreed.
It worked well enough for the early levels, but because the Quake 1 engine was built around 16 bit fixed point mathematics it couldn’t support the extent of map that was required to successfully convert some later ones. The floating point based Quake 3 engine supports the required map extent and I did have a version of QBreed running under Quake 3 at one point, but lacked the time to do anything more with it. This project too was abandoned, but you can download a snapshot of the final QBreed development directory here.
Alien Breed 3D - Box Art
I also created a patch, SetJoyPort, that made AB3D compatible with CD32 joypads, and a trainer. Both of these were later incorporated into and superseded by PatchAB3D by Peter Gordon but you can still download the originals from girv dot net and Aminet.
Alien Breed 3D is truly one of the stand-out classic Amiga games. Download from Dream17 and play it today!
John Girvin is a software engineer, sci-fi buff, cyclist and retrocomputer fan (ie: nerd) from Belfast, Northern Ireland.
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October 29th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Good read! Well written and informative. The AB3D RTG work sounds fantastic. Ever tempted to try it again?
October 29th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Sure, given time … oh right.
October 29th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
nice work girv
would be nice to see a rtg version but well this time thing dam
happy tappin
August 27th, 2010 at 12:37 am
Is there somewhere we can get the levels that you converted to Q1 or Q3 (or the utilities to do it ourselves) ?
November 5th, 2010 at 10:26 pm
How well did these 3D games run on stock A1200′s? I didnt think they had the performance for any 3D. Evidently I was wrong! Still miss Workbench.
November 7th, 2010 at 9:57 pm
AB3D ran acceptably on a stock A1200, but it shipped with a special cut-down version for these low memory machines. You really needed extra RAM and a faster processor to get the best experience.
November 7th, 2010 at 10:36 pm
I’ve made the QBreed utilities, source code etc. available for download now. See this post for details.
May 17th, 2012 at 7:55 am
Andy Clitheroe rumouredly worked to accomplish an 1×1 patch for AB3D, and got it working (I have seen screenshots), but then made (or someone else did) the decision to turn the patch into a whole game.
That is how the fiasco called AB3D II:The Killing Grounds was born. Completely soulless, grey, unimaginative, badly designed levels, lacking in many things (including the shotgun flash which existd in AB3D), and having a really disgusting FOV (Field of Vision – it’s like you would use a lot of zoom constantly with a camera, it looks dreadful in a FPS game) – all in all, a real failure of a game, despite the ‘advanced lighting effects’ and some good ideas, ‘real 3D engine’, actual 3D enemies (that don’t look like anything) and so on.
I just wish they had simply released the 1×1 patch, perhaps with a few extra levels, and left it at that. But no.
Still, knowing that such a patch did exist at some point in some form, would anyone happen to know whether
a) It would be possible to find it, obtain it and use it with AB3D (for actual 1×1 Doom-like experience with WinUAE (which would be fast enough for it, even if a real 68060 CPU isn’t))
or
b) It would be possbile to re-create such a marvel from scratch (if you have the source code, it should be possible, right?)
Then again, Clitheroe’s code is famously really messy and difficult to read, so perhaps this isn’t possible. Still, one can always hope..
June 24th, 2012 at 4:43 pm
AB3d2:TKG got better pretty quickly to a point that its as good as the prequel. Unfortunately it needs as much grunt as you can throw at it (I didnt discover how good it is until I played it on my amithlon box using the RTG patch). Only really for ’060+patches, or emulation unfortunately.
It’s actually pretty colorful, and has some great levels. The 1st few arent very representative of the complete game though.
As for portability, forget it. The sources are pretty amiga specific, both 68k asm, and hardware hitting. A person is better off recreating it using and/or modifying an exisitng open source engine.