This project is about the porting of Amiga Breathless for PC with modern GPU hardware. If you like this project and you want that it will be continued in the future, please make a donation to support my work. It will be appreciated.
Downloads
Demo #2
After 4 years (!), I've found the time to release the second demo of Breathless, which is basically a rebuild with the latest version of TextureMind version. There are lot of improvements, the most relevant ones are the support for Linux (only Ubuntu24 for now) and AMD graphics cards (it should work on Intel series too, but it's untested). Another improvements concern program shaders, now the lava is rendered with a program shader bound in the material, instead of the original texture. Hopefully, the next demo release shouldn't take so long :-)
Windows x86_64 (portable):
Download (5.7 MB)
Linux x86_64 (portable):
Ubuntu 24 - Download (10.4 MB)
Demo #1
This is the first demo of Breathless for PC. In this demo, you can turn around your view with the mouse and set forward with the up/down cursors, eventually go up and down with the left / right mouse buttons. You can fly around the third stage with no collision detection applied. In the future demos, I will implement an actual walk with collision detection, and the missing code to open the doors.
As you can see, the graphics aspect is very simple without any lights applied, sky, characters or animated textures. That's because the 3D engine is still under development. As next step, I will introduce a new lighting system with PBR. I do not exclude that I will implement also a ray-tracing renderer in the future.
Background
The remake of Breathless was an old dream of when I was 14, along other titles like Gloom, Alien Breed 3D, Super Stardust, Mario 64 and so on. This work is part of another bigger project that is called TextureMind Framework, developed to facilitate the creation of these kind of projects, like games, demos, presentations and so on. The idea to make a remake of Breathless in this moment started when I saw that the 3D engine with Vulkan was stable enough to render any kind of map imported with AssImp library. So why don't import Breathless map and use the same 3D engine to render them?
I was amazed by the idea of rendering Amiga Breathless with Vulkan libraries. The biggest obstacle was to import the maps from the old format in GLD, that was more suitable for raycasting than polygonal rendering. I started downloading all the material from Aminet, with this link:
http://aminet.net/package/game/shoot/Breathless-1996-Source
Then I studied the format from the original source code in C, in particular the map editor. The first important obstacle was that the editor was programmed for loading the map only in uncompressed format and all the maps were compressed in an unknown format called SLZ. I got 0 results on Google. I didn't know the format and I was about to abandon the project.