Ambermoon

The grandfather of the player explains at the beginning of the game that his presumed-dead companion spoke to him in a dream of a new threat to the land of Lyramion.

Since hard drives for the Amiga were rare, most players had to put up with frequent disk changes (and corresponding long load times), particularly before battle scenes.

Ambermoon features first person 3D movement in dungeons, and Simon states that "we have had a bitmap-polygon routine at Thalion for over two years now ... we've not had the opportunity to implement this technique but now the chance has finally arisen.

Our revolutionary realtime texture mapping system gives you the possibility to move around freely in three-dimensional dungeons and cities.

"[1] Simon goes on to express that this feature is "normally impossible" to do on 16-bit machines, and states that "The development has gone from wireframe to solid polygons and now on to texture mapping.

"[1] Simon explains that "Many painting programs such as DPaint have been doing this sort of thing for years but the real problem lies with performing it in realtime with dozens of bitplane polygons.

[1] Due to this, the game loses "25% of the optimum speed", but The One states that "[Thalion feels] that the advantages of having more colours to play with and the ability to smoothly fade objects to black when there is little light in the dungeon more than make up for this.

"[1] Simon goes on to state that he feels that the team at Thalion are "the only software house capable of doing this because we have the experience of Amberstar and some new development tools.

We're using the same size screen for the texture mapped dungeon in Amberstar which is why our system doesn't tend to 'crumble' distant objects as much as Legends of Valour.

"[1] Ambermoon was a major success for Thalion, but it ultimately failed to prevent the company's collapse, which occurred before they were able to begin the final part of the planned trilogy.

Part of the Thalion team went on to Blue Byte, which produced the graphically-similar game Albion, a spiritual sequel to Ambermoon.