LightWave goes high-res and 24-bit!

After about 30 years of silence on the Amiga platform, killer-app "LightWave 3D" of "Babylon 5" and "seaQuest DSV" TV-series fame (and many more) has received an update. 

"Update" being a little bit of an understatement - it seems to be more like reverse-engineering and a rewrite. Original LightWave company NewTek stopped supporting the Amiga around 1995 (rumor has it that after the last public Amiga version 5.0, version 5.5 was developed, but never released), so it never got to see the shift to "retargetable graphics" aka RTG, let alone proper Full-HD screen resolutions as provided by modern FPGA-based Amiga systems. So despite outstanding functionality, speed and output quality, LightWave remained somewhat tied to the Amiga's built-in graphics chipset, which became a bit of a flaw over the last three decades.

Thanks to the effort of a team of Amiga and LightWave enthusiasts, this has now changed drastically. A couple of weeks ago, news popped up of a new release called LightWaveRTG, with an(other) update (1.1) following shortly after (Sept. 12th). It is more or less a re-implementation (in parts) of LightWave 5.0r and Modeler 5.0f, but with many limitations removed, and some modern features added. 

The biggest change may be that the GUI is now RTG, freed from Amiga-chipset screenmodes - now you can model and layout in 1920x1080 pixels, if you like. What a relief! Also, 24-bit color has been added to many previews, so you now get much more accurate feedback about what the final rendering will look like. Here are some more features of LightWaveRTG: 

- loading and saving of anim previews
- many bug fixes, improving program stability
- Datatypes support (includes PowerPC Datatypes)
- rendering speed improved by up to 20%
- run multiple instances of LightWaveRTG at the same time
- new icons
- ...and more

It's an amazing update that massively improves usability on more recent Amiga configurations. There appear to be no plans to further expand LightWaveRTG - but there is also talk of a LightWave (classic and RTG) add-on named "JumpGate3D" that is currently under development, said to be "the next step" for LightWave Amiga. That sure sounds exciting.

Check out the sources below for all the details:

It seems the news of the release showed up first on Amigatronics website (Spanish). 

https://amigatronics.com/2026/08/29/lightwavertg-el-iconico-lightwave-nativo-rtg-gracias-a-tolkien-y-kikems-amigawave/ 

Especially the English Amiga Board link is recommended, with English translation of the news, download link (updated for version 1.1) and some early user feedback.

https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=123609 

LightWave Digital, the company holding the rights to the current official LightWave line of products (Windows and MacOS), has a very nice history page.

https://lightwave3d.com/documentation/lightwave-history/

Wikipedia has a lot of information about LightWave.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LightWave_3D 

And this is a YouTube video of LightWave user "Muadib 3D" checking out the new release (2026-09-14):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLtRhfPid6o

 

Muadib 3D 

 

Alien Breed Tower Assault - in 4K!

Retro Recipes was able to remaster some old Alien Breed Tower Assault (1994) footage.

"Alien Breed: Tower Assault" is the last of Team17's top-view 4-way-scrolling Alien Breed games, before they went on to continue the series in first-person 3D-view. It is a little more refined than the previous games in the franchise, which includes having fancy 3D rendered intro and cut scenes like it had just become mandatory for all those fancy PC games of the 1990s. 

This video by Retro Recipes popped up just yesterday, in which the intro sequence of Tower Assault can be seen in stunning 4K quality. It's 90s' 3D, so the higher resolution doesn't necessarily match the quality of the modeling and textures, but nonetheless this is quite nice to see. But, most importantly, this isn't a conversion, remake, AI-upscaling or anything - it's the actual LightWave 3D project files, found on Team17's actual development machine (an A4000), just re-rendered in 4K.

It's always great to see the original developer's work preserved, and re-examined decades later. On top of the nostalgia, oftentimes interesting details, or forgotten features can be found. Program source code can be adapted to modern systems, or emulators can be used, but in this case, part of "Alien Breed: Tower Assault" just got better with time, (apparently) without any modifications.  

Anyway - see for yourself: 

 

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eIMDD25gnjI

Retro Recipes x Commodore