I'm still chipping away at optimisations, little by little. I've been
distracted by my PC remake of the Freescape engine*, but haven't
stopped working on the Sam stuff. The code is now roughly 28% faster
than the version that I submitted for Sam Revival, and I'm not done yet.
Filled polygons shouldn't be an insurmountable problem. In fact, they
should be noticeably faster than the version from before I switched to
vector outlines. The main problem is that not using the stack pointer
for polygon filling will obviously slow that down by a huge amount,
but continuing to use the end of frame interrupt for triple buffering
and timing would lead to the occasional stray four pixels of random
colour. In fact, it'd be very occasional because it'd only happen if
the interrupt fired while the CPU was drawing the last four pixels of
a scanline. I guess the final decision on what to do about that would
depend on whether the engine was being used for anything that was
meant to be close to a realtime game.
My suspicion is that something sufficiently sparse that didn't run
full-screen would actually be playable in real time with solid
graphics. But I've yet to try to prove it.
Incidentally, having watched I, Of the Mask a few times, I think it
has exactly this problem — though obviously being a Spectrum game it
leaves more 16 pixels of junk on screen. I'm not completely sure though.
In terms of the engine's functionality, I'd like to get Elite-style
movement (i.e. incremental rotations around local axes rather than
Euler angles and progressive global axes) in there before calling it
'complete'.
For a game, I prototyped a tennis game but it didn't seem to be fun
whatever I did. So now I'm not really sure.
* I know it's definitely not what this list is for, but Windows and OS
X betas are available from http://tinyurl.com/66wr29
On 10 Jul 2008, at 16:06, Colin Piggot wrote:
Thomas Harte wrote:
I think I'm running out of optimisation ideas now, which is not to
say
that there aren't any, just that I haven't had them yet and may never
have them. So it's time to start implementing an actual game.
Anything in mind at this stage for a game, and how feesible would it
be to
impliment shading to the code as it stands? (going back to one of the
original ideas of being like a Freescape style engine)
Would anyone be at all interested in my code, packaged as a public
domain library of functions? I'll probably eventually do that anyway,
but I'm curious.
Yeap, certainly. I had a few ideas on what could be done with the
maths
sides alone.
Colin
=====
Quazar : Hardware, Software, Spares and Repairs for the SAM Coupe
1995-2008 - Celebrating 14 Years of developing for the SAM Coupe
Website: http://www.samcoupe.com/
