*gasp* Better than Carmageddon? Heresy!
...okay, so Carmageddon wasn't exactly a *racing* game, but it HAS racing in it!

Ooh, that reminds me, Craig, please email me the debug-enabled version so that I can run Carmageddon with it when I'm feeling better and see if I can figure out what causes it to freeze up on certain levels. (Maybe it doesn't anymore. That would be rockin'.)

Colin,
Fabio has uploaded it to sourceforge.
But be warned, it's not for playing, as logging causes unbelievable amounts of slowdown.

I'm going away for Chrismas, but I've just bought a laptop so I can play with Glidos and OpenGLide while away (and maybe do some work - but I hope not). There are two rather nice CDs here that at last I will be able to play with, and Screamer is head of the list. I'll have a look at the log now.

Hmm, I should say though: if I remember rightly you said that it worked but ran slow. My guess is that it uses loads of frame buffer writing. Looking at your screen shots, there's loads of non 3d stuff over the top of the 3d scene; often that's done with frame buffer writes. This could be bad news, because at present noone's thought of a real ffast way to do it. Fabio made it very much faster than it used to be, but it is still slow.

There is maybe a hack, which would be to handle the frame buffer writes only once per frame. That might mean that some of the image gets reordered in the z direction but maybe not.

I'll have a go anyway.

Yes, in the log there are many repeats of

grTexDownloadMipMap( 0, 8, 3, --- )

That's Glidos sending the contents of an area of the logical frame buffer as a texture.

Just have to hope that the once per frame trick works.

I know you'll have fun with those CDs, I did 😀

I did notice that the slowdown is constant when overlayed text is on screen.
But the weird thing is, the slowdown is uniform (if thats the right way to describe it)

i.e. When slowdown occurs in a game, the frame rate drops, and even becomes erratic.
But in SRally, the frame rate is an exact 10fps. Ups to 19fps when the text disappears, then back to 10fps when text is displayed.

Anyway, if you don't reply here,

HAVE A GREAT XMAS, MATE !!!! 😀

Interestingly enough, games such as Omikron, when used with Quincunx FSAA, and when displaying HUD (during hand-to-hand combat), will cause the framerate to drop to <1FPS. Well, that said, Omikron is the only one I've seen do it. (Not in Glide or using a wrapper!) Maybe the new nVidia drivers fix that, but since that fiasco, I haven't used Quincunx. Makes me disappointed that the Quincunx hardware takes up 1/4 of the board!!

CraigG wrote:

I know you'll have fun with those CDs, I did 😀

Yes, I can hardly wait. I keep thinking I want to mess with them now, but I know that if I do there's a real possibility of getting no more work done this side of Chrismas. I did sneak the S3TC verison of Unreal off them, which was really naughty, but couldn't resist.

I did notice that the slowdown is constant when overlayed text is on screen. But the weird thing is, the slowdown is uniform (i […]
Show full quote

I did notice that the slowdown is constant when overlayed text is on screen.
But the weird thing is, the slowdown is uniform (if thats the right way to describe it)

i.e. When slowdown occurs in a game, the frame rate drops, and even becomes erratic.
But in SRally, the frame rate is an exact 10fps. Ups to 19fps when the text disappears, then back to 10fps when text is displayed.

Does sound like frame buffer writes.

Anyway, if you don't reply here, HAVE A GREAT XMAS, MATE !!!! :) […]
Show full quote

Anyway, if you don't reply here,

HAVE A GREAT XMAS, MATE !!!! 😀

Yeh, and you mate. Another advantage of having a laptop is that I should be able to visit the forum from time to time. And, if I get anywhere with Screamer, maybe post some files.

Snover wrote:

Interestingly enough, games such as Omikron, when used with Quincunx FSAA, and when displaying HUD (during hand-to-hand combat), will cause the framerate to drop to <1FPS.

Interesting. Probably for the same reason: with antialiasing they have to create a virtual frame buffer like we do.

Colin,
Have you tried the newer 41.09 drivers ?
If you have a GF3 or a GF4, then you can use a new 8x FSAA which looks absolutely amazing !!

But the downside is that it's D3D only, no OGL 😠

So I hope they are planning on getting all these nice new modes in OpenGL, then I'll buy a Geforce FX. OTherwise, I'll just plump for a Radeon 9700 Pro.

And, if I get anywhere with Screamer, maybe post some files.

I look forward to them. 😀
Just remember that every game has it's own path, so try not to install Srally to a new directory or you may get some probs running it. Edit the screamer.cfg to point to your drive letter, or the game will just freeze.

Well, the problem didn't manifest itself using 2x or 4xFSAA modes.

OpenGL is an outdated API, which is trying to be evolved, but I'm not sure how well that will go. That's pretty much the reason there's no 8xFSAA in it. Besides, 8xFSAA is pretty much overkill unless you're running at 640x480, in which case: why!?