Harekiet wrote:

Can't stick all tiles in 1 large texture and have the shader do the tile rendering 1 pass with a screen filling quad?

*thinks about it for a moment*

...while that would indeed work I don't think there'd be a huge enough speed benefit compared to what I'm already doing to warrant the huge amount of time it would take to actually learn HOW to do that. Plus, what I have already runs a constant 60 FPS easily on any system with an average or better video card so it really doesn't need to go even FASTER. ;)

(I do already have all the tiles in a single large texture though because as I already mentioned, changing the active texture too often is a great way to kill the framerate.)

Sticking it all on an atlas = big saving for gl calls, and also quite essential for GLES.

I realized this the hard way 😒

Gemini000 wrote:

...while that would indeed work I don't think there'd be a huge enough speed benefit compared to what I'm already doing to warrant the huge amount of time it would take to actually learn HOW to do that.

Don't think you'd get that much any speed benefit compared to caching the background bitmap and only drawing the changes. Still would be a nice exercise, stick the tile indices in a 2d texture, use those indices to sample the tile textures. Only benefit would probably be if you wanted more animation/changes in the tileset per frame.

Harekiet wrote:

Don't think you'd get that much any speed benefit compared to caching the background bitmap and only drawing the changes. Still would be a nice exercise, stick the tile indices in a 2d texture, use those indices to sample the tile textures. Only benefit would probably be if you wanted more animation/changes in the tileset per frame.

Yeah, if the tiles were animated at all then that approach would almost certainly be better. As it stands though, all the tiles themselves are static, though some tiles generate particle effects.

I've done a bunch of testing with Allegro and have found that so long as I don't exceed about 10,000 draw calls per frame, and minimize changes to the active source texture, I can maintain a constant 60 FPS on most systems. Those draw calls can also be just about anything of any size too, so hacking together multiple things to draw in a single call can result in even BETTER performance when it can be pulled off. ;)

My biggest concern at the moment is drawing beams, like lasers and such. Allegro has ribbon-drawing capabilities which, in combination with my glow shaders, will probably produce the exact kind of effect I need, but I've not tested how fast they are so I'm hoping having 100 beams on-screen at a time doesn't kill the framerate. (Estimated maximum based on the kinds of weapon customization possible.)

Yeah I'd guess allegro doesn't provide the most efficient interface for drawing stuff. Although the 5.xapi seems to have some hold bitmap call that seems to delay rendering till it's constructed a large chunk of operations to fire off at once to d3d/opengl.

Harekiet wrote:

Yeah I'd guess allegro doesn't provide the most efficient interface for drawing stuff. Although the 5.xapi seems to have some hold bitmap call that seems to delay rendering till it's constructed a large chunk of operations to fire off at once to d3d/opengl.

Well, don't get me wrong, Allegro is freaking POWERFUL in the right hands. ;)

It's been designed to handle countless potential situations for handling its various functions and can operate both in Direct3D and OpenGL with the same command set, plus has functions for just about every other facet of game design besides just graphics AND cross-platform support on top of that. The only things missing really are networking and 3D. :B

As for held drawing, Allegro does indeed do this and I always utilize it. 10,000 draw calls/frame is the average for older hardware to maintain 60 FPS. On my current 4 GHz AMD system, I can actually hit closer to 30,000. ;D

Yeah Allegro doesn't seem that bad. Maybe we should have an allegro backend as well if someone ever makes a DOSBox rewrite!

Harekiet wrote:

Yeah Allegro doesn't seem that bad. Maybe we should have an allegro backend as well if someone ever makes a DOSBox rewrite!

Maybe... though I think you guys have done such an awesome job with DOSBox that a rewrite probably isn't even remotely warranted. ;)

Besides, considering DOSBox is an emulator, I'm not sure how much simpler it would be to write under Allegro given that most of the code would have to be outside of Allegro's own functionality anyways. All Allegro would do would be to make it simpler to port to the OSes supported by Allegro and make it simpler to interface with video and audio hardware, all of which SDL already does anyways. :P

PCem used to use Allegro. Engoo also used to use Allegro

KEYWORD: Used to.

Oh well for the PC emulator I'm slowly writing I've just made a big c++ class that handles all the backend stuff and have implementations for directx and gdi. I thought scummvm had a very similar thing. Once you go crazy with c++ it's easier to make different backends with virtual functions and you don't really wanna have any platform or library specific code in your main code.

I'm not really able to watch your show Gemini, there's no HTML5 player for blip.tv is there? I refuse to install flash player.

Lots of sites I've been roaming around have been introducing HTML5 video objects, they work wonderfully in those browers that are quickly adopting HTML5. Currently I'm using PaleMoon because Firefox has gotten really stupid and that "Australias" interface is just a google chrome wannabe. And I dislike google chrome.

I wish I could redirect all web video to Media Player Classic instead of the browser's own feeble attempts at playing video slowly tbh imo

leileilol wrote:

I wish I could redirect all web video to Media Player Classic instead of the browser's own feeble attempts at playing video slowly tbh imo

QFT

Harekiet wrote:

Oh well for the PC emulator I'm slowly writing

ooooooh. 😁

DracoNihil wrote:

I'm not really able to watch your show Gemini, there's no HTML5 player for blip.tv is there? I refuse to install flash player.

Lots of sites I've been roaming around have been introducing HTML5 video objects, they work wonderfully in those browers that are quickly adopting HTML5. Currently I'm using PaleMoon because Firefox has gotten really stupid and that "Australias" interface is just a google chrome wannabe. And I dislike google chrome.

Supposedly Blip will give you a HTML5 player if you change your user-agent to pretend to be a mobile browser:

http://smartypants.com/blogs/index.php/2014/0 … eo-player-ever/

Also, Chromium (the open-source browser on which Chrome is built) is meant to have a built-in Flash player so you don't need to infect your PC with Adobe stuff.

...?

Why is Flash inherently evil now? What kind of murder and satanic rituals has Adobe been up to? :o

Gemini000 wrote:

...?

Why is Flash inherently evil now? What kind of murder and satanic rituals has Adobe been up to? 😮

Apart from the official Flash Player being a somewhat bloaty and infamously unstable plugin, a lot of conjecture and herp derp.

Gemini000 wrote:

...?

Why is Flash inherently evil now? What kind of murder and satanic rituals has Adobe been up to? 😮

Apparently it's been a really long time since you've tried installing something from Adobe. Also, how are you missing them constantly breaking flash?

Flash went from a simple web animation (you know, those MS Paint quality animations with telephone quality audio?) to this bloated, Web 2.0, over hyped, overused platform that wastes a ton of resources, has about as much security issues as Java, and worse some companies and websites make their ENTIRE index page a giant flash object.

HTML5 master race.

DracoNihil wrote:

Flash went from a simple web animation (you know, those MS Paint quality animations with telephone quality audio?) to this bloated, Web 2.0, over hyped, overused platform that wastes a ton of resources, has about as much security issues as Java, and worse some companies and websites make their ENTIRE index page a giant flash object.

HTML5 master race.

This. Flash is so bloated and riddled with security holes that even Adobe would prefer that everyone migrate to HTML5. The only reason Flash hasn't been banished a la Java is that web developers are so addicted to it. Fortunately Apple's (and subsequently everyone else's) decision to banish Flash from the mobile space has helped a bit, but it's still pretty prevalent.