English Amiga Board - View Single Post - How did games like Starglider 2 get such a high frame rate?

roondar · 09 August 2018, 19:09

I'm not an expert in 3D gaphics, but there are a few things these games did to speed things up I do know:

1) almost all of them ran in low colour modes & resolutions.
2) almost all of them didn't run full screen.
3) a number of them used the blitter to clear the screen while doing the calculations for the next frame to draw.
4) the ones that did use the blitter (as I understand it) made a 1BPL version of any filled polygon in a seperate buffer first (using blitter line/blitter fill) and then copied it over to whatever bitplanes where needed.

And 5) they tended to draw simple shapes only (no nice looking spheres for instance), meaning less math was needed for drawing the polygons and each of the polygons was a simple shape.

Edit: I'm also pretty sure that any game showing circles just used 2D circles instead of 3D representations.

However, there is probably more going on than just this

09 August 2018, 19:09	#7
roondar Registered User Join Date: Jul 2015 Location: The Netherlands Posts: 3,423	I'm not an expert in 3D gaphics, but there are a few things these games did to speed things up I do know: 1) almost all of them ran in low colour modes & resolutions. 2) almost all of them didn't run full screen. 3) a number of them used the blitter to clear the screen while doing the calculations for the next frame to draw. 4) the ones that did use the blitter (as I understand it) made a 1BPL version of any filled polygon in a seperate buffer first (using blitter line/blitter fill) and then copied it over to whatever bitplanes where needed. And 5) they tended to draw simple shapes only (no nice looking spheres for instance), meaning less math was needed for drawing the polygons and each of the polygons was a simple shape. Edit: I'm also pretty sure that any game showing circles just used 2D circles instead of 3D representations. However, there is probably more going on than just this