Thanks for your answer. I think these are all valid points, but I think I've already considered all of them.
1) SG2 looks like it's in 16 colour mode (I've tried counting colours on screen). I've tried dialling down the depth I'm using and I can see that the last 1/3 of my "pipeline" is directly proportional to the number of planes I have to update, which is as you would expect, but there's not enough savings here.
2) True, SG2 and others use half the screen for the view outside and half for the cockpit / dials, etc. But the object I'm drawing fits in that half, so right now there's no savings by cutting half the screen off.
3) Yes, I'm doing that - blitting the screen memory full of zeros takes less time than my calculations stage so is effectively free.
4) Yes, and if I go back to blitter filling I'll double check all this, but I'm not seeing huge benefits from the blitter at the moment. Bigger polygons might make the difference more significant. A blitter queue would be like magic, but like magic, they don't seem to exist in reality.
5) Yes, the ball is not realistic for a game object, but I've tried counting the polygons in a busy SG2 scene, and I think my ball has about the same, so I think it's probably a good test.
Quote:
Originally Posted by roondar
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  |