Quote:
Originally Posted by pink^abyss
Well done!
I wonder how much the blitter will slow it all down when it comes to blitting the gazillon
of sprites in Outrun...
Although very simple in comparison to Outrun I was prettry amazed back then by the
Super Hang On demo OCS@50fps
[ Show youtube player ]
|
Indeed. That's what we'll be finding out next. If the road rendering is anything to go by, I will be rewriting the sprite code at least 8 times from scratch. Incidentally, I reduced the number of bitplanes used by the road from 3 to 2 yesterday, without losing anything. Well - it runs even faster now!
For the sprites (and I mean OutRun sprites here, not Amiga sprites), rather than jumping straight in and coding like a possessed madman, I'm spending time analysing the OutRun level structure (I coded a
level editor 10 years ago which helps), palette usage, and planning out as much as possible on paper in advance. It provides a break from pure coding, as I've been burning the midnight oil a bit.
Beyond that it will be figuring out where best to use the Blitter, and where to live in fast memory and pure CPU. My initial assumption is that I may be better off bypassing the Blitter completely for sprites. But I will probably be wrong.
I have seen the SHO demo. It's cool, although you can take short-cuts with demos that won't cut it for an interactive game. There are a lot of edge-cases to cover. Well, most of them aren't even edge-cases - just part of the game engine.