Optimizing Wolf3D-style rendering

[britelite]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

But visually ins't so good.

What part of placeholder graphics didn't you understand?

[DanScott]

*gets popcorn*

[britelite]

Originally Posted by DanScott

*gets popcorn*

You're going to need some beer too

[zero]

I had an idea for speeding up rendering.

You can use one bitplane to make a mask that covers the areas were walls are drawn. Obviously it will be only one colour... But you can render the texture into other bitplanes and use the palette (or even dual playfield!) so that it is visible only where the walls are.

How does that help? Well if you use the right wall texture then maybe you don't have to render full height textures. Say you just wanted depth shading, so stuff further from the player is darker. You only need to render a 1 pixel high texture and then use the copper to repeat it.

Obviously this limits the kind of texture you can use. You could maybe expand it from 1 pixel to 16 or 32 and it will have to be carefully designed to mask the fact that it isn't really scaled or positioned... Although I suppose you could adjust the start position to match the top of the wall.

But it would be fast, you could use a blitter fill for the walls. For a game speed may be preferable.

[chb]

AND IT DOEZ NOT EVEN LOOK LIKE WOLFENSTEIN, THEY GOT ALL THE TEXTURES WRONG!!!!!111!1!11

Seriously, people would have killed for something like this back in the day. Very impressive engine, and some of the textures already look gorgeous - e.g. the amber screen before the "level complete" gives some nice steampunk/chaos engine vibes, placeholder or not. Kudos for doing something original and not sticking with the Wolfenstein theme. I'm really curious about the final result!

[britelite]

Originally Posted by zero

Obviously this limits the kind of texture you can use.

Yeah, and this right here is the problem. I do want real texture mapping, and anything else is out of the scope for this project.

But it would be fast, you could use a blitter fill for the walls. For a game speed may be preferable.

Rendering the walls is the easy part, and is currently fairly quick anyway. It's rendering the enemies and items where it get's a bit trickier.

[Tigerskunk]

Amazing Engine...

[aros-sg]

Originally Posted by britelite

What part of placeholder graphics didn't you understand?

I think he means the ~dithering effect which tries to make it look less low-res. It's kinda ugly. On today's sharp monitors. Maybe less so if was more blurry (old monitors, or crt monitors or bad eyesight).

[britelite]

Originally Posted by aros-sg

I think he means the ~dithering effect which tries to make it look less low-res. It's kinda ugly.

Do I really need to repeat myself? This is a part of the graphics, and may or may not be used in the final game.

EDIT: and to be clear, I don't really think that's what he was referring to when saying this is something that would've been thrown in the trash back in the days...

[britelite]

This discussion seems to be going off the tracks now, so let's keep to the technical side of things. If you feel like commenting on the graphics and/or audio part of the preview, then please start another topic, so I can ignore it

[zero]

Originally Posted by britelite

It's rendering the enemies and items where it get's a bit trickier.

Why is that? Aren't they effectively just extra walls? I guess they are partially transparent and can overlap... But I don't understand why rendering would be significantly harder than the walls.

[britelite]

Originally Posted by zero

I guess they are partially transparent and can overlap...

Exactly this, there's quite a lot more work involved, which means only rendering shaded walls as you suggested wouldn't really speed up things significantly, because you'd still have to do pretty much all the same work with the enemy sprites in both approaches (assuming you'd want textured sprites instead of single color blobs).

[zero]

Originally Posted by britelite

Exactly this, there's quite a lot more work involved, which means only rendering shaded walls as you suggested wouldn't really speed up things significantly, because you'd still have to do pretty much all the same work with the enemy sprites in both approaches (assuming you'd want textured sprites instead of single color blobs).

Seems like it would speed it up a lot, because for the walls you only need to render the top pixel, the bottom pixel, and the shading colour pixel. Then do a blitter vertical fill, during which time you can be calculating other stuff.

Of course I accept this is not your goal, you want a proper Wolfenstein style renderer, so the rest of this is just me thinking about a similar but different engine that attempts to be fast rather than really pretty.

For objects, assuming you don't allow any geometry where an object can be visible to either side of a wall, you can probably optimize rendering a lot by figuring out the horizontal span that needs to be drawn and then blitting some pre-scaled bobs into position. The scaling only needs to be horizontal if you use line skipping for vertical, although it might get costly with the blitter.

I would also extend the colour palette by using a 2 line wall texture to allow for simple XO mixing.

Considering you can do full screen scrollers at 50 fps using the blitter fill method it may be possible to get very decent frame rates drawing walls the same way.

[Photon]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

Doable the effort to do a game like Wolf3d, but to be honest, back in the day a game like this wold be put into trash. Why? Visuallly is very very worse.

Instead trying to do somenthing that doesn't belong to Amiga, why don't put all the effort to do the same but using "simple" flat ray casting whiout "texture mapping", and have a very good gfx?

You mean Wolfenstein. Corporation preceded Wolfenstein on Amiga, and had more gameplay depth than Wolfenstein. The id platformer removed most of the platformer; the id shooters (Wolfenstein was their 3rd attempt IIRC) removed most of the maze/Gauntlet type games to reduce it to shooting and walking into buttons.

Any attempt from most PC users to laud the performance of these games on their PC are mistaken memories from years later.

If you wanted sound with your game you would pay in excess of $1500/GBP to play Wolfenstein half decent on release summer 1992, and this is what you would see.

[ Show youtube player ]

That looks close to Britelite's OCS performance, so... someone record this on A3000

[roondar]

Indeed, I'm highly impressed by the performance of Cyberwolf. And despite the work-in-progress graphics I already find them, well, nice. It can only get better once 'full' art is in place.

[Dunny]

I remember a friend having a brand new 386, and grabbing a copy of Ultima Underworld. Gorgeous game with amazing 3D graphics but damn, it chugged along like a snail. Wolfenstein was quicker, being a much simpler engine, but it was still very slow and couldn't go proper fullscreen without crawling.

I also recall seeing Quake on a 486... Played in a postage stamp sized window.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by britelite

You're going to need some beer too

and Pizza.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Photon

You mean Wolfenstein. Corporation preceded Wolfenstein on Amiga, and had more gameplay depth than Wolfenstein. The id platformer removed most of the platformer; the id shooters (Wolfenstein was their 3rd attempt IIRC) removed most of the maze/Gauntlet type games to reduce it to shooting and walking into buttons.

Any attempt from most PC users to laud the performance of these games on their PC are mistaken memories from years later.

If you wanted sound with your game you would pay in excess of $1500/GBP to play Wolfenstein half decent on release summer 1992, and this is what you would see.

[ Show youtube player ]

That looks close to Britelite's OCS performance, so... someone record this on A3000

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-...940-story.html
Article date: December 1993, Location: Los Angeles, CA, USA.

A year ago, a San Francisco-area PC clone dealer known for its low prices was advertising a fully equipped 33 Mhz 486 PC for $1,388. Today, that same machine costs about $1,000. Another dealer was selling 240-megabyte hard disks for $525. Now $259 will buy you a 345-megabyte hard disk. You can get a gigabyte of storage for less than $800.

Retail prices, of course, are based on the cost of components. Intel’s popular 33 Mhz 486 CPU cost PC makers $1,056 in 1990 in quantities of 1,000. At the end of 1992 it cost $329. Starting next week, it will be $272.

In March, 1993, Intel introduced its high-end Pentium processor, which is about twice as fast as today’s 486 central processing units. At the time, PC makers who ordered 1,000 Pentiums paid $878 for the 60 Mhz version. In January, they’ll pay $793 and in April, 1994, the price will dip to $675. Complete Pentium-based PCs are now advertised for as little as $2,800, but the number of companies using the Pentium is still quite limited

-----------------
My parent bought my secondhand Amiga 3000/030/882/KS2.04 sometime in 1992 before Amiga 4000's release ~ $900 AUD with Amiga 500 Rev 6 (with original box) trade-in. My Dad also purchased ex-corporate IBM Model PS2 Model 55SX(386SX, MCA bus VGA, 5MB RAM, later upgraded to 25Mhz 387 FPU overclocked to 33Mhz, jumper can select either 16Mhz or 33Mhz) below $500 AUD in a similar time period.

I jumped to Pentium 150Mhz (Socket 7 overclocked to 166Mhz, S3 Trio64 UV SVGA) PC in 1996 i.e. running Quake and Windows 95 are the main draw cards.

At 1996, CyberVision 64(S3 Trio64) and 68060 at 50Mhz accelerator cost more than my Pentium 150Mhz based PC path.

[roondar]

To not make this too off-topic, I'll keep this very short: the cheap "fully equipped" 486's were often not as good as you'd think, usually they shipped with dead slow and very cheap ISA VGA cards and quite often "fully equipped" meant "no sound card".

Don't underestimate the effects of slow VGA card on 3D games.

[VladR]

Originally Posted by Dunny

I also recall seeing Quake on a 486... Played in a postage stamp sized window.

You recall wrong.

Quake didn't run on 486. It required Pentium because its rasterizer was written by Michael Abrash against Pentium's floating Point and parallel divide features.


I suspect you recall Doom2 on something like 486 SX 25/33 MHz. That was, indeed, a very slow 486. My friend had one of those and it was a very bad purchase. Initially it was ridiculously more expensive than 386 DX 40, but only marginally faster in most games...

Or, maybe it was a non-Intel Pentium-class chip ? Some of those Cyrixes were quite awful...