How does X2:Megablast parallax with all that colors? - Page 12

DanScott · 16 July 2020, 00:04

Quote:

Originally Posted by Antiriad_UK

That's really neat. I liked the usage of the debugger. I think I will try something like that to understand some demo effects I don't understand. Switching the buffers and trap bltsize.

Apart from the usual "clears" and "fills", you'd be suprised probably at how little the blitter really gets used (especially in my recent demos).. quite often to do things that are not exactly "visible" (ie.. to build bitplane pointers for each line of the screen etc..)

lmimmfn · 16 July 2020, 01:20

Quote:

Originally Posted by roondar

Thanks for the video, interesting to see it in action.

So... Many... Blits...
Wow, no wonder it's slow. The game must be doing well over a hundred blits per frame! And that's just for the foreground tiles! That's not even counting the background, the clear blit or the sprites.

No HW scrolling of either layer, no HW sprites, no interleaved bitmaps, no nothing. Just a big bunch of blits!

Its erm.... shocking!!!!
Great work McGeezer on showing it!

Tigerskunk · 16 July 2020, 07:45

Seeing this, I think it's amazing that they even made it to 17 fps with this engine.

Wow.

aros-sg · 16 July 2020, 09:33

I may remember wrong but I actually think sometimes (maybe a CRT thing) 17 fps looked better (or less bad) than 25 fps, because objects looked less ~"smeared/blended together" (previous 1/17 frame <-> current 1/17 frame) because the objects travelled more pixels between previous and current time (less overlapping in time).

Code:

xxx
     xxx
          xxx

vs:

Code:

xxx

  xxx

   xxx

Tigerskunk · 05 August 2020, 12:13

Quote:

Originally Posted by DanScott

Apart from the usual "clears" and "fills", you'd be suprised probably at how little the blitter really gets used (especially in my recent demos)..

But why is that in your case?
I use the Blitter like for everything except stuff that's in slow RAM.

DMWCashy · 07 September 2020, 22:05

Hi All,
I have been trying out some methods to improve the speed of Xenon 2, though from my efforts so far 25fps seems the best we can hope to aim for, unless someone has some really neat trick up their sleeves.

Currently I am able to render the 4 colour background and 16 colour foreground tiles at the cost of half a frame. This is using a 2 plane full screen cookie cut for the background.

I had a look at using 5 bitplanes, which does reduce the load in half. However the colour palette needs to be doubled for this to work, and so removed the ability to define sprite colours (which i'm using for bullets and lasers) so a no go there.

As the tiles move at a very slow pace, I have the tile rendering down to a mere 3 scanlines of execution

So if anyone has any tricks, or ideas let me know.

16 July 2020, 09:33	#224
aros-sg Registered User Join Date: Nov 2015 Location: Italy Posts: 191	I may remember wrong but I actually think sometimes (maybe a CRT thing) 17 fps looked better (or less bad) than 25 fps, because objects looked less ~"smeared/blended together" (previous 1/17 frame <-> current 1/17 frame) because the objects travelled more pixels between previous and current time (less overlapping in time). Code: xxx xxx xxx vs: Code: xxx xxx xxx Last edited by aros-sg; 16 July 2020 at 09:35. Reason: leading spaces

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16 July 2020, 07:45	#223
Tigerskunk Inviyya Dude! Join Date: Sep 2016 Location: Amiga Island Posts: 2,773	Seeing this, I think it's amazing that they even made it to 17 fps with this engine. Wow.

07 September 2020, 22:05	#226
DMWCashy Registered User Join Date: Dec 2019 Location: Newcastle Posts: 67	Hi All, I have been trying out some methods to improve the speed of Xenon 2, though from my efforts so far 25fps seems the best we can hope to aim for, unless someone has some really neat trick up their sleeves. Currently I am able to render the 4 colour background and 16 colour foreground tiles at the cost of half a frame. This is using a 2 plane full screen cookie cut for the background. I had a look at using 5 bitplanes, which does reduce the load in half. However the colour palette needs to be doubled for this to work, and so removed the ability to define sprite colours (which i'm using for bullets and lasers) so a no go there. As the tiles move at a very slow pace, I have the tile rendering down to a mere 3 scanlines of execution So if anyone has any tricks, or ideas let me know.

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