Optimizing Wolf3D-style rendering

[pipper]

Quake can run on a 486. I played it on an AMD 486DX4-120. Not the fastest thing in the world but playable.

[VladR]

Today? Sure. Quake runs on refrigerator.

But the very first build upon release didn't. We tried it.

[rothers]

Originally Posted by pipper

Quake can run on a 486. I played it on an AMD 486DX4-120. Not the fastest thing in the world but playable.

Yep, I played the demo all the way through on my overclocked 486/120 too back in 1996. It had to be in 320*200 but it did play ok. It really needed that FPU though, my friend had a pentium60 which played it far better.

[roondar]

I distinctly remember playing Quake on a 486 at a friends house. It ran terribly, but it did run.

[DanScott]

and yet again a thread goes off topic....

[robinsonb5]

Originally Posted by DanScott

and yet again a thread goes off topic....

Does that really matter when the original conversation finished well over a year ago?

[Dunny]

No, this was definitely a 486 (I inquired, having not seen Quake before), and it was definitely Quake because it was showing the entrance to E3M1 (the metal floor with lava beneath). It wasn't exactly smooth, even at smallest window size.

[britelite]

Originally Posted by robinsonb5

Does that really matter when the original conversation finished well over a year ago?

Well, it certainly doesn't make me want to give updates on any progress I've made with the game.

[britelite]

And regarding Quake running on a 486, I just tried it (Quake 1.06 SW-version from 1996) on my 486dx2/66 and it ran just fine. Can't say it was fast, but it ran.

EDIT: And because I haven't got anything better to do on a Saturday night, I installed Quake 0.91 SW-version, and even that one ran on my 486. So can we please end the Quake-discussion now?

[robinsonb5]

Originally Posted by britelite

Well, it certainly doesn't make me want to give updates on any progress I've made with the game.

Your thread, your call, I guess - and looking again at the 1st post I see that you specifically asked for it to remain on-topic, so fair enough.



So, what's new?

[VladR]

Originally Posted by britelite

And regarding Quake running on a 486, I just tried it (Quake 1.06 SW-version from 1996) on my 486dx2/66 and it ran just fine. Can't say it was fast, but it ran.

EDIT: And because I haven't got anything better to do on a Saturday night, I installed Quake 0.91 SW-version, and even that one ran on my 486. So can we please end the Quake-discussion now?

Fair enough, except we can't really go back in time. I recall really well that the executable I had, didn't run on 486 because we went through exorbitant effort to compare it and make sure CPU was the only different HW part (hauling my PC on foot, through heavy blizzard, about 7 km on foot from nearest bus stop - you don't forget such days, ever).

Later on, I found out that there were quite a few other differences in that particular executable. Let's just say the Quake you buy now on Steam is slightly different in few major areas, but that's really going off-topic...

[VladR]

Going back to the topic: Have you had a chance to run your code on something like 68060 and perhaps higher res ?

I'm assuming this should run at 60 fps on ~68030-040.

And at least 75-90 fps on 68060 in HiRes, correct ?

[roondar]

Between KK/Altair's "doom-like" and the results shown here by Britelite, I've been very impressed with the performance of these kind of engines on the A500. Now, I could be wrong here but it seems to me that the methods used by these two engines are specifically optimised for lower end Amiga hardware, so it could be that they don't scale as well as you might think when using faster systems.

That's not to say they won't be faster, but if I had to guess, I'd say that a routine that avoids the Blitter altogether is probably going to be faster on the '040 and '060 as it saves you the effort of storing partial results into chip memory (instead you'd run all the graphics in fast memory, only doing the C2P to chip memory.

[VladR]

Yeah, given how insanely fragmented the Amiga HW space is, there's always going to be a combo of some gfx card & CPU that swings the performance bottlenecks in a different direction.

But perhaps 060 already has a C2P HiRes Wolf ?

[britelite]

Originally Posted by VladR

Going back to the topic: Have you had a chance to run your code on something like 68060 and perhaps higher res ?

I haven't tried it on anything above 020 yet, as the current code uses some SMC that isn't very cache friendly. But when the game is in a more complete state I will of course make sure it will work on faster CPU's.

I'm assuming this should run at 60 fps on ~68030-040.

And at least 75-90 fps on 68060 in HiRes, correct ?

Currently the game runs in PAL, so there's a 50fps cap.

[britelite]

Originally Posted by robinsonb5

So, what's new?

Not that much progress on the graphics side of things, have mainly worked on some bugs and reworking the audio. Next up on the graphical side of things will be special cases like rendering the doors opening.

[dreadnought]

I'm not quite sure if this is on topic, but I think it's pretty cool: [ Show youtube player ]

[britelite]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

I'm not quite sure if this is on topic, but I think it's pretty cool: [ Show youtube player ]

A promo-video without any interesting technical info, have a wild guess if I think it's on topic

[dreadnought]

Yeah, it is actually a damp squib. The original post I got it from said there was a link in comments to his code on github (I couldn't verify coz my utube is all u-blocked). Also now I read that this guy is all hot air and never finishes anything. Oh well.

[rothers]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Yeah, it is actually a damp squib. The original post I got it from said there was a link in comments to his code on github (I couldn't verify coz my utube is all u-blocked). Also now I read that this guy is all hot air and never finishes anything. Oh well.

You could make a really amazing 2.5D engine like the one shown on the GBA with relative ease assuming you have unlimited ROM. You can precalculate endless graphics and you're mostly just blitting the correct height/colour to the screen (the GBA also has top notch 2D hardware).



The Amiga does not have that and it makes it a lot harder.


I know one of the guys who wrote Duke3D for the GBA and he was telling me how it worked at the pub just before lockdown, it had some amazing tricks going on, but again they had massive ROM to utilise.