Compileable version of Alien Breed 3D II - The Killing Grounds

[coachman]

When playing on classic hardware, I prefer using 2/3 regime instead of full screen - it gives much better flow. However, in that case the text messages are not visible. How complicated would it be to print the text at the usual location even if that's not in the area covered by the reduced 3D view?

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by coachman

When playing on classic hardware, I prefer using 2/3 regime instead of full screen - it gives much better flow. However, in that case the text messages are not visible. How complicated would it be to print the text at the usual location even if that's not in the area covered by the reduced 3D view?

That's the plan. It's a question of how best to do it, because that varies depending on whether or not you are on AGA or RTG.

Doing the messages "in display" is easy because the overhead is next to nothing as the whole frame is either C2P'd to Chip RAM on AGA or copied to the locked bitmap in RTG.

However, in both cases, on 2/3, we are only updating the small region (and borders). To reuse the the space below 2/3 view (which is my preference) clearly has a number of "best ways" to do it.

For AGA it seems overkill to have to C2P a new region to the display so we want some sort of optimised plotter that can operate in planar space. We may also want to the blitter to clear the region*. For RTG, given the total number of pixels written for text is quite small, we probably want a rectangle clear call first, followed by direct writes to the locked bitmap for the text.

* the tricky bit for AGA is trying to find a good, single colour index for text. One that would require manipulating only a single bitplane, ideally. That depends on how the palette is set up, which is a bit odd. We might get away with a brightish white by sticking to bit 5 (colour index 32).

In both cases, we definitely don't want to do any more work than is strictly necessary, so we probably only want to do that redraw when the text changes. Since those regions are not overdrawn by anything, this could be very efficient as we'd be updating the text only once every few seconds.

[Karlos]

First work in a while, but I've done some spring cleaning which has mostly been around removing the various unused historic menu code, of which there is far too much. It's like picking at a thread in a jumper, as you identify something unused, it leads to the next thing and so on, unravelling the whole thing.

[Karlos]

@abu_the_monkey

Just saw and merged your PR for the message buffer fix.

[abu_the_monkey]

Originally Posted by Karlos

@abu_the_monkey

Just saw and merged your PR for the message buffer fix.

cool

also there was a fix for the '*' quit key from paraj
https://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p...postcount=4366

[Karlos]

Top banana

[abu_the_monkey]

I didn't include the fix from paraj in the pr I raised as they were separate issues. If your happy with it you could include it with your next merge perhaps.

[Karlos]

Sure. I want to merge my "nonfunctional" changes separately anyway.

[Karlos]

Merged and included the submenu exit fix. That's a lot of old menu code finally laid to rest.