MaxCoderz

Some of you have seen the screenshots floating around on IRC. Now, it's official! Check out the project forum here.

Wow that is looking incredible, its amazingly fast!

Are you using any neat tricks for speed increases?

tr1p1ea wrote:Wow that is looking incredible, its amazingly fast!

Are you using any neat tricks for speed increases?

For one thing, I'm using the BC, DE, and HL normal and shadow registers for the innermost loop. Also, a bit of SMC. I have decreased the quality since the earlier versions, which almost doubled the speed.

How did you decrease the quality?

Dwedit wrote:How did you decrease the quality?

I pretty much made the resolution 48x64 and stretched it. Slightly more than half the calculation needed as before.

It always helps to look at the big picture.

Halving the horizontal resolution is what they did in Doom (if you selected Low Quality Mode), also Doom on the GBA.

Also, the lower quality will be even less noticeable once I add objects, because the sprites are going to be normal resolution.

calc84maniac wrote:

Dwedit wrote:How did you decrease the quality?

I pretty much made the resolution 48x64 and stretched it. Slightly more than half the calculation needed as before.

ingenious!

What kind of resources did you use to set up the 3D engine? (Not many tutorials on that kind of subject out there)

I'm not really sure where I first got the algorithm idea. I think it might have come from a raycasting tutorial (because this uses the same idea as raycasting but with each pixel, not just each column).

I've been working on this a bit, and I think I have the sprite-coordinate-getter-finder-thingamajig working... finally...

Right now I'm displaying one of 3 sprites depending on how far away you are... which makes it look a bit strange, but at least that's how the 68K version did it. Also, I only have the sprite from the back, so it looks a bit odd without rotation. I hope to get a scaled sprite routine working so I can display the ship at any size, but if that ends up too slow, I'll be sticking with the fixed set of sizes.

Anyway, here's the screenshot goodies!

Looks to be working properly, terrific stuff! .

Using fixed sprites would be ok, the speed gain would probably be worth it.

Yes, the only available scaped sprite routine (by Badja) is really slow, although it seems optimal. Maybe caching can help, but that requires some sort of garbage collecting, and if you have a lot of different sprites you will need a lot of ram.

I believe he has written his own sprite scaler, but im not sure how it will adapt to this project.