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Posted By

Rachy
on 2006-02-03
04:34:13
 Re: Xeo3 - Background tiles..... Blog 29/01/2006. (impasse!)

There is something what I don't exactly understand: you rejected the inner black because there is no masking. But if there is masking then inner black can be applied yet.

Memory and processor time waste: in general there is not much I could suggest.

For memory: I guess you use two screens for double buffering, also probably two charsets. It doesn't seem a lot to me. Probably there are also further data for gfx, such as animation which is copied on demand, but yet again it seems not as much memory to me. So what is it taking so much memory? Implementing some simply packing on map elements? (RLE for example.)

On processor time: you could probably implement your own TED sound player, which can be very-very cheap. (Around 2-3 raster lines.) I know that Luca won't be happy... wink
Also using the zero map as variables, or even for running code could help, it can be faster because of the simplier addressing.
Getting the scrolling area smaller could also help a lot. The rest of the screen could take up by dashboard and some graphical elements.
With clever limits in the elements of the game you could win a lot. Limiting the number of enemies, bullets, etc.
I don't know how much it could help (if at all), but you might check if wasn't it faster moving only the non-empty part of the screen at scrolling. (Obviously checks might take much time.) With tricky map levels where not as many parts of the screen is occupied it might also help.
And finally 2 frames refresh... It isn't pretty, but yet acceptable, IMO.

For the bgcolor problem: I already suggested that if sprites took only 3 colors (2+black) then it won't collide with the bg colors. But you are absolutely right: it takes much time to scroll the color map too.



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