Cave flying technique

[User137]

I want to show a technique i used in this video (using my nxPascal):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BrFwCob8xI

Commonly it is believed that manipulating hardware accelerated graphics in pixel level is slow. Therefore a whole genre of "caveflying" games were forgotten for years.

I'm using OpenGL's framebuffer object extension. To make explosion hole in map texture, i'm drawing a black circle through framebuffer. Using substractive filter it is able to remove alpha channel from that part of the texture. For collisions there is a separate boolean array so i don't have to read from texture at any point.

If i set to full timer mode at Sleep(1), i'm getting 800-1200 fps while using 1680x1050 resolution, and while firing button is held down. Removing sleep(), makes fps go above 4000 but also giving frightening noises from my monitor... I mean this technique is extremely fast for this.

[paul_nicholls]

that is pretty cool indeed!

Any chance of sharing some source code?

cheers,
Paul

[WILL]

That's impressive! I'd love to have a tutorial on how to do that here on PGD or in the next issue of Pascal Gamer Magazine.

[pstudio]

Looks good and +1 for sharing code

[Traveler]

That's pretty neat indeed!

[phibermon]

Excellent effect! there are all kinds of ways of using this in a game, worms of course springs to mind

Love it! what graphics card was used in the example video? Would you say that the CPU bound checks on the boolean array were the limiting factor?

(and are you sure that the noise you're hearing at high framerates is coming from your monitor and not the voltage regulators on the motherboard/GPU? it's a high pitched 'screech' like you get when you turn on old Tv's right? despite the high frame-rate numbers, the monitors refresh rate will not vary)