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.