DXDRAW options

[Speeeder]

Well, seifer, as far as I see, it wouldn't really be THAT hard to restart your project... And if you took about like 10 minutes with overthinking a followable system for your program, like putting every whip into a class, then making a container class which will contain all the ships in a matrix of pointers (so it will know which ship is in which poistion without further alignment tinkering) and moving all the ships as one from the container class... You'd only need to make it know which row in its matrix has living ships, then it would know how much area the field of ships will take... So it could very simply move them all... Also, that way, we could as well help you correct something if you have a problem

Edit: oh, yea, I'd also forget the sprite engine, and load the picture of the ships to eighter the container or the ships (depending if you wish to use diff for each or not) into a TDirectDrawSurface, and handle drawing and hit checking in the ship classes.

[seiferalmasy]

well, I really didnt think the answer was so simple. It turns out, on some graphic cards (poor ones), if the desktop bitdepth is over 16 bit there is a massive performance loss, frames skipped ALOT . I thought it was window mode doing it, but it was just the bitdepth.

It could be just that 24/32bit takes up more graphic card performance, but this kinda performance degradation leads me to wonder whther this is a bug in delphix.

Anyway, I need to upgrade to undelphix soon.....

[Speeeder]

Like I said, UnDelphiX 1.07 is pretty close to bugless... I hardly doubt that performance died only cuz of DelphiX. You need to note that older graphic cards will not support much of the hardware accelerated functions, and DirectX will draw them software emulated... If the CPU is crappy too, then that'll be some extra juice for it ^^ Anyway, as far as your game goes, if you plan to release it for crappier computers, then make it start in fullscreen mode by default, and do not use 24bit. Only 16 and 32. Have to add there, that older video cards also had quite a big performance reduction on 32bit in ANY game, just as you said. And finally, add at least command line options so the user may choose a mode (fullscreen/bit depth), so your game will run as wanted.

In short: A game will run fastest in fullscreen 16 bit mode. If that's not sufficient enough, add configurability. If the given performance isn't that needed, then you can push it up

[seiferalmasy]

You bet ya. I am making 16 bit mode forced I myself have a 256 MB graphic card. and the performance increase on mine is noticible...so I am sticking with 16 bit, the quality increase just isnt worth the hit on performance imo . On crap comp 1 : 2 GHZ with 16MB gcard it won't run anywhere near smooth on vsync or above 60 fps. On crap comp 2 600 MGHz 4 MB gcard, the game does not run at all in 32 bit mode (well unless you count about 98% frame loss).

The performance loss is staggering

[Speeeder]

Then that kinda performance loss is your error, not DelphiX's... Check my game: http://freespace2d.try.hu, it's running pretty nicely compared to what graphics it is pulling off, and the fact that most pictures aren't in the power of two width/height. You can use -lowquality on slow machines to turn the glow effects off. (And it's 32bit)

[seiferalmasy]

I will run your game on those crap computers and I can guarantee it won't run right (unless undelphix is somehow different). (also I have made 3 games, 1 uses hardly any graphics)

Yours forces fullscreen mode and prob uses non32 bit mode so it might run correct. No way to use window mode?>

Btw, nice use of graphics

also: I figured out an earlier problem I had, I use the sprite engine, and in order to make sprite change I just override the dodraw method

[Speeeder]

This might be a shockingly suppriseing thing, buuut... Please do read the text at the bottom of the menu screen Hint: Alt-Enter

Yes, it does force 32bit mode, read the minimum system requirements for the game ^^ Also, it needs a fair enough video card - Gef3+ or Radeon 8500+. I think that's fairly reasonable. Of course there could be many places that could be optimized, buuuut... Imo if you make your game about that much optimized, then it'll be all good

[seiferalmasy]

hahaha yeah i did just bris through it, should have checked alt-enter my bad

[seiferalmasy]

Stretcthdraw my logo onto dxdraw.surface. Cpu usage never goes above 1%

DrawRotate, same procedure, 50% cpu at all times, even when logo has stopped moving.

Any reason for this? normal?

[jasonf]

It's been a while since I did any DelphiX, I do remember Draw Rotate being a heavy function though.

I'd wrap the draw rotate function in another function which has a buffer surface.. DrawRotate the sprite onto this surface when the angle changes and just blit the surface the rest of the time.
If you're rotating all the time, it'll be slower, but if you rarely change the angle, you'll see a massive performance gain to just using DrawRotate.

*Obviously, you'll have to supply the previous buffer and previous angle to the function and let it decide to either use the prevoius buffer or render a fresh image with DrawRotate.