Messages

451

Suggestions / Re: "grey" fog of war

« on: August 30, 2011, 04:20:56 pm »

Allright, thanks for the info  - I'm starting to like the x-com motion scanner now

So on topic: it makes no sense to have some kind of fancy motion scanner 3D view I guess.
Having a "greyed-out" fog of war to visualize your soldiers's current field of view, is probably the only realistic and useful application for this effect.

EDIT: a cool blip-blip-blip sound effect when the blobs light up would be nice though

452

Suggestions / Re: "grey" fog of war

« on: August 30, 2011, 11:04:56 am »

Hmm, yes, it's indeed from the Aliens movie.
It might have been easier to do a motion detector in the movie technically or the kind of aliens did not show up on infrared, so it adds some more to the tension, also the blobs on the motion detector are not realtime, they have a low update frequency = also more tension.

Hudson: [reading a motion detector] I got signals. I got readings, in front and behind.
Frost: Where, man? I don't see shit.
Hicks: He's right. There's nothin' back here.
Hudson: Look, I'm telling ya, there's somethin' movin' and it ain't us! Tracker's off scale, man. They're all around us, man. Jesus!
Dietrich: [looking through an infra-red scope, walks right past an Alien] Maybe they don't show up on infra red at all.
[the Alien pounces on her and drags her up to the ceiling]

453

Suggestions / Re: "grey" fog of war

« on: August 29, 2011, 09:01:17 pm »

Talking about motion scanner... I always found it a bit silly:
I quote ufopaedia:" This sophisticated device uses a variety of detectors..."
so I assume it has at least the very basic detectors like sonar and infrared, right?
And then: "Static units will not be detected."
I mean, what's the story behind it? Since when does either sonar or infrared not detect static objects? I would say the opposite: static objects are the easiest to detect :p

Ok, the device would become slightly overpowered, but you could compensate in more realistic ways for example : 100% TU use instead of 25%, a detection radius of only 4 tiles instead of 9...

454

Troubleshooting / Re: OpenXCom very slow even on good pc?

« on: August 29, 2011, 03:14:01 pm »

Yes i am indeed using a debug build so that might cause the problem, if debug is proven to be slow.

Oh noes !! I have been optimising the hell out of it, all for nothing :p
Hehe, just kidding.

Debug build is slower than release build. So I'm actually glad to hear that it was indeed a debug build.

455

Programming / Custom blitter (need some people to test)

« on: August 28, 2011, 12:31:31 pm »

Hi,
since build 08_27 a custom blitter has been implemented for both rescaling the screen and for blitting shaded battlescape tiles. Two places where the "standard" SDL methods proved to be a slowdown.
This should normally result in higher FPS (and less RAM usage in battlescape due to disabling of caching).

In the included screenshot you see the effect on my pc (it's about 150% FPS gain) and 4,2 Mb less ram used.

I would like to know if the same improvements are visible on other systems. I hope it is not going to slow down on any kind of configuration  and no new bugs are introduced.

456

Suggestions / Re: "grey" fog of war

« on: August 27, 2011, 12:17:21 pm »

Yeah. Or a special treatment of a blue tint towards yellow and red tint, depending on the heat of the object/unit

457

Suggestions / "grey" fog of war

« on: August 26, 2011, 11:48:24 pm »

I was having fun with a custom blit function - it gives the opportunity to have very fast effects on the color per pixel - almost like a pixel shader.
Blitting certain tiles in a grey-scale color for example. See screenshot.
It could serve a purpose some time?

458

Suggestions / Re: opengl

« on: August 24, 2011, 05:40:15 pm »

Yeah, implementing realistic shadow/lighting results in a change of gameplay. We noticed this when I implemented the light blocking.
It might not be wanted in a strategic game.
We probably don't want to add in eye candy just for the sake of making prettier screenshot. Got to keep focus on gameplay.

Some kind of shadow blobs is already there for bullets, so it wouldn't be too hard to have the same kind of shadow blobs below units, especially for flying units this might be interesting. Because they give a better idea of a unit that is standing on the ground, or it is floating in the air.

459

Programming / Re: Battlescape performance

« on: August 24, 2011, 02:32:56 pm »

found an article on the topic:
https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2011/07/22/visual-c-debug-buildsfast-checks-cause-5x-slowdowns/

going to test it at home tonight and see what the results are...

460

Suggestions / Re: opengl

« on: August 24, 2011, 01:11:02 pm »

Sure, I just found it interesting to read actually because I did not know it was possible, but it probably has a lot of limits - I was not that far into it yet.

461

Suggestions / Re: opengl

« on: August 24, 2011, 12:39:46 pm »

yes, the grey area is a nice example.
But also having smooth lighting/shadows (instead of lighting per tile) is an example.

I will not mention the word "shaders" again - as it seems to be cursed :p
You know lots of 2D games use them right? Smooth fog of war is another example.

462

Suggestions / Re: opengl

« on: August 24, 2011, 12:29:23 pm »

Sorry, I don't have a lot of OpenGL knowledge yet. But how does lighting and shadows work with just drawing quads then?

PS. I'm just looking into other popular opensource isometric engines that work with OpenGL (there are not *that* many). Because I don't want to re-invent the wheel from scratch...

463

Suggestions / Re: opengl

« on: August 24, 2011, 10:24:02 am »

Shaders is the only way I know how to do this on hardware. You don't want to transfer textures back and forward from video memory to system memory, then you loose the advantage of using video acceleration all together.

I'm reading up on how to do isometric tile drawing entirely on the GPU with shaders:
You got one texture buffer which holds all the sprite sheets needed for the specific type of terrain.
You got one texture buffer which holds the data of which sprite to draw where on the screen and how dark (and maybe opacity?)
Just one call renders the whole battlescape.

464

Programming / Re: Battlescape performance

« on: August 23, 2011, 08:45:53 pm »

Yankes : that's exactly what I did yesterday. I wrote my own blit function with the shading done on the fly - it simplifies the whole problem a lot.

But there is still a problem with it. When running in debug mode, the handwritten blit function is also compiled with debug info, making the whole thing soooo sloooow
I'm no specialist on compilers and stuff like that, so I don't know how you can have parts of the code normally build while still being able to debug build the rest...

465

Suggestions / Re: opengl

« on: August 23, 2011, 05:09:10 pm »

SDL/Software is probably still the way to go until 1.0 where all standard features are implemented.
And then people wanting to port to other devices can do so branching of from 1.0, while openxcom itself switches to opengl after 1.0 - given that I will have the opengl engine finished by that time to replace the SDL/Software engine?
No need to support both this way.