Messages

616

Offtopic / Re: SDL 1.2 to 1.3 Migration Guide

« on: November 21, 2010, 01:52:15 pm »

Yeah but I think everytime you need to query the pixels it needs to be transferred or locked or some other thing that makes software more efficient for that in the long-run.

That's true. If textures are stored in hardware memory, you can not randomly access pixel data whenever you want to like you want to in software memory.
You can use shaders if you want to modify pixel data every frame, and if want to do pixel editing that can't be done with shaders, you can't do it every frame I'm afraid.
Why would you want to use it for?

617

Programming / Re: Battlescape development

« on: November 19, 2010, 07:26:57 pm »

I'd like to announce that battlescape milestone 6 has been reached.
- XCom soldiers inside the skyranger spawn on the battlescape
- Soldiers can be selected either clicking them or with the "next soldier" button, selection is indicated with yellow arrow.
- Basic soldier stats are shown in the small info area
- Pathfinding is implemented: soldiers walk around avoiding obstacles (most of the time :p)
- Right click - look at functionality.
- Center-on-soldier button.

Milestone 7: (todo)
- Fix pathfinding bugs.
- Add battlescape sounds.
- Add laser rifles.
- Add floaters to test your laser rifles on.

618

Suggestions / Re: externalization of small bitmaps that are now hardcoded

« on: November 18, 2010, 02:51:43 pm »

In any way, the placeholders idea sounds good, but that is part of graphics modding.
But that would imply going to a world of modern graphics files, going away from the xcom palettes... and I think that is only going to happen after release 1.0
So I rest my case for a while

619

Suggestions / Re: externalization of small bitmaps that are now hardcoded

« on: November 18, 2010, 10:20:15 am »

I'm not talking about external graphics (PCK, SPK files), but the non-copyrighted hardcoded bitmaps.
As far as I know noone can hold the copyrights of a 3x3 pixels square

620

Suggestions / externalization of small bitmaps that are now hardcoded

« on: November 17, 2010, 03:28:10 pm »

Probably something that is interesting to add somewhere on the way: the hardcoded bitmaps (for eg. drawing a base, ufo, craft on the globe and the recently added small number font, or the yellow arrow in the battlescape) may be externalized by BMP(or PNG) files?
To further increase the flexibility/moddability of the game.

621

Open Feedback / Re: OpenXCom and hqx scaler

« on: November 17, 2010, 02:01:21 pm »

it took me 5 minutes to implement vector scaling for the globe (I know that is the easiest part)
But it's just to have an idea.
PS. GUI elements are not vector scaled but hq3x scaled (once at startup of the game).

PS2. the framerate on my vector scaled globe is 400, on the tradionally pixel-scaled globe 80.
So it looks better + it's faster. The only disadvantage is that the way the GUI works may need a little rework. (basically all X/Y coordinates through the whole game need to be scaled)

622

Open Feedback / Re: OpenXCom and hqx scaler

« on: November 17, 2010, 01:40:19 pm »

interesting discussion on this topic of scaling/resolutions:
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=5185.0

623

Programming / Re: SPriG: An alternative to SDL_gfx

« on: November 17, 2010, 01:13:36 pm »

Good points michal.
Especially the faster full-screen scaling is not a valid argument in my opinion, because I still see it as a hack and not the right solution. I see no other big advantages that outweigh the disadvantage of adding another dependency on top, and probably a not so activly developed one.

624

Programming / Re: SPriG: An alternative to SDL_gfx

« on: November 15, 2010, 10:22:57 am »

And you probably can use SPG_FloodFill to fill the oceans

625

Programming / Re: Ocean colouring - Version 2

« on: November 14, 2010, 06:08:14 pm »

looks good, if the filling method is fast enough. Is that a method you write yourself, or does it exist?
And  and wouldn't you need 16 seperator lines? I think the original one had 16 shades of blue.

626

Programming / Re: Battlescape development

« on: November 14, 2010, 01:44:25 pm »

Rene: "I can't believe X-Com send us out here without any equipment at all... a scouting mission they said. But what if there is really some alien activity over here?"
Sarah: "Well, then I run as fast as I can back to the Skyranger. By the way, I'm catching a cold walking around on this ice and snow."
Rene: "Come over here, let me warm you up."

revision 206 to play with basic pathfinding

627

Open Feedback / Re: OpenXCom and hqx scaler

« on: November 10, 2010, 04:16:34 pm »

I don't think it'd work just by resizing the resources though. You might get a boost from only resizing all the resources at the start but:
- Not all the game's graphics are stored resources, stuff like buttons/windows/etc are drawn on the fly.

Stuff that is drawn on the fly (=vector graphics) is even easier, you just multiply every coordinate with the scale factor

628

Open Feedback / Re: OpenXCom and hqx scaler

« on: November 09, 2010, 11:51:45 pm »

Yeah, it has some strange effect to it. It does some nice anti-aliasing to diagonal lines and circles.

As for the performance of the current scaler I think that is due to the way it is implemented. In my opinion it should not scale every frame by frame, but just scale the raster graphics at loading time, and then use the pre-scaled graphics for blitting.

629

Offtopic / Re: Daiky's x-com project

« on: November 09, 2010, 11:32:27 pm »

A part that I've never made public, was my geoscape. But I find it such a shocking difference how easy a geoscape graphically is done with a 3D engine vs a 2D engine
It took me 10 minutes, just a few lines of code to add a sphere, texture it with Earth.png, add a light and a rotation animator, add a camera et voila.

It's kinda like a fast-food geoscape. While SupSuper's geoscape is the French Cuisine or a piece of art

630

Open Feedback / OpenXCom and hqx scaler

« on: November 09, 2010, 01:58:37 pm »

Hi,
this is just an open discussion following on greyhound's blog comment.

Hqx is the only scaler I have experience with, it's fast, opensource and easy to implement (1 single class). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hqx)
There is another widely used one called 2xSAI, which seems to do the job very nice as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2xsai_example.png

In openXcom it can scale raster graphics immediatly after loading them, so there is no scaling going on during the game itself, in contrary to the pixel-stretching it is now doing, which will drastically increase framerate at higher resolutions. Downside is that the scaling is fixed to either 2x 3x or 4x.

But this ofcourse only applies to raster graphics and not to vector graphics like the globe and the user interface elements, which have to be scaled in a mathematical way.

In attachement a preview of what hq3x does in comparison with the standard stretcher set to 960x600.
PS. it's faked, the hq3x is applied after the screenshot, but it's just to get an idea