Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Back to optimising

cliffski

So the fullscreen / windowed toggling is still shaky, but the game now runs in both windows and fullscreen and in pretty much any resolution, including my own 1920×1200 res. Listening to music from star wars whilst testing the game fullscreen at that res with a big battle is a flipping joy.

I’m in ‘lets minimise the number of textures used’ mode. Even at the start of a battle before much fighting, I have this, and it’s not pretty. (click to enlarge).

The problem is the running lights use a different ‘blend mode’ so putting them in the same texture as the ship saves me nothing :(. Lots to think about here. SetTexture() can be pretty slow, and you ideally don’t want to be doing hundreds of them every frame. Of course, in games programming, everything is a compromise. The good news is I’m only using up 70% of the CPU to do this stuff, given a minimum 60 FPS.

4 thoughts on Back to optimising

  1. Great, NAMES!

    so:

    1) what’s the difference between Leopard and Falcon fighters?

    2) …or between Javelin, Phalanx and Ballista Fighters?

    3) how’s the ATI’s forced native resolution switch coming along?

  2. Apart from the different physical appearance, they will have a different weight and cost and power output, so one may be a better choice to be armed with lasers, another with missiles etc.

    Not sure what you mean about the resolution thing?
    The good news is, all resolutions and mdoes seem to work. The bad news is ‘on-the-fly’ swapping might be a pain. At the very worst, I’ll do that thing where “You need to restart GSB for those changes to take effect”.

  3. Your Star Wars comment made me wonder if you have any plans for music in the game yet…. may I suggest something along the lines of The Planets by Holst (more specifically Mars and Jupiter) :)

  4. “Not sure what you mean about the resolution thing?”

    If you don’t force ATI cards to switch resolution when the resolution is the same as the desktop resolution, tabbing out to desktop results in slow drawing everywhere unless when you want to go back to the game.

    ….annoying, but hardly menacing.

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