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Topic: Project Aqua: SDL vs. Allegro (Read 10132 times)
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GeomanNL
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I love YaBB 1G - SP1!
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How often are all characters displayed at once on your screen, in all 8 directions ?
How often do you actually cycle through all 300 animated frames ?
If you display only a fraction of this each frame, then loading from disk might actually work.
Or are you rendering huge fights with dozens of units displayed on screen ? In this case, you might consider reducing animation detail because the more units are displayed, the less someone will notice the details associated with each unit.
You could even decide to reduce the animation detail only if there are many units displayed, and increase it again if there are fewer units. I doubt anyone will be bothered by such a thing. This would mean, discarding data while the game is running, and reading it back again when needed. Disks are pretty fast, it won't reduce performance much.
Otherwise, you'll have to go 3d and discard a lot of your work. Animation in 3d is less memory intensive. However, 3d is much less efficient in terms of computing power, so you'll not be able to render many detailed units.
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Deus Siddis
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Wow, that is a dense mesh.
Was it made entirely in Blender 3D? If so, I wonder if some of your renderings could be submitted as possible blender gallery art. They could maybe have "Project Aqua" in their sigs, as a promotion (if they were accepted.)
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Halleck
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Hm, maybe. Our lead character modeller, Lee, (the guy who modelled that) was also a lead artist on blender's project orange, so he could probably get a plug for us. 
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« Last Edit: June 29, 2006, 12:37:37 am by Halleck »
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Deus Siddis
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Oh. . .well nevermind then. 
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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Here is how SPECTRE works and then why it failed-
**Sprite is basically an array of Quads binded to a seperate texture. Offset is an integer that can be set which tells which indice in the quad array to draw. If you want to have animation you change the offset and no slow-down from blitting occurs. Sprite also has its own transform matrix, a ZDrawOrder variable, and other handy flags.
How many Quads are there? I don't know what a Quad is, but it sounds like there are a lot of them. Or are there just a few, and there are a lot of references to each one? If you have millions of identical references, and fewer than 256 distinct Quads, then you could make an array of them and reference them with a byte index rather than full object reference. That'd shrink their memory footprint by a factor of 4.
But our Map's alone can take up to 10 MB in memory,
which map? You didn't mention a map. Bitmap?
And then the amount of memory for a single character with up to 300 images loaded into memory times however many characters there are on the screen.
300 images loaded into memory per character... How many distinct animation actions are they going to be executing? Can you cut out some of the middle animation frames?
Our engine crashes from an out of memory error when loading our larger sized maps(20 megs uncompressed b/c of animation).
If it depends on map size, your design isn't scaling right. Are you loading the whole map background at once? It seems unlikely that people would be teleporting around a lot, so you can load it in segments, any four of which are small enough to be handled easily.
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« Last Edit: June 30, 2006, 07:28:05 pm by Death 999 »
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Halleck
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A little update for those interested...
we are currently prototyping a true 3d engine using irrlicht.
Here's a quick hack of a walkaround map with collision detection and a fixed camera angle:
Most of the game will probably be like this. (Not art-wise, the map and the character are just some stuff from quake.)
Here's the "world map" we've been prototyping, which will allow you to travel between 'floating' continents in an airship:
  
(Muller and I made the crappy looking models, the cool jet is from vegastrike.)
The plan is to finish these prototypes as proof-of-concepts in order to get a better idea of how to pull this off. If we find that we can do everything we need to do with irrlicht, all 2d plans will be scrapped for good.
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« Last Edit: July 06, 2006, 02:20:04 pm by Halleck »
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Deus Siddis
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Cool pics. So now I guess it is Irrlicht vs. OGRE.
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Halleck
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Thanks for the heads up... we'll explore this as we get deeper into the prototyping phase.
Irrlicht has improved since last year's 0.11 release, it's currently at 1.0. Still, some of the major limitations mentioned might still be present.
Also... we don't necessarily need all of the bleeding edge effects, we just need it to look pretty and have reasonable system requirements.
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