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[SBOVIS]

Hi all,
        I am nearing the end of my project (2 year implementation) and was wondering if there is any future plans to speed up the 2D engine?

Running a scene at 1024x768 with an actor a JPEG background and roughly 6 scene entities seems the norm, but at times the engine does seem to slow and then catch up with itself, as if caching memory.

On various machines fom 512mb to 2gb there seems to be the same issue where you run a scene once and it slows and then quit and run it again and it is fine.

Is there any house keeping that could be done to help the engine perform better?

Does the engine rely on a 3D card with acceleration for 2D more than say other 2D adventure creators?

I have used FPSC (First person shooter creator) & 3D gamestudio before and these editors run far smoother in 3D than WME doing 2D on various machines.

Just wondering if the CORE 2D/3D engine is on the cards for an overhaul?


MAny thanks





 

[metamorphium]

Hi,

I don't think it's actually WME problem. I am using some of very complex scenes with a lot of overlays and other things and
the performance is steady. Even when I used a few 3d actors and a couple of large overlays in 1024x768 I maintained steady
fps.

Maybe you should consider some script optimalization. Also if you use a lot of random background sounds try preloading them.
The same goes to sprites.

If you'll look at the technology demo of the game Schach Welten, you'd get the idea what's possible with the engine and how
it runs smoothly even in bigger resolution than 1024x768.

[adonf]

Just a couple of ideas, don't know if they'll work in your case:

1) Use small textures and keep dimensions as close as powers of 2 as you can (32, 64, 128, etc). Most video cards use only textures with dimensions in powers of two, so if your sprite is, say, 65x129 the Direct X driver will put the bitmap into a 128x256 texture that's almost 4 times bigger than needed. This can add up and fill up the video memory with empty pixels and use memory bandwidth for no good reason. If you have 1024x768 backgrounds made of a single sprite you can divide them into two sprites of dimensions 1024x512 and 1024x256, you'll save one megabyte of video RAM per background image on some cards.

2) Transparency usually hurts rendering speed because pixels have to be processed even though they are not rendered. If you have big transparent textures try to divide them and limit the amount of transparent pixels

I hope this helps

[adonf]

Sorry for drifting a little bit, but after writing my previous post I remembered that WME does quite a bit of texture handling. For instance it can divide sprites into smaller textures in cases where the video cards doesn't support the texture's resolution (for example one 1024x1024 sprite will be split into four 512x512 texture if that's the video card's maximum texture resolution). Mnemonic, does the engine also pack separate sprites into a single texture to minimize empty texture space ?

In this case my first point is not valid.

[Mnemonic]

Mnemonic, does the engine also pack separate sprites into a single texture to minimize empty texture space ?

No, it doesn't.