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411570N3
Joined: Wed Jan 07, 2009 10:26 am Posts: 4074 Location: That quaint little British colony down south
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Re: Bizarre Graphics behaviour on newer MacBooks.
Possibly. But development time to do this would probably be absurd.
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Fri Aug 20, 2010 5:13 pm |
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Geti
Joined: Sun Jul 13, 2008 9:57 am Posts: 4886 Location: some compy
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Re: Bizarre Graphics behaviour on newer MacBooks.
Quite offtopic, but it seems this thread has mostly served its purpose anyway, and I wanted to clarify.
The problem isn't that multithreading is oh so hard, it's that Dan's never done it before, so the current systems probably aren't set up in a way that would be able to be multithreaded easily (ie without rewriting how all of the managers do what they do). However, if he actually has kept the code properly encapsulated, it wouldn't be to hard to put all of the managers on their own threads (or at least put movableman on one, and the rest on another). The problem is that there's not ever going to be distribution of the physics calculations this way (movableman handles physics) so you're not getting _that_ much of a gain as opposed to running it on a dual core as-is. The game hasn't been designed for multithreading, and it's unlikely that Dan would even consider a rewrite of anything at this stage. -> There won't ever be multithreading (Though i7 CPUs run it amazingly fast, and I've never had much trouble with lag on my Phenom II 720BE). The game is built on top of directx 7 afaik, which is only used for blitting stuff to the screen and not for any of the pixel-based physics calculations. Acceleration would help this (with a dedicated GPU being a lot better at doing things to pixels than your average CPU) but Dan's stated that his intentions are more towards finishing the game than fiddling with the tech. The best way to improve graphics performance is to keep your resolution down. It's more likely that various optimisations will be used to up the game speed, not multithreading or hardware accelerated graphics.
Regardless, I've written a guide on making CC run faster as-is, go check it out.
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Fri Aug 20, 2010 10:56 pm |
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Dr. Evil
Joined: Mon Aug 17, 2009 3:00 am Posts: 242 Location: The Great White North
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Re: Bizarre Graphics behaviour on newer MacBooks.
Quote: The game is built on top of directx 7 afaik Allegro, actually. PhantomAGN, any news from your friend.
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Mon Aug 23, 2010 9:56 pm |
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PhantomAGN
Joined: Mon Jun 29, 2009 2:40 am Posts: 610 Location: Deep below The Map of Mars
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Re: Bizarre Graphics behaviour on newer MacBooks.
Whoops, forgot to have him look at it. He's left for fall quarter, so it may be too late -- I'll see if I can catch him online.
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Tue Aug 24, 2010 1:48 am |
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Geti
Joined: Sun Jul 13, 2008 9:57 am Posts: 4886 Location: some compy
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Re: Bizarre Graphics behaviour on newer MacBooks.
Dr. Evil wrote: Allegro, actually. dev log wrote: There actually is hardware acceleration done in the blitting of bitmaps in CC, albeit very primitive and limited (DirectDraw7 on windows). ... – Data ?
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Tue Aug 24, 2010 4:30 am |
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Dr. Evil
Joined: Mon Aug 17, 2009 3:00 am Posts: 242 Location: The Great White North
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Re: Bizarre Graphics behaviour on newer MacBooks.
?
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Wed Aug 25, 2010 12:27 am |
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Geti
Joined: Sun Jul 13, 2008 9:57 am Posts: 4886 Location: some compy
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Re: Bizarre Graphics behaviour on newer MacBooks.
dev log wrote: (DirectDraw7 on windows) The plot thickens. I imagine allegro got used in the porting process because Directanything is M$ exclusive, and allegro is a similar interface to DD7 (or so I've heard).
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Wed Aug 25, 2010 4:49 am |
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Grif
REAL AMERICAN HERO
Joined: Sat Jan 27, 2007 10:25 pm Posts: 5655
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Re: Bizarre Graphics behaviour on newer MacBooks.
Allegro's been used since b11 at least, well before the mac version existed.
You may notice the AllegroConfig file in Base.rte.
Allegro itself, though, is just a C library; it's not a display management system. To the best of my knowledge, it's equally capable of using OpenGL and DX. Likely, Data's using directdraw on windows because he's more comfortable with it/he finds it more stable/whatever.
The port to OSX was done by a third party who would naturally choose something that works on OSX and is also more generally useful and less proprietary.
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Wed Aug 25, 2010 4:57 am |
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