Now you can forward post #278 for those who have missed out on all his previous posts. All the "random" elements I simply copied and pasted from all his old posts - verbatim! I didn't change a thing! I spent my whole morning on it LOL!!!
Last edited by Dave Sell; Dec 7th, 2005 at 07:34 PM.
Reason: forgot my MAD face
Nobody knows what software they want until after you've delivered what they originally asked for.
Don't solve problems which don't exist.
"If I had eight hours to cut down a tree, I'd spend six hours sharpening my axe." --- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
I had a free day yesterday. So... uh, yeah, Civ III won this time. I shouldn't have bought that game a few months back. I just recently noticed I actually had the game. So what do you do: place the CD on the tray and try it out... and... get addicted.
Anyways, today I've done atleast something: I got rid of "KAFPE" and replaced it with ArrayInit function. I'm submitting this information to FAQ.
Why oh why I decided to make a "proper" engine? Instead of doing just a simple two day doodle I'm making a monster!
You are making a full engine because you are ocol like that and we can hopefully turn it into a (successful?) community project. It might be the first project in the project communications section that evetually is completed since... sandpaper?
Merri- missed your post with the peliminary version of the gunAI - just tried it and it looks good so far - just wondering - is it gonna be something like Worms II but real time?
Pretty much like that. Of course you can turn that into a Worms II style game, too.
Here is the current version for you to play around with, maybe that'll get me back into actually doing it as I've released "bad code" and I must release it complete and better:
Edit Ignore the EXE file, it is old. Just recompile it or run only under IDE, makes no big difference.
hehe sure - no probs Merri
Some of your tricks are new to me like I never knew the form had a backbuffer
Damn my past projects would've been betterif i knew that lol .
Form has no backbuffer, it is made using API Or well, form does create a backbuffer for itself if you use AutoRedraw: the backbuffer is then made visible each time the form is refreshed (ie. Form1.Refresh). But it is slower than using API made backbuffer.
Humm... now that I look at it, the code I've done is quite low on amount. A lot of my time has gone to keeping things bug free and working properly. I wonder if I have any bug in the code at the moment. Hmm... I guess this thing we call "kaamos" is hitting me pretty hard right now, it is dark most of the day, you can't see the sun in many weeks and so on... I haven't been in a good coding mood in the last few days.
Try setting the FPS to 400. It worked finely on my computer and the processor usage varied around 2 - 5% (I had other programs open though, so I'd say the usage was around 1 - 2%). I have a 2200+ Athlon XP @ 1750 MHz. The only way to make it really stay at given FPS is to make it multithreaded so that the game main loop thread is given a higher priority.
SetPixel would cause a lot of slowdown if there were lots of bullets drawn on the screen (bullets not on the screen are not drawn at all). I know a technique that'd be many times faster... actually I'm planning to use it instead of BitBlt if I'll ever start really optimizing all the speed critical stuff.
Btw, try changing the bullet speed to 39 or 18 or 8 when you use FPS 40. 39 appears to be a good speed for rapid fire.
SetPixel would cause a lot of slowdown if there were lots of bullets drawn on the screen
I guess you mean directly modifying the bitmap memory instead?
setting it to 400fps doesn't work well on P4 2.4Ghz here (no HT - one of the old ones) - the max it has is around 240 fps. At home on my AMD Sempron 2400+ it sometimes goes lower than 40fps when theres lots of bullets e.g. 2000+ (but I guess for the purpose of the game we won't have that many bullets on screen).
So I'll say 40-50fps is ok for those with slightly older machines.
Hi I've made some modifications to Merri's code.
Changes:
-No more backbuffer picturebox - replaced with DIB
-No more label for display - DrawText to screen
-Direct blitting to form.
-Replaced SetPixel with array hacking
-I guess must be slightly faster than original (but you can't directly compare because the rendering region is smaller on the original by quite a few pixels.)
Well I could do bump mapping, transparent layers (no, not bitwise transparency!) and some other nice effects. In a game that is, not just as separate samples
Well, I had the picturebox there to make it easy to resize the screen size and to be able to add space for controls without a hassle Haven't taken a look in the code as I've been busied with some another "project"...
Merri, are things coming along are are you busy lately? If your busy, thats okay. I've just been looking forward to this for a while and no one has posted in a few days.
Well it sounds like you have a lot on your plate. We could just start the contest after Christmas. That way you would have a ton of time to get it working great in between now and then, and we might get more people to participate.
Hi - made a flying 'helicopter' :P.
Will make more modifications when i have time - maybe even complete the engine. Im supposed to be having mock exams now - and what am i doing...damn :P
EDIT:Fixed - somehow the zipping program at college or me screwed up the zipping :P
Last edited by Raedwulf; Dec 12th, 2005 at 06:33 AM.
I noticed that too on my home computer AMD Sempron 2400+ but it has no problems on P4s and P4 Ds. What is your computer?
I think the main cause is that I used a DIB Section in my version - I've uploaded a new version which uses conditional compilation
#Const DIBSECTION = True ' False to use SetPixel.
I don't know if this true but I believe for older computers DIBSection runs slowly on xp - because my progs that use intensive gdi dib sections run slowly on P3 and AMD (old ones).
ahhh ok - yeah my exe was probably outdated. DIBSection works fine on P4 - but for older pcs it gets very sluggish(slower than SetPixel - dunno why) - I can only guess that windows xp uses optimised sse2 routines or something by default for P4 and uses slow x86-only otherwise for other pcs....but I have no idea.
I was reading earlier and I think minesweeper is a good idea.
Software languages known: Qbasic - TI-Basic - Liberty Basic - Visual Basic 6
Software API's known: Directx 7 and 8
Internet languages, in the process of learning: HTML - JAVASCRIPT - PHP - CSS - MYSQL - AJAX
those look really good, the mods should consider one of them!
Software languages known: Qbasic - TI-Basic - Liberty Basic - Visual Basic 6
Software API's known: Directx 7 and 8
Internet languages, in the process of learning: HTML - JAVASCRIPT - PHP - CSS - MYSQL - AJAX
Those are fairly simple to solve on paper, make them a contest how? Based on speed? There is hardly any coding challenge (in the first ones that I saw). Did you see a specific one that seems interesting?
Has someone helped you? Then you can Rate their helpful post.
Re: Future Contest Suggestions
Now you can forward post #278 for those who have missed out on all his previous posts. All the "random" elements I simply copied and pasted from all his old posts - verbatim! I didn't change a thing! I spent my whole morning on it LOL!!!
Originally Posted by eyeRmonkey
- just wondering - is it gonna be something like Worms II but real time?
hmmmmm if you're not in the mood to do it i might lend a hand and see what i can add to it 
