I’ve been adding support for the OpenGL VBO extension to VectorStorm;  this allows 2D and 3D geometry data to be uploaded directly to the video card, so that it may be rendered rapidly without hogging memory bandwidth between the CPU and the GPU.  Which translated into non-technical terms means that VectorStorm can render far more without dropping frame rate, when using the new VBO classes (Note that currently, nothing is actually using these;  I’ll need to adjust loaded display lists to use these automatically, instead of using the old, slower “vertex arrays” approach).

Note that the VBO extension isn’t universally supported;  it requires OpenGL 1.5, which means that if your video card was made in the last four or five years, it probably supports it.  But it’s not guaranteed.  If VBOs aren’t supported, VectorStorm emulates the VBO functionality internally, and it should be no slower than it would be using the older rendering interface.

This new tech will eventually make it back into the VectorStorm trunk;  probably sometime after I finish up this increasingly-mislabelled “Game in a Week”.  :)

Rendering of the distorting Lord terrain map has been swapped over to use VBOs.  This has sped up some of the terrain rendering code, but calculating the vertex distortion is still by far the most expensive part of the rendering;  I’ll need to find an optimisation before Lord is released, or else it’ll have absurdly high system requirements for what it’s actually doing.  Or I could bite the bullet and disable the terrain distortion;  that’d speed everything up dramatically.

I’ve also picked music for Lord, have implemented a credits scroll, and started on an introductory sequence.  But there’s still a fair whack to do before the game is finished.