I’ve been adding support for the OpenGL VBO extension to VectorStorm;\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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;\u00a0 I’ll need to adjust loaded display lists to use these automatically, instead of using the old, slower “vertex arrays” approach).<\/p>\n
Note that the VBO extension isn’t universally supported;\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But it’s not guaranteed.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
This new tech will eventually make it back into the VectorStorm trunk;\u00a0 probably sometime after I finish up this increasingly-mislabelled “Game in a Week”.\u00a0 :)<\/p>\n
Rendering of the distorting Lord terrain map has been swapped over to use VBOs.\u00a0 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;\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Or I could bite the bullet and disable the terrain distortion;\u00a0 that’d speed everything up dramatically.<\/p>\n
I’ve also picked music for Lord, have implemented a credits scroll, and started on an introductory sequence.\u00a0 But there’s still a fair whack to do before the game is finished.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve been adding support for the OpenGL VBO extension to VectorStorm;\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Which translated into non-technical terms means that VectorStorm can render far more…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[30,17,3],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/po9WK-6s","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}