Monday, August 17, 2009

Feature list is complete!

I've decided that yesterday's feature list is going to be the complete list for release 1.7, and I'm now into bugfixing and tuning mode. Aaaaahhhh, feels good.

I expect this to take some small amount of time as the radically overhauled memory system has some fairly wide-ranging implications; for example I'm almost 99% certain that at least some of the menus are now overflowing buffers (those that use cvars in textboxes). I've already tuned the memory allocation quite a lot, and the good news is that map loading times are now almost on a par with GLQuake. I think that the remaining speed loss there is coming from a combination of texture compression (takes longer to load a texture) and D3D texture loading (which goes through various different COM interfaces before getting down to texture memory).

I might make disabled texture compression the default in the new release; it'll mean a small drop in performance, but not dramatically so, and those huge maps will be faster to load, which I think is worth the tradeoff (if the perf drop was much more I would say "default on", of course).

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Will enabling texture compression be a cvar, or exposed within the menu system?

mhquake said...

Possibly both. Almost everything in the menu system is a cvar to begin with anyway.

mhquake said...

I should add - it's already a cvar.