Is this getting boring yet? I'm after pulling another quite significant speed increase out of DirectQ by reorganising the way vertex buffers are managed. This was originally something I had planned for 1.9.0, but the more I thought about ways to do it, the more I started itching to do it. Right now it's just on world surfaces, excluding sky and water, so there is quite a bit more to come from it.
Overall it's really heading in the direction of a Q3A-alike shader system now, only that Q1 won't use .shader files so it'll just be restricted to the surface types available in a Q1 map.
What does this mean for next week's planned release of 1.8.3? I don't honestly know just yet. Obviously I'm going to continue with the current work and move everything else across to the new setup, but it's far too early to guess at how long that will take. The basic world surfaces took me about 1 hour to do, but integrating the other data types is going to be a bigger job.
Next week also sees the release of Visual Studio 2010, and - depending on how it's legacy OS support pans out (and when the Express versions become available) - I may make the switch. I'll probably write some about that when the time comes.
Update: Change of plan. Firstly, the new setup was relying on a capability that all cards may not have, and secondly it was turning into a lot of work. Basically it's given me some good pointers for what needs to be done in revisiting the refresh, but it won't happen for 1.8.3, and next week's release is still on.
The whole refresh does still need to be revisited; in many respects it's quite clunky and has some seriously ugly code in there (if you've ever looked at d3d_warp.cpp you'll know what I mean). I may yet get something minor done between now and next week, but I won't hold things up for it.
Update 2: Another change of plan. I got it. ;) We're now running 10% faster than 1.8.2 was.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
DirectQ Speeds Up (Yet Again)
Posted by
mhquake
at
3:40 PM
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