Wednesday, December 31, 2008

About time too!


Although I have become rather fond of the old monochrome lighting over the past few weeks.

Other news: checked out XAudio a bit more and realised that it appears to be a very thin wrapper around DirectSound (you could probably just #define everything and make it look identical). I can understand Mictosoft pushing for it's use, but making setup and operation virtually identical to DirectSound except for changing the names around DOES NOT WIN ME OVER. Still no support for loading media files in the API either. 1 out of 10, must try harder.

I wrote the texture flushing mechanism, so video RAM headroom is going to be back in the next release. It's scary when you think that a 2048 x 2048 RGBA texture can take up to 16 MB! I might load really large (think over half max size) textures as 16 bit - I'm already doing it with water warp updates, so why not? Texture compression is also an option, although as I lock the miplevels to generate mipmaps it might be tricky. D3DXFilterTexture is another option here.

More map testing; I totally choke on WARPC. Not surprised either, that map even exceeds the limits of the standard Q1 protocol (over 256 models, net buffer sizes in excess of 8192), so it's not really a fair test. Give me an engine killing map that stays within Protocol 15 bounds and then we'll do a real test. The warpspasm start map is fair enough though, it did help me find a bug I had in R_TranslatePlayerSkin.

Some strange bugs in; crashing on screenshots, HOM effects, etc. I don't really know what to think; I can't reproduce them so I don't even know where to go looking for a fix. It might help if some people grabbed the source code and ran a debug build, although in fairness I suppose that having to download and install Visual Studio (2008 Express) and the DirectX SDK might be a bit off-putting.

All for now.

1 comments:

Chip said...

Happy New Year!

May 2009 bring you more inspiration and work power for your projects, especially DirectQ!