Re: [Alephmodular-devel] Some questions about the current code.

[Br'fin <br...@ma...>]

On Friday, December 20, 2002, at 03:37  AM, Matt Lee wrote:

> Br'fin wrote:
>> So I registered a creator code with Apple.
>> AMdl  (Hex) 414D646C
>
> For the heck of it, I grabbed the new branding stuff from CVS and  
> rebuilt 0.2+. It Still Works(tm).

Oh good. It doesn't get everything, mostly the icons and the creator  
type. There's still text resources that refer to Marathon for instance  
that I haven't touched.

> I wasn't around when Aleph One was first being developed from Marathon  
> 2, so the early stages of improvement are new to me. Two things I've  
> noticed about the current code: One, pressing Escape doesn't seem to  
> exit to the main menu, as in Moo and A1. If there's a way to do this  
> without quitting and relaunching the app, I've missed it. Can this be  
> scheduled for 0.3?

Yeah, you already picked up on it, Command-W to exit back to the main  
menu. I expect all of the basic UI polishing to be late in the work of  
0.5. AlephModular plays alright now and that's the main thing. 0.5 or  
so is where all the heavy lifting of breaking things apart is. And  
that's when we should both define 'How does the platform specific GUI  
module tie into the game' and actually implement it for at least MacOS  
X.

I didn't think it was that important to polish things yet, not when we  
were planning on ripping them all aprt and rebuilding them better,  
faster and stronger.

> Two, when I ask AM to report its frame rate, it shows me a constant  
> speed in the upper 20's to a perfect 30. (I'm running on a G4/400).  
> This is regardless of the settings I use, which is to be expected  
> given the generation of hardware I'm using. However, the perceived  
> performance is much lower than 30, it's more like 10 to 15.
>
> Is this due to OS X weirdness? If so, how does A1 get around it?  
> Setting the resolution to Low appears to have the greatest improvement  
> (perceived speed ~30 fps, with 100% screen size, Millions depth, all  
> sound options on). I recognize that this may be the type of thing  
> that's pushed out several releases... I'm more curious than anything.

Most likely it's due to the OSX double buffering of the gui window. (OS  
X Weirdness) And because Marathon was internally buffering the view  
window, then now we're dealing with an accidental triple buffering.

And no, A1 doesn't actually get around this. Not in software mode.  
OpenGL itself probably hooks to operate around the double buffering.  
And since most machines that can run OSX can generally run the OpenGL  
as used by Marathon... there's the A1 gets around it.

I want some better abstraction around the screen buffers that Marathon  
uses. Something that can deal with 'draw a 640x480 screen in the middle  
of this 1024 x768 buffer' or 'draw a 640 x 480 screen in this buffer of  
the same size' and then it's the display library that is either sending  
that output to a window's immediate buffer or is sending it to a  
DisplaySocket full screen connection or what have you.

-Jeremy Parsons

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Br'fin               |      TIMSter, MU*er, Web Programmer, ... Insane?
The Denim Warrior    |                  You be the judge...
br...@ma...       |
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