#17 noise renderer

[Mathias Gumz]

i improved the performance of the jamming noise
renderer a lot, but there are still problems with mesa.
with the nvidia-0.9.767 this patch rocks and is damn
fast, no performance slow down any longer ...

regards

bz-akira

[Mathias Gumz]

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improved some other things (noisequality) and now mesa
should render the new noise right .. but i need feedback
from mesa-users.

so feel free to mail and diss me,

regards,

mathias

[Mathias Gumz]

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1.texturenoise will shown even when disabled texture
2.use now GL_NEAREST -> "harder" noise (for hh =)

and thats it

[Tim Riker]

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when changing resolutions under XFree86 the noise goes away
and a white screen is shown instead.

[Mathias Gumz]

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and ... solved :)
i think the problem is, that i dont use the bz-internal
texturething. if someone changes the resolution, the texture
will be lost, perhaps because auf building a new
openglcontext.

the white screen on tims screen by using the first
patchversion was the same problem. the texture was lost
somewhere ... but i dont know yet, how bzflag handles the
different contexts and/or visuals ...

any suggestions, please mail me

bz-akira

[Tim Riker]

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This did indeed fix the white screen. Performance under
software mesa is about 15% slower with the flag than
without.

The old method was about 10% slower. So it does not seem to
make a lot of difference with software mesa.

I'll do more tests though, I expected it to be a little
faster, and I'm wondering why it's not.

[Mathias Gumz]

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the problem of mesa is, that its a softwarerender... so the
improvement shouldnt be signifikant.

and perhaps mesa isnt able to handle textures quite goof.
for example chestal or someone else told me, if he stands
direct in front of a wall (the wall filled up the screen)
the performance sunk rapidly.

glDrawPixels() (the old method) transfers the pixels from
the procmemory over the bus. mesa transfers _all_ over the
bus. so if mesa is faster with glDrawPixels than with
textures, we should perhaps #ifdef some things ... but
therefore i need much more reply of the mesausers and their
experiences ...

regards, mathias

[Gert Brinkmann]

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A suggestion: If turned on "low" details in the option menu
the radar could be drawn completely black instead of noisy.
Ideal for slow machines and bad mesa-implementations?

Gert

[Mathias Gumz]

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i included this "feature" ... but...

someone with mesa could say, hey, why the hell is the noise
gone ...
so, perhaps it would make sense to add option .. but if we
do that, i think we had to discuss the optionmenu ... it
becomes larger and larger ..

regards mathias

[Gert Brinkmann]

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You should describe this in the documentation then you can
answer "RTFM" if one asks. ;)

Or another idea: Make the radar noisy but only once. So the
noise is not moving because of no refreshes. I think this is
a good choice. It really should be kept simple and CPU-cheap
on low detail. This is what this option is good for. All
things switched off by this option value should be described
in the man-pages.

Gert

[Mathias Gumz]

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documentation is for whimps :) .. just kidding.
i could make the radar whatever you want. i just want to hear more meanings. for example the use of one static texture ( or better the full texture, because now i swap the texture coords) is a good idea for mesapeople, but perhaps they wanted their old noise back ? ...

so the mesausers should realy stand up and say, HEY MAN, this is what we want :)

regards, mathias

[Mathias Gumz]

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received a mail from chris and made some changes to match
with the rest of the bzcode.
features of the actual patch:

*using bzflagopengltexture now (change your resolution to
whatever you want)

*the noise is as beautiful as the original noise! if you
are able to see any pattern of the noisetexture, you must be
extremly fast with your eyes and mind and so called god of
recognizing :)

*the jammingradar is now :

-texture on, quality > low : moving noise
-texture on, quality = low : 1 static noisetexture
-texture off, quality = low : blinking black screen

so the "powerusers" get the moving noise, the
"quality-is-not-necassary-i-want-kill" got static noise and
the poor get the blinking blackradar ...

hope everybody is now happy with the patch :) (dont think
so ...)

regards and happy bzflagging

[Mathias Gumz]

                       texturenoise for the jammingflag grabbers

[Tim Riker]

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applied, thanx!