tuxkart-devel

Re: [TuxKart-devel] Slowness - really related with Karts?

[Ingo R. <gr...@gm...>]

"Jason T. Rice" <jt...@gt...> writes:

> Pardon me - I signed on early because the project seemed
> interesting, but the minute you guys blew off the originator, a guy
> whose name shows up at the end of 70% of the "OpenGL How To"
> searches on the Flightgear lists, the Gimp lists and the OpenGL
> forums, I knew I'd be wasting my time.

We DID NOT 'blew him off', he just went away all by himself for no
good reason.

> So go ahead and flame him.

We didn't start the flaming, he started complaining about every change
we did without giving us a useable other way to do it. If all people
agree that the old GUI needed a complete rewrite since it was
basically unusable and Steve tells you that we MUST stick to current
PUI, that really wasn't all that helpfull. Same with fullscreen, plib
simply can't do that at the moment. With VBO Steve told us that it
"wouldn't much help", well it doubled the performance.

Now if Steve just started fixing issues instead of telling us that we
don't need that would have been a whole lot more helpfull.

> The single font texture is THE definitive way it is done.

Yes.

> Mail me when these guys go home. I code, model and do sound effects
> -- and hate sprawling dependency lists.

Sorry, but the libraries that we use are the same that are used by
pretty much every second other OSS game too, so I really can't see how
that should ever be much of a problem.

> Mail me when these guys go home. I code, model and do sound effects
> -- and hate sprawling dependency lists.

How about instead helping us RIGHT NOW and making this GOTM run a
success instead of just complaining and slowing all this down even
more with more and more endless flaming? We need help and are happy
about everything we can get.

-- 
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Re: [TuxKart-devel] Slowness - really related with Karts?

[James G. <j....@vi...>]

On Sun, 2004-09-05 at 23:32, Jason T. Rice wrote:
> Pardon me - I signed on early because the project seemed interesting, 
> but the minute you guys blew off the originator, a guy whose name shows 
> up at the end of 70% of the "OpenGL How To" searches on the Flightgear 
> lists, the Gimp lists and the OpenGL forums, I knew I'd be wasting my time.

We didn't "blow him off", we just fundamentally disagreed about whether
or not adding dependencies was acceptable. Despite this intractable
disagreement we hoped that maybe Steve would be happy to work on the 3D
stuff, which we all accept he knows far better than we do, and which is
totally seperate from dependency issues. He said he didn't want to,
which is his choice, and I don't hold any sort of grudge about this. But
we certainly never said "we don't want you", or "we think we know better
than you about 3D graphics". Quite the opposite, we have said "Steve, we
don't know much about 3D graphics but you do, could you please help
us?".

But I just don't see how OpenGL expertise in any way makes you a better
judge of whether or not adding dependencies is a good idea.

Because you've brought it up again, I'll put the case forward again. No
dependencies are better than dependencies, sure. But given the choice
between a crap GUI and no fullscreen mode, or a nice GUI and fullscreen
mode but with dependencies, or a nice GUI and fullscreen mode and no
dependencies but a couple of months of extra coding, which is best?
There is no right answer, but having a CV with lots of OpenGL stuff on
it doesn't make your answer any more correct.

> So go ahead and flame him.  The single font texture is THE definitive 
> way it is done.  Texture switching WILL kill you on an OpenGL or DirectX 
> system.  If you don't know what it means, Google for "Texture Switching" 
> and I'll bet the experts point to some obscure 10 year old web page of 
> Steve's. That is the reason that every commercial game you pick up has 
> budgetted character textures into compact atlases and you never see a 
> character, feature, deco or terrain piece jump across multiple 
> textures.  EVERY pro title uses a single texture font system to avoid it.

As I said already, the use of ttf for in game text was a matter of what
was easiest, not what is best. At some point I'll experiment to see how
many FPS using ttf loses us. If it's more than maybe 5 fps or something,
then I might change it back to using a bitmap font. If it's less than
perhaps 5 fps, then the question is: another evening of coding or just
leave it for now to focus on other more important things?

> ... and to answer your question, 2 full titles on N64 - a pure OpenGL box.

How does this make opinions on dependencies more valid?

	James

Re: [TuxKart-devel] Slowness - really related with Karts?

[Ricardo C. <ri...@ae...>]

Em Segunda, 6 de Setembro de 2004 01:40, o James Gregory escreveu:
> On Sun, 2004-09-05 at 23:32, Jason T. Rice wrote:
> > So go ahead and flame him.  The single font texture is THE definitive
> > way it is done.  Texture switching WILL kill you on an OpenGL or DirectX
> > system.  If you don't know what it means, Google for "Texture Switching"
> > and I'll bet the experts point to some obscure 10 year old web page of
> > Steve's. That is the reason that every commercial game you pick up has
> > budgetted character textures into compact atlases and you never see a
> > character, feature, deco or terrain piece jump across multiple
> > textures.  EVERY pro title uses a single texture font system to avoid it.
>
> As I said already, the use of ttf for in game text was a matter of what
> was easiest, not what is best. At some point I'll experiment to see how
> many FPS using ttf loses us. If it's more than maybe 5 fps or something,
> then I might change it back to using a bitmap font. If it's less than
> perhaps 5 fps, then the question is: another evening of coding or just
> leave it for now to focus on other more important things?
>
 Okay, made a simple test where I've enabled and disabled text drawing. The 
difference is huge in terms of performance, more than 20 fps, in my system.
 It might be possible to see with some tool where it spends more time, if the 
rendering, converting of SDL_Surface to textures or the drawing of textures.
 The use of a pixmap would decrease the frame rate needed, since it'd just 
take the time of drawing it to screen.

Cheers,
 Ricardo

-- 
The error of youth is to believe that intelligence is a substitute for
experience, while the error of age is to believe experience is a substitute
for intelligence.
		-- Lyman Bryson

Re: [TuxKart-devel] Slowness - really related with Karts?

[Steve B. <sjb...@ai...>]

James Gregory wrote:
>
> The in-game text in the old TuxKart was heavily pixellated and very
> ugly.

Which is because it had to work on a typical card of that era - a
Voodoo-1 or -2 which had a hard limit of 256x256 as the largest
possible map.

Given the ability to use a 1kx1k for the fonts, that problem would
magically disappear.

> Given that SDL_ttf was already being used for the menu screens, by
> far the easiest way to fix this problem by just switching the text
> drawing calls to use SDL_ttf, rather than using one thing for menu
> screens and another for in-game status text.

Well - don't spend too much time on it - SDL is the first thing I'll
be removing when you guys finish messing around.

---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
HomeEmail: <sjb...@ai...>    WorkEmail: <sj...@li...>
HomePage : http://www.sjbaker.org
Projects : http://plib.sf.net    http://tuxaqfh.sf.net
            http://tuxkart.sf.net http://prettypoly.sf.net
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
GCS d-- s:+ a+ C++++$ UL+++$ P--- L++++$ E--- W+++ N o+ K? w--- !O M-
V-- PS++ PE- Y-- PGP-- t+ 5 X R+++ tv b++ DI++ D G+ e++ h--(-) r+++ y++++
-----END GEEK CODE BLOCK-----

Re: [TuxKart-devel] Slowness - really related with Karts?

[James G. <j....@vi...>]

On Sun, 2004-09-05 at 23:54, Steve Baker wrote:
> James Gregory wrote:
> >
> > The in-game text in the old TuxKart was heavily pixellated and very
> > ugly.
> 
> Which is because it had to work on a typical card of that era - a
> Voodoo-1 or -2 which had a hard limit of 256x256 as the largest
> possible map.

Sure, I never said "Oh Steve you idiot why on earth did you include such
crap fonts??!?!", I simply pointed out why it had been changed.

> Given the ability to use a 1kx1k for the fonts, that problem would
> magically disappear.


> > Given that SDL_ttf was already being used for the menu screens, by
> > far the easiest way to fix this problem by just switching the text
> > drawing calls to use SDL_ttf, rather than using one thing for menu
> > screens and another for in-game status text.
> 
> Well - don't spend too much time on it - SDL is the first thing I'll
> be removing when you guys finish messing around.

We know already.

	James

Re: [TuxKart-devel] Slowness - really related with Karts?

[Ricardo C. <ri...@ae...>]

 Please, stop counter arguing the use of more dependencies. Even if it is 
better for the user, Steve, the maintainer, already stated that he have 
already experienced with that and it is a pain in the ass to maintain. So, 
back off and stop bitching about this.

 Steve, the fact that Plib doesn't support some stuff (even major like 
fullscreen) and even that some developers are more used to SDL and it speed 
ups their development, I think its reason enough for linking to this library.
 I just hope after the upcoming release, programmers will help porting the 
code to Plib, and implement in Plib what's missing.

Cheers,
 Ricardo

Em Segunda, 6 de Setembro de 2004 00:05, o Ingo Ruhnke escreveu:
> "Jason T. Rice" <jt...@gt...> writes:
> > Mail me when these guys go home. I code, model and do sound effects
> > -- and hate sprawling dependency lists.
>
> Sorry, but the libraries that we use are the same that are used by
> pretty much every second other OSS game too, so I really can't see how
> that should ever be much of a problem.
>

-- 
Rudin's Law:
	If there is a wrong way to do something, most people will
	do it every time.

Rudin's Second Law:
	In a crisis that forces a choice to be made among alternative
	courses of action, people tend to choose the worst possible
	course.

Re: [TuxKart-devel] Slowness - really related with Karts?

[Ingo R. <gr...@gm...>]

Ricardo Cruz <ri...@ae...> writes:

>  Please, stop counter arguing the use of more dependencies. Even if
> it is better for the user, Steve, the maintainer, already stated
> that he have already experienced with that and it is a pain in the
> ass to maintain. So, back off and stop bitching about this.

If Steve doesn't want his mailbox filled with support mails there are
some simple countermessures:

 - remove/hide his email address from Tuxkart game itself and place
   instead tuxkart-users/de...@li... in some good
   visible place, state that all mails should go there and let the
   users help themself

 - create a static linked binary, this is basically the 'support-free'
   solution, if it 'just works' people won't have a reason to complain

 - create a good configure script that states what exactly is missing
   and how to get it

Removing the dependencies itself and creating so a whole lot of
completly unnecessary work is by far the worst solution.

Beside that, as far as I see it plib is actually the part of the
depency tree that is the most 'non-standard', the SDL stuff has been
used by hundreds of other games without problem.

-- 
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