DescentBB

pATCheS wrote:I think he means that all of the vertices for each face are sent to the graphics card, as opposed to using something such as a triangle strip, where the previous two verts are used for the next triangle (this saves gobs of memory bandwidth in talking to the hardware through the gfx driver).

• I will look into the wantmip thingie.
  
  I will also work over transparent explosion stuff. I will however definitely not manipulate explosion effects pixel-wise.
  
  Phoenix blobs were animated in D2?
  
  I have made D2X to render Plasma blobs transparently, so they're not as bright as they used to be. I like the effect though.
  
  Re briefing movies: Here at home I have a frame flashing around each robot at the 1st frame - did not happen at my workplace machine. Weird. The palette problem is gone though. The frame stems from a fullscreen variable that needs to be set but obviously only being set after the 1st frame. Movies not played in fullscreen have a frame around them to have them look better in higher resolutions than 640x480.
  
  Re: Disappearing menus: This might have something to do with blending bitmaps. I really cannot tell why this sometimes happens. Actually what happens is that D2X creates the menu, prints the text, and then blits the background over it. Don't ask me why.
  
  Re vertices: D2 supports 900 segments with each having 6 sides consisting of max. 2 faces. That makes 48 vertices per segment, totalling approx. 45,000 vertices per frame. Don't tell me that's a lot. Btw, a level has quite a few open sides, so there are less vertices to be rendered, as those segment sides aren't rendered. Then, D2 excludes a lot of segments from rendering with a kind of hidden surface (rather: hidden segment) algorithm.
  
  If I don't cap frame rate at all in D2X-W32, I get about 850 - 1050 fps (that with some code that effectively creates a frame capping effect, too). Ok ok, I don't have a GF 5200 or Radeon 9250 at home.

• D'oh you found it out. For some weird reason mouse navigation in config menus doesn't work. You should however be able to assign the middle button/wheel to a game function. I am using it for the afterburner.

pATCheS wrote:

Code: Select all

//Do this for each texel in an explosion texture
for(int x=0, x<w; x++) {
  for(int y=0, y<h; y++) {
    pixels[x][y].alpha = (pixels[x][y].red + pixels[x][y].green + pixels[x][y].blue) / 3;
  }
}

Of course, if you wanted to be real fancy about it, you could use the accepted chromatic intensities (I think green is weighted highest at around .5, red around .3, and blue around .2). Dunno how three float multiplies would compare speed-wise to three integer sums and a divide though. Not that it matters, since it'd only be done once per texture load anyway.

typedef struct tPixel {
   unsigned char red, green, blue, alpha;
} tPixel;

for (int i = w*h, tPixel *p = pixels; i; i--, p++)
   p->alpha = (p->red * 3 + p->green * 5 + p->blue * 2) / 10;

Diedel wrote: The problem is that currently I simply hand the bitmap and a global alpha value to the OpenGL system ... ... no bit-wise rendering done here. D2 bitmaps are palettized, one byte per pixel bitmaps. I would need to convert them to RGBA bitmaps, decoding each palette color to its nearest RGB equivalent, and have that one rendered ... phew.

Diedel wrote:patches,

I have modified D2X so that it can have a texture's pixels' alpha calculated from the pixel colors, but the result are rather opaque explosions, so I am still experimenting with this.

Diedel wrote:

Gregster2k wrote:Every version of D2X-W32 I've ever used has Crashed to Desktop on startup with an NTDLL.DLL error message.

Giving some details like OS, gfx & sound hardware, driver versions would have been a good idea.

I have D2X-W32 running on WinXP pro & home, Win2K pro with Radeon 9800 pro, X800 XT, GF 5200, GF2 400 MX, Soundblaster onboard, Soundblaster Audigy w/o problems.