Re: Tools

[Pierre Phaneuf <pp@ludusdesign.com>]

Ingo Ruhnke wrote:

> >> This is the difference between Demo Bob and John Carmack.
> >
> > I d'no, there's an aweful lot of ".asm" in quake and doom and wolf3d...
> 
> ---- from the quake-src readme.txt -----
> The projects have been tested with visual C++ 6.0, but masm is also required
> to build the assembly language files.  It is possible to change a #define
> and build with only C code, but the software rendering versions lose almost
> half its speed.

And I'd be ready to bet that the OpenGL versions don't lose that much
from disabling the assembler code.

This is the 3D equivalent of what I'm talking about. In its time, the
Quake software renderer, with all of its hand-optimized assembler and
incredibly well done design and algorithms was pure MAGIC!

But now, that era is gone. It doesn't matter if you have the talent of
John Carmack, Tim Sweeney and the ten best demo coders all rolled into
one, even a poorly done OpenGL engine can completely SMASH what a
software renderer can do.

Now that 3D accelerators are getting popular, hardware-only games are
sprouting up, which is expectable and fine.

Why is it that even though 98% of every freakin' PC on Earth has
hardware accelerated 2D that we still cannot use it???

Accelerated 2D is the difference between making my game 640x480 in 8 or
16 bit color depth MAX or making it 800x600 or 1024x768 in any color
depth! My DirectX colleagues have been demoing me smooth, fullscreen,
picture-to-picture TrueColor fading! This is progress! And *everybody*
has the hardware to do it! But I cannot do it on Linux, WHY???

(just run Quadra in 32 bit color depth for an idea of what I'm talking
about)

-- 
Pierre Phaneuf
Ludus Design, http://ludusdesign.com/
"First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you. Then you win." -- Gandhi