Re: how to add assembler?

[Erik <br0ke@math.smsu.edu>]

On 17-Oct-99 Jeff Read wrote:
> Pierre Phaneuf wrote:
> 
>> Assembler and direct buffers are both rather old-fashion nowadays. With
>> hardware blitters, there is no way you can do better.
> 
> I suppose, if all you're doing is blitting simple images or sprites to
> the screen. However, many 2D accelerators do not have support for things
> like alpha-blending, scaling, rotation, shearing, distortion, lighting
> effects. If you had a 3D card these could be accelerated, but as yet
> there's no real elegant way to use a 3D accelerator's functions in a 2D
> context, e.g., in a window or framebuffer. I know, for example, that
> StarCraft and Jazz Jackrabbit 2 do not use hardware accel for much of
> their graphics (which often involve translucency and/or lighting).-
> 

but games like starcraft represent a 3d world, so it should be fairly easy to
do in true 3d, using opengl. It'd simplify things like faking altitude and
drawing by altitude so tanks don't appear over battlecruisers. For something
like that, doing it in ogl from the start would be pretty neat. That'd be
pretty nutty, everything 3d, the ability to move the camera around mebbe?
dynamic LOD would be pretty critical to the performance of that I bet... I'm
salivating already :)

I don't know jazz jackrabbit2, but starcraft doesn't have lighting and only
basic translucency. The lighting in starcraft is all from the same point every
time on every map on every thing, so I'm gonna guess the rendered the graphics
with lighting in them. Translucency is done like a 1 bit alpha, so a simple
bitmask blit would do that job, I d'no if 2d hw accelerators do that :/ The
only hw accel I've looked at or really care about is 3d, focused on ogl :)

        -Erik <br0ke@math.smsu.edu> [http://math.smsu.edu/~br0ke]

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