Hey people do you like 2D games? Then check this one out. I'm calling it Platformisis. It's supposed to be a 2D sidescroller similar to Super Mario World... not really... but just checking! In this game you do run and jump but you can also fly! And you spend most of the time soaring though the air and smacking the baddies around. I'm currently in the early developement stages of this game but you might also be interested in it too. Please check out the site for the game. Tell me what you think!

http://www.geocities.com/platformisis

Couldn't read the text of your site, that crumpled paper background is really distracting. Font is ugly too, use sans-serif fonts on the web.

DRAWING LINES AND BOXES WITH PUTPIXEL IS CRAZY.

Yeah, but I'm in control of the show here! If stick to the OS's methods of drawing such primitives then the portability just went out the door and I'm not in control anymore. Have you checked out, by chance, how I draw pictures?

The font should be readable. It is not the best but it does work on all browsers.

PutPixel() is very smart. It is not your average pixel drawing routine.

He doesn't mean that you should use some OS-provided draw mechanism. What he means is that you shouldn't draw your boxes with individual calls to putpixel. For example, you can do it much quicker using a memset for each horizontal line.

cheers
sam

It's smart and slow, especially when you consider you're doing all that stuff in it each time you call it (which is a LOT of times when you are filling a box).

If you're going to use a putpixel routine you should make it as simple as possible (just straight linear code, no comparisons, nothing extra).

cheers
sam

Hey Francoissoft, remember me? How's it going pal, with all your competitions and bans on fora?

Anyway, I really think you should learn to code efficiently -> that's what a real skill is, making full use of the available commands. Instead of thinking it's cool to use 'basic' commands.

Excuse me, if you insist on using PutPixel, however smart it may be, you know nothing. Do you realize that multiplication per putpixel operation ? All the calls, returns, parameter passings, pushs, pops ? It's all slow and unnecessary stuff, and it has nothing to do with staying in control of things.

It's not slow. I tested it. It might be slow on 386's but not on pentiums. memcpy would not be able to decide if a pixel is transparent or not. I have tried that in the past and it was a pain to figure out. If you can do a better reimplementation of the drawing primitives I would like to see it.

I'm targeting pentium machines not older models. I tested the methods. They are
very quick!

No, I'm implenting things from scratch. I want to see how it's done.

I think you miss your 286. I do insist that you try drawing 1000000 pixels with putpixel() and I'll tell you that this can be done in 1 millisecond on a Pentium 3.

Okay, instead of bashing the site, like everyone else is doing here, rather rude and ignorant. I'm gonna comment about that screenshot you had.

It seems bizzare, the storyline is off, and the character is a fly. With a fly as a character, you should make it as if he's questing for the golden stash of the giant poo. That's where you get ideas, then the badguy could be a toad, and the toad is guarding it because he says it'll be a great investment for a body moisturizer for frogs.

The idea of the fly afterwards could be that your fly village buddies are tired of toads eating and keeping them down, so he's taking a course of action to get the giant poo to show up the frogs.

You, by far, did the worst bashing ever. Poo? Where did you get an idea like that?

The way I would do it is I'd have two different drawing routines: one that just does a straight blit and one that does transparency checks. In the level editor I'd flag certain tiles as having transparency information. In the map drawing code I'd then check that and pass the tile off to the appropriate drawing routine.

However if it's fast enough for you then great! You don't need to optimise until/if it becomes a problem anyway.

cheers
sam

I hope you weren't replying to me :P I was telling him to NOT use a putpixel call :P

sam

Are you a troll? Seriously?

You post on a public forum asking for comments and we give our opinions and CONSTRUCTIVE criticisms, and then you just bash us all!

Good luck!

sam

1. Yes, I miss my 80286. And I think there are many people out here who miss the days of old crappy EGA graphics, too.

2. 1 million pixels in a millisecond would mean 1 billion pixels per second. A Pentium 3 with 2 GHz (don't know what models there were exactly, but certainly not faster ones) would have to complete your PutPixel in less than 2 clocks. That's not possible. Check your measurements, they're ridiculous, sorry.

Questioning BRIAN FELLOWS is like questioning Budda.
Sit, and carefully contemplate his words, don't argue or try and find flaws. You will only talk yourself in circles, before arriving at the same conclusion as everyone else ...

For in the end, it is you who are mistaken. :)

- Jacob

Thanks for the tip but I'm working in a 256x256 screen mode. So the drawing was fast!

I was just a little angry at you but PutPixel() does draw at 10,000,000 pixels per second. I just tested it yesterday. That seems to be quick enough for a 256x256 screen which is what I'm working on.

You haven't compiled the source code for Platformisis, have you? Please compile it and then run the tests. You'll see that PutPixel() is not slow.

So it works at 10M pixels / second ? That's 200 clocks per PutPixel call on a 2GHz machine, and much closer to what I expected from looking at the source.

Just why won't you listen to a dozen people telling you not to do it the way you're doing it at the moment ? Feeling superior ? You shouldn't, most of the people around here are likely to have a lot more experience that you.

You asked for our opinions, and we told you that you coding style is ugly (using globals foremost), and using PutPixel won't lead you anywhere. Now if it currently works for you, fine so far. But the screens don't look as if there's much going on yet, and requiring a 2GHz machine for such a game is ridiculous, too.

Finally, I'm sorry if I sounded offensive.

Well said.

> Please compile it and then run the tests.
> You'll see that PutPixel() is not slow.

Which is faster way to fill horizontal span?

A)
for ( int x = x0; x

2GHz for that? That's ridiculous, how long did you even MAKE this game? Rooms, obejects, including sprites! Did you do, like, 1000 levels or some jit? The fly itself is way to crappy to deserve 1% of that space!

nice one ;)

it's possible that it's 'so fast' for you simply because you have too many mhz to burn on pushing/popping, and work in l1/l2 cache most of the time (because of the tiny 256kb framebuffer).

francois, if you're going to continue to be ignorant, that's your loss, but wait until you try some 3d stuff triangle by triangle ;)

to everyone else: you guys should have *some* mercy, he has no way of knowing/detecting this inefficiency (as a n00b who has been bathed in abstractions, virtualistions and many many many mhz ;)


ps. i would be *fascinated* to learn about your research in 'internet wires' and hybred pumpkins ;)