Creeping biggerism revisited

Post by **torangan** » July 19th, 2006, 2:41 pm

Unless we get OpenGL support or similiar, strict size limits are rather important to keep the performance in a usable area. There's already enough slow down from other sources.

Post by **zookeeper** » July 19th, 2006, 3:16 pm

torangan wrote:Unless we get OpenGL support or similiar, strict size limits are rather important to keep the performance in a usable area. There's already enough slow down from other sources.

If that's the case, then it's simply just one more reason to keep units smaller to make animating them well possible.

Post by **torangan** » July 19th, 2006, 6:54 pm

The more hexes you overlap, the more needs to be redrawn.

Post by **Jetrel** » July 19th, 2006, 9:09 pm

zookeeper wrote:
torangan wrote:That's what I meant with strongly discouraged. Once you allow it, people will want to use it for all kind of animations since they can do much more then. It should be restricted to those cases where there's really no other choice. Otherwise it'll expand from unit to unit with the limit getting broader and broader.
I don't see what problems that could possibly cause. If someone can do a better animation by using more than the 72x72, then great, the animation looks better. Why would it be a problem? There's no reason to make a spearman jump around the screen, even if a gryphon was made to be able to stretch it's wings a bit.

Precisely. First, few units would have an actual use for this.

Second, this "arms race" is ... preposterous. It might be at least plausible if wesnoth was a free-for-all in development, but it's not - I can mediate over what goes in and what does not go in. We devs do have control over things.

The public can't commit to SVN, you know...

torangan wrote:Unless we get OpenGL support or similiar, strict size limits are rather important to keep the performance in a usable area. There's already enough slow down from other sources.

Uhm, what I was talking about was a much more invasive change to the graphics engine; probably including OpenGL support. Something is "rotten in denmark" if a software-rendered 24-bit graphics game like Myth: TFL can run at a faster framerate on a much slower machine. Functionally, our graphics engine is decent; but something fundamental about the design needs to eventually be changed in the interests of speed. Little optimizations have helped us before, sometimes very significantly, but theres got to be a much bigger bottleneck somewhere, and I think it's in the general design.

JW · Post by JW » July 19th, 2006, 10:08 pm

And I would much appreciate such an improvement in speed, if the invasive changes ever occured.

Post by **torangan** » July 20th, 2006, 1:24 am

AFAIK we're currently not redrawing the part behind a unit as in copying what was behind back. Instead the whole hex is drawn including transitions and if a unit is on top of the adjacent hex it's redrawn as well. If this redraw now overlaps other hexes... you get the picture? But I don't know the details of the graphics code so I might be wrong.
True for sure is that it's possible to optimize the drawing part of Wesnoth a lot - if and only if we find someone to write the code...

Post by **turin** » July 27th, 2006, 6:56 pm

I haven't posted yet in this thread, but...

I must say, I think we are going a bit overboard. The General has already been redone in the new style, but now the Elvish Archer is taller than it (they are the same height pixel-wise, but the elvish archer doesn't have a helmet, so...). A third level unit, IMHO, should not be shorter than a first level one. Does this mean we are going to have to redo the general - again?

And with units like the Trolls - I have a sneaking suspicion that Neo's new variants will look undersized compared to the new elves. It will be rather impossible to have larger-sized units look decent unless we allow them to spill out of the hex in their standing frames. Which has real problems, code-wise, performance-wise, and, IMHO, desirability-wise.

I don't have a problem with making the units larger, but I do think that most of the new elves go a bit overboard...

Post by **Neoriceisgood** » August 18th, 2006, 12:47 pm

turin wrote:I haven't posted yet in this thread, but...

I must say, I think we are going a bit overboard. The General has already been redone in the new style, but now the Elvish Archer is taller than it (they are the same height pixel-wise, but the elvish archer doesn't have a helmet, so...). A third level unit, IMHO, should not be shorter than a first level one. Does this mean we are going to have to redo the general - again?

And with units like the Trolls - I have a sneaking suspicion that Neo's new variants will look undersized compared to the new elves. It will be rather impossible to have larger-sized units look decent unless we allow them to spill out of the hex in their standing frames. Which has real problems, code-wise, performance-wise, and, IMHO, desirability-wise.

I don't have a problem with making the units larger, but I do think that most of the new elves go a bit overboard...

I have to agree with Turin on this, unlike the complaints people (like Turin) had with the Drakes, at least they were supposed to be bigget than averange, being dragon-kin and all;

however with the ever growing unit graphics, the bigger units lose the whole feel of actually -being- bigger.

Oh well, at least the dwarfs are still small.