Messages

211

General Jo Engine Help / Re: 3D 3rd Person Camera -- Issue with rotating camera face using jo_3d_set_target

« on: February 24, 2018, 07:58:44 pm »

Sorry I didn't have enough time to fully implement a third person camera, but here you have an updated version of your demo with full 3d space control, acceleration and basic collision.
Implementing a full third person camera shouldn't be that hard, but it could take a little while and some trial and error to get it right.

Let me know if you need more help.

212

Project announcement / Re: Sonic Z-Treme

« on: February 24, 2018, 05:44:11 pm »

Probably not, but right now it wouldn't work well for sure, both on the CPU and the VDP1.

Anyway RAM is so tight that it wouldn't fit since I would need to keep space for the light vectors, so I will stick with static lights.
I don't plan to add dynamic lights.

On real hardware, the framerate goes between 20 and 30 FPS (or 60 fps sometimes if left uncapped). The video seen here is on emulator, which stays at 30 fps (or 60 if I leave the framerate uncapped).
There is lot of overdraw (sprites written over other sprites), if I find a solution for that the framerate should be much better.

The CD loading functions are really terribly slow (2 minutes to load a 1,3 MB map!!!) and prone to failure, so I'm not showing real hardware footage until I can bring that loading time down to something better (15 seconds or so).

213

General Jo Engine Help / Re: 3D 3rd Person Camera -- Issue with rotating camera face using jo_3d_set_target

« on: February 24, 2018, 03:58:53 am »

Yeah, I kind of realize that after not touching Sonic Z-Treme for a while I'm getting a bit rusty with third person view.
I'll see what I can do over the weekend.

That being said, you should avoid the look at and use the matrix instead.

Even SGL warns against the lookat function as it's not 100% reliable.

214

General Jo Engine Help / Re: 3D 3rd Person Camera -- Issue with rotating camera face using jo_3d_set_target

« on: February 24, 2018, 02:16:20 am »

Ok, I'll look it up.
Btw, what kind of game are you trying to do?

215

General Jo Engine Help / Re: 3D 3rd Person Camera -- Issue with rotating camera face using jo_3d_set_target

« on: February 23, 2018, 08:27:05 pm »

Can you share some of your code?

216

General Jo Engine Help / Re: Audio issues - repeating/skipping

« on: February 23, 2018, 08:23:57 pm »

I'm not 100% sure, but try changing the makefile to pal and the resolution (in the conf.h) to something like 352x256 (or any pal specific resolution ). I guess it's an issue with the v-synch set at 1/60 instead of 1/50, since you need to DMA the PCM audio.

217

General Jo Engine Help / Re: Audio issues - repeating/skipping

« on: February 23, 2018, 06:07:31 pm »

It's a PAL Saturn?

218

Jo Engine Wish List / Re: Reading binary files with pointers instead of returned char stream?

« on: February 23, 2018, 04:59:33 pm »

On a sidenote, the loading is super slow, but it's also prone to failures.
I'm not sure why, but ever since Jo Engine was updated with the read retry functions I had multiple failures while loading.
Any ideas how to both make it faster to load and more reliable?

219

General Jo Engine Help / Re: TGA limit?

« on: February 23, 2018, 04:23:56 pm »

Yes, with jo max sprites (look at conf.h for the options). I use more than 500 different sprites in some maps in the FPS demo and it works fine with 16 colors.

220

Project announcement / Re: Sonic Z-Treme

« on: February 22, 2018, 03:27:16 am »

I tested the demo on real hardware : 20 to 60 fps, which is great considering it's not optimized.
Here is a video with 2 more Quake maps :
https://youtu.be/2B48PMqd1zg

221

Jo Engine Wish List / Re: Reading binary files with pointers instead of returned char stream?

« on: February 20, 2018, 06:36:30 pm »

Wow, that was fast!

If the nb of bytes remaining to be read is less than the sector count, will it get past that point or does it ajust accordingly?

I say that because I need to split where the data goes since my files are larger than the available RAM and reading past the limit will break everything up.

EDIT : I did a quick test, and as I suspected there is no "safety net". I guess the way around this is to check if the remaining number of bytes to be read is less than the sector count, then switch to reading one sector at a time.

222

Jo Engine Wish List / Re: Import Tilemaps

« on: February 20, 2018, 06:33:40 pm »

Good to know!
2D on Saturn is indeed very interesting, sadly I don't have the patience to create sprites and deal with animations, so I'll stick with 3D for while.

223

Jo Engine Wish List / Re: Reading binary files with pointers instead of returned char stream?

« on: February 20, 2018, 05:41:13 pm »

After doing some tests on real hardware, I came to the conclusion that the read_next_bytes function is super slow.

If I understand correctly, it's reading 1 sector at a time, which causes waits as data gets transfered from the CD buffer to the memory.
As an example, reading a 1,4 Mb file took me around 1 minute 30 seconds, but in a game such as Quake the same file would take around 20 seconds or less to load.

I really like the flexibility with the read next bytes since it allows me to load files larger than 1 MB, but I think it could be improved a lot by doing something more like the asynch read (like read 10 sectors at a time, send the data straight into the specified buffer - Low work RAM in my case -  like in the SBL documentation vol.1 p. 18).

In the meantime, I started to try to write my own functions, but it would be nice to have a speed boost within the default Jo Engine functions.

224

Jo Engine Wish List / Re: Import Tilemaps

« on: February 20, 2018, 05:32:11 pm »

It wouldn't work simply because how the SGL workarea works.
You will need to cull the sprites that aren't on screen.
It should be quite easy using a simple grid, but since I never use the 2D functions I couldn't tell you exactly how you could do it.
The idea is that if each tile is like 32 pixels wide and your screen is 320 pixels wide, you only show tiles that are within 5 or 6 units of the screen's center.
Perhaps a new map rendering function would need to be create as I don't think the current functions cull-away the sprites that aren't onscreen.
SGL will discard the sprites that aren't on screen, but they will still get processed and fill the workarea quickly, so you need to do culling on your end too.

225

Project announcement / Re: Sonic Z-Treme

« on: February 17, 2018, 03:29:29 am »

Everything is automated, which is why the textures don't look all that great, but my pushing them further I might be able to hide it. About the open space, my engine doesn't support proper occlusion culling (pvs or portals), so I need to limit the draw distance.