Messages

286

General Jo Engine Help / Re: Booting Jo Engine games with Pseudo Saturn Kai?

« on: September 22, 2017, 02:32:44 am »

It seems like the problem comes from the extended ram malloc. Deactivate it for the time being in the Jo Engine source files and it will work fine. Another solution is to use pseudo saturn on a cartdridge without ram.

287

General Jo Engine Help / Re: A few questions about PCM functionality

« on: September 22, 2017, 02:30:52 am »

Nice to know that the different frequencies didn't play nice for you since I now know I'm not alone!
For the audio, there is no overflow check AFAIK, so if you specify a channel to play on you will probably get crashes.
I also can't play more than 2 audio files at the same time, but I know Johannes wants to fully modify the audio implementation, so maybe you can try the SGL functions for the time being.

288

Project announcement / Re: Sonic Z-Treme

« on: September 20, 2017, 06:52:58 pm »

Well, I could just put it at 30 fps and it would run fine, but my whole game logic is at 60 fps, so it's some work too since at 30 fps it's like a slow motion game. So I prefer to spend time optimizing the game first, and if that's not enough I will downgrade to 30 fps and just add more effects

289

Project announcement / Re: Sonic Z-Treme

« on: September 20, 2017, 03:20:54 am »

The problem is that when the CPU can't keep up, it drops one frame, so your game logic goes down to 30 fps. So it's going from 60 to 30 to 60, making the game hard to play. I have a few ideas for preprocessing the visibility. My hard limit seems to be around 1100 vertices on screen, the game now goes from 700 to up to 1600 sometimes, so it's uneven. Of course, there are 2 cpus, but sending the draw command to the slave doesn't help that much (SGL slPutpolygonS). I could probably brute force my way to 60 fps by alternating the matrix transformation between slave and main CPU, but I want to optimize everything and keep some room for extra effects. The main problem for high vertices count is the way that by subdividing a map for culling you duplicate many vertices, putting a strain on the CPU.

290

Jo Engine Wish List / Re: 3D mesh drawing and collision detection?

« on: September 17, 2017, 08:42:43 pm »

I'm currently starting to work on a proper octree for both collision and 3d drawing.
One issue I have is that subdividing a map for culling increase the vertices count, slowing down the Saturn.
Like, if you take a cube (8 vertices), subdivide it in 6 objects, you end up with 24 vertices.
I noticed there is an Object struct in SGL 3.0 which contains child/parents data and polygon data.
Anyone knows how to use it and if it would help?
Another option I guess could be to store polygon data in the octree's leaf and all vertices in one list, then just DMA the polygons to one single temporary mesh, but I'm not sure if it would be a pratical solution and fast enough.
Any ideas to solve that issue?

291

Project announcement / Re: Sonic Z-Treme

« on: September 16, 2017, 01:05:58 am »

 Right now it runs between 30 and 60 fps on real hardware, so it's not really playable, so I will have to optimize everything first.

292

Project announcement / Re: Sonic Z-Treme

« on: September 14, 2017, 05:07:57 pm »

Small update, now using a map from Project AXSX (thanks to Andrew75) :
https://youtu.be/UDzUXsTSKk4

293

Project announcement / Re: Sonic Z-Treme

« on: September 04, 2017, 05:32:02 am »

No need, it's all working already.

294

General Jo Engine Help / 30 FPS?

« on: August 29, 2017, 08:07:12 pm »

Hi!
It seems like we can't change the framerate in the makefile.
Like : JO_FRAMERATE = 2  has no effect at all.
Also, by changing the value directly in the Conf.h file, I experience crashes when there are too many polygons on screen, which never happens at 60 FPS for some reasons, so I'm not sure if it's not fully implemented or I'm missing something.

On a sidenote, related to what Null1024 mentionned about Jo Engine 9.0 potentially breaking some stuff, it seems that the exect on slave function doesn't work anymore as it should (it used to work in Sonic Z-Treme, but I had to remove it since it didn't execute the functions after upgrading.
I tested the Shooter demo (which also use the slave) and it's also broken, which further proves issues with the slave functions.

295

Share your code / Re: 3D Map tool + FPS demo

« on: August 29, 2017, 05:05:30 am »

I removed gouraud shading because it's much slower with it (25% at 60 fps). The "slow" performance is in fact between 30 and 60 fps on real hardware. I just need to add precalculated visibility and I should be able to hit 60 fps. If not I will just display a low quality model at distance and use lower quality textures on that model. Either way, I will get to stable 60 fps, I just need lot of work to get there, but I'm confident.
Precalculated visibility is my next headache, I plan to just subdivide the map in a few zones (say 64 zones) and do ray tracing checks (on the PC) at the limits and middle of each zone, then store the results compressed in an interger. So say I'm at zone 2 and can potentially see 6 meshes (out of 32 as an example) from there, I will just flip the bits of that integer to 1, the rest to 0. If I have 128 meshes, I will need 4 integers per zone (like 64 again), which means it will only take 256 bytes, which isn't too bad for the huge speed gain. Anyway, that's the plan for now, it might not work when I try it and it won't be that easy to pull.

296

Share your code / Re: 3D Map tool + FPS demo

« on: August 27, 2017, 04:20:31 am »

Second post, the youtube link.

297

Share your code / Re: 3D Map tool + FPS demo

« on: August 26, 2017, 03:44:29 am »

I made a big update, the map tool now reads TGA files and writes to the binary custom file for texture mapped levels.
I also added a function to auto-subdivide the map for view frustum culling.
I'm still using SGL culling function, which isn't great.
I also changed the collision code to reduce CPU usage (I didn't do much testing, so it's possible that it's buggy now).

I succesfully imported levels from Project AXSX, but performance isn't that great for now as you can see in the video.

I still have to fix bugs, do more testing and find a way to precompute visibility (suggestions are welcome!) in order to improve performance further.

298

Jo-Engine release / Re: Release 9.0

« on: August 12, 2017, 06:46:18 pm »

Amazing!
Can't wait to try it!

299

Share your code / Re: Collision BB generator (WIP) + FPS demo

« on: August 10, 2017, 03:49:28 pm »

Huge update!
The map tool now reads .Obj files and outputs a binary map format.
The FPS demo is now using this map format and you can change maps by reading them on the disk.
Just press L/R + start in game to switch maps.

I still have lot of work to do on the tool and there might be bugs that I didn't find out yet, so if you find any make sure to tell me!

300

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

« on: August 09, 2017, 03:42:15 pm »

The good folks at SegaXtreme helped with it, and it was an issue with data alignment.
Seems to be fixed for now!
I will update the tool and FPS demo in the next few days to show map loading from the disc.