I’m back again, after a week of harvest-work, I’m now ready to start the second half of GSoC, a big question then, is what’s left to do?
- Volume-settings are currently ignored (well, mute works, but that’s it)
- Videos desynch a bit (I used the video-code from the Sword 2.5-engine, which states this to be a known issue)
- Only OGG-audio is supported at the moment, while games like “the white chamber” also use WAV.
- Detection still needs a bit of work:
- Detection is hardcoded for the games I have tested with, and doesn’t allow for user-games with changing/unknown MD5’s.
- Detection is set with a common target, and Savegames use hardcoded filenames, thus making ALL WinterMute-games share savegame-namespace. This means that slot 3 in J.U.L.I.A. also is slot 3 in Dirty Split…
- TTF-fonts still need a bit of adjusting:
- TTF-fonts currently lack a decent fallback to theme-fonts (in ANY case text will be drawn, just not with a font that looks at all similar to what was intended when the games were made)
- TTF-fonts drew a bit on the dark side (cheap Star Wars-jokes aside, this was because I drew 16bpp for some reason, and then converted that to 32bpp, I have a fix for it now)
- Variable renaming:
- There are still the odd variable name here and there that follows either the VarName-naming convention, or the style_where_you_put_in_a_bunch_of_these. I think I got most of the former. And the latter, well it will have to change as well.
- Drawing is slow, or as _sev put it:
<_sev> i don’t agree it is slow
<_sev> it is über-slow
Well, this is the bit that I talked a bit about last time, sadly I have still not solved the dirty rect-thing (since I haven’t really been working on GSoC the past week, owing to the mentioned harvest-work). I did go through the blit-function I use right now, and noticed two things:
As fuzzie mentioned back when I originally tried to refactor the blit-code from the Sword25-engine for common usage, I changed the constant shifts to variable shifts (i.e. “pix << 24 & 0xff” became “pix << blueShift & 0xff”), which would disable any compiler-optimizations that could change that to byte-access, instead of a shift, accordingly I also changed the byte-writes to format.colorFromARGB-calls, which add even more shifts. Doing some profiling on thise code revealed that ~30% of the total runtime was spent in this function. Simply changing the shifts back to constant shifts, and the format.colorFromARGB-calls to byte-writes, reduced this to ~19%. Which now makes flip() the heaviest part of the entire code (since it does a complete redraw of the frame every frame), counting in at ~57% of the total runtime spent in g_system->updateScreen(). Finishing up dirty rects should reduce that load by quite a bit more.
I did do some minor game testing the past week, as meta kindly provided me a retail version of J.U.L.I.A. I was able to play on from the demo, the downside being that I found J.U.L.I.A. to be using sprite rotation, which is not supported in WME Lite, from which I have based this port. This makes it rather unlikely that the full J.U.L.I.A.-version will become completable with this port during GSoC, although, it isn’t unlikely that I’ll end up adding in sprite rotation at some future point.
Going forwards, I’ll try to get the things listed above fixed, and hopefully end up with a reducing my list of TODOs, instead of finding new roadblocks.