Which one do you want first? (+video)

[Stephane Hockenhull]

Ok, I admit it: I laughed at the "Sharp Edges" punnery.

there's about a dozen more stupid taglines


had to put something to read during the initial world generation which takes a while (about 2mins).


I want to make it easy to generate most of the starting world on a PC then transfer it to the Pandora SD card, the game runs very well when walking around a pre-generated area loading off the SD card, it still stutter a bit when you're walking into new area and it has to generate the world as you're moving.


overclocking should help a huge amount there (a 720Mhz, about 400Mhz are eaten up for the main game, leaving 320Mhz for world gen, OCing to 1Ghz (and extra 280Mhz) could nearly double the world gen speed) , using the DSP might do some good eventually but I expect at most a 25% boost.


now that I mostly fixed the SD card read/write stalls, the leftover stuttering is due to both threads (game and world gen) fighting for CPU time, its a bit easier to balance on a realtime gaming console OS with fixed priorities, Linux is more tuned for general fairness.


I'll figure out something, its still very much a work in progress.

 

[Stephane Hockenhull]

Hey, this really looks good. And your world generation and the snow toped mountains are a nice contrast to the "usual" Minecraft Worlds. I hope it will run good on the Pandora, I wouldn't care if there also are just unfiltered 16x16 Pixel Textures if this gives a big performance boost. Maybe I've played to much minecraft but I don't need bilinear filtering in these kind of games.

unfiltered doesn't seem to give a performance boost on the SGX GPU.


the engine supports texture packs with higher-res (and lower-res) textures, each cube face texture can be a different resolution (right now the stone wall is 64x64 the rest is 32x32), mipmaps (bi and tri-linear), raw RGB 24/32bit, 256color palettized and PVRTC textures, ES2.0 pixel shaders, and of course can disable interpolation.


for now I've hard-coded the settings to interpolated non-mipmapped PVRTC texture and its using the ES1.1 fixed function pipeline as a baseline.


I haven't had time to put an option for all this, convenient Configs, Menus and UI are often what takes the most time to program.


it will be in there eventually


I want to put some more profiling/benchmark features in it so kernel dev can test with it as this engine is likely going to workout every single part of the Pandora kernel and hardware.


right now with 3D, multi-threading, SD read+writes,


and eventually audio, DSP, and networking all at the same time.


its a beast to keep the workload balanced and running smooth.

 

[gruso]

So, having played the Rebirth entry - impressive. Real time rendering is playing catch-up a lot of the time, but the world feels smooth and natural to move around in. I hope people remember they're just playing a tech demo when they judge this; all you can do is move around (and jump) but being a from-scratch work this is quite a feat.


I know you didn't have a Pandora when you packaged this, so I'm sure there will be a heap of things you'll automatically fix when you have one. Just a couple of notes though:-


- The game opens in a partially off-screen window. Fullscreen mode will be good.


- Nub controls are good, although a little sensitive for my liking on the right nub (mouselook).


- Inverted Y axis on the right nub would be very welcome


Definitely looking forward to more!


(Do you want this thread moved to the Rebirth section for now? Or maybe start a new one there for feedback?)

 

[Stephane Hockenhull]

the other shoulder button should let you place and remove blocks, there's still a significant delay tho.


you can invert the Y axis of the right nub if you edit ~/.BetaBlockQuest/joystick_map.xml and add

flags="invert"

to the "nub1" section at the bottom of the XML, the one with the "JGAME_AXIS_Y:1"

   <map src="JGAME_AXIS_Y:1" dst="JGAME_AXIS_Y:1" flags="invert" />

that should do it.


I'll add a GUI at some point for configuring and remapping inputs, the engine does supports it already its just not easily user-accessible


I started a new thread ( ) , we can close this poll.