Re: SDL interface reorg checked in

[Hans Ronne <hronne at pp dot sbbs dot se>]

>> Nice work. And everything works fine on the Mac. The Linux X11 fullscreen
>> mode is broken, though. Fullscreen DGA and windowed X11 both work fine.
>> Haven't tested fullscreen X11 for a while, so this problem may be unrelated
>> to your latest checkin.
>
>I haven't actually tried fullscreen myself...

The problem was just that I had checked "output to console window" in the
compiler. Turns out the X11 fullscreen mode does not cooperate well with a
console. Same problem as with the Mac SIOUX console. I had to hack the SDL
event loop to get the latter to work properly.

>Cool, clearly I need to get dev tools onto my new DP machine that
>runs almost-the-last-build-before-GM of OS X, who will care about
>Linux then?! :-)  It points up something else, which is that this
>interface is going to need to have some timing machinery regulating
>how fast things can happen.

True. Something like a play_movies delay for every move..

>> The Linux game seems to spend long periods when nothing is drawn to the
>> screen. This makes me wonder if the slowdown is just due to slow graphics.
>> Maybe something else is eating cycles in the Unix version?
>
>Well, SDL isn't magic - you're still doing protocol to the server,
>and too many packets will kill the interface.  I notice that the
>color cursor in HOMM3 on Linux is ever so slightly draggy, and
>that Loki's latest update has an option to use only X cursor
>instead, so I suspect those guys had to work at getting reasonable
>speed too.

In fact, the slow graphics was the main culprit after all. I just fixed the
last clipping bug so that SDL_UpdateRects can be used instead of SDL_Flip
and it speeds up the game 10-fold under X11. Performance is now comparable
to that of the DGA driver in fullscreen mode (double buffering enabled)
which I also finally got to work. The cursor drag is almost gone, but the
scrolling is still painfully slow.

Hans

Hans Ronne

hronne@pp.sbbs.se