🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug5.182236.57893@cc.usu.edu> sl8nl@cc.usu.edu writes:
>A few questions:
>
>I was playing around with Ultima VII the other day...and was appalled at what
>I saw (no, the game was great).  Here's why.  We were playing it on a 386-25
>DX with 8 megs of RAM and more than enough disk space.  Biggest problem was,
>it accessed the disk every time you took a step.  This resulted in SLOW...
>movement.  Is this a case of bad programming, where Richard Garriot decided
>they were pressed for time and didn't have time for fine-tuning.  I'm 
>comparing Times of Lore for the Commodore 64 by Chris Roberts (yeah, the
>Wing Commander guy).  He had smooth bi-directional hires scrolling on a 
>one mhz machine!  That definitely took some time, but Ultima VII?

Smooth scrolling was very easy to do on the C64 because its redefinable
multi-colour character set meant you can get fancy graphics while staying
in text mode.  Each time you move a byte into video memory, you are
essentially drawing a 4x8 tile of 4 colours.  To scroll the screen only
required a block move of 1000 bytes, which can be done within one retrace.

>
>Hey, I can see going all 386 based.  That ought to give more than enough
>power for applications today, and ideas of what we want for better machines.
>But Ultima VII felt like more of an abuse to the 386 than an encouragement.
>I'm not knocking U7.  It's a great game.  Can someone offer an explanation,
>though?  (I want an explanation, not a flame on what I just said)

I've never played the game, nor have I even seen it running, but I have
seen screen snapshots of it and I think I can see why it may be slow.
I appears that U7's world is a multi-layered slab of voxels (volume
elements).  To draw each screen would require the laying down of several
layers of full-screen bitmaps, so I think it's the ISA bus that's the
bottleneck here, not to mention that each NPC leads a pretty hectic life.  

Phat.