Re: Questions...

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#491

From: MoonMan
Date: Sat, 08 Aug 1992 00:30

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In article <BsLrs5.8An@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca> ptran@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca (Phat H Tran) writes:
  
  [deleted...]

>>> 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.  
>>
>>That's probably a lot of it.  Richard did say that U7 is no longer tiled.
>>He never mentioned layered...but...
>>
>
>I don't know what RG means by "not tiled".  Voxels are just tiles in the
>third dimension.


  I REALLY doubt that it uses voxels - that would probably be far too slow.
By "not tiled," however, he meant that the maps aren't stored/displayed
as a set of fixed-size bitmaps.  That's obviously the case, as I'm sure
anybody who'd played it would see.  The buildings, trees, etc. are anchored
to a rather fine grid.  The reason it goes so slowly is that a lot of the
images are at least the size of the screen, and some are probably bigger.
I'm surprised they didn't make better use of memory, though.  On an 8-mb 
machine I didn't expect constant loading...

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                         ///                kludge@u.washington.edu
                                           
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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!uw-beaver!news.u.washington.edu!hardy.u.washington.edu!kludge
From: kludge@hardy.u.washington.edu (MoonMan)
Newsgroups: rec.games.programmer
Subject: Re: Questions...
Message-ID: <1992Aug8.003022.13232@u.washington.edu>
Date: 8 Aug 92 00:30:22 GMT
References: <BsJss1.BM1@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca> <1992Aug6.110009.57912@cc.usu.edu> <BsLrs5.8An@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca>
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