🚀 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.

> 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.

It may have been a redefined character set (I couldn't image doing it at
the speeds it was going, though.)  It looks like to me that the screen was 
split.  Times of Lore looked more hires than a typical character set.

>>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.  

That's probably a lot of it.  Richard did say that U7 is no longer tiled.
He never mentioned layered...but...

Josh

In article <1992Aug6.110009.57912@cc.usu.edu> sl8nl@cc.usu.edu writes:
>> 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.
>
>It may have been a redefined character set (I couldn't image doing it at
>the speeds it was going, though.)  It looks like to me that the screen was 
>split.  Times of Lore looked more hires than a typical character set.
>

Very, very, few, if any, smooth-scrolling games on the C64 used its bitmap
mode.  The redefinition of the character set is a one-time-only overhead,
and didn't impact on speed during the game.  Split-screens were also
amazingly easy to accomplish on the 64 with its raster interrupts.

>>>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.  
>
>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.

Phat.