Spring RTS Engine

Optimizing it is fun

I had to do it. With size restriction and big maps in the works, something had to be done.



-Buggi

Sex. Need any graphics or icons done for it? :)

A application icon would be sweet :D

...

Right now making it *fast* is issue #1. It creates tiles, checks for matches, it's all good. Except with C# I am not directly accessing raw Bitmap bytes. (Which I'm starting to think would be better.) Right now it's pretty damn slow moving all that information around. Most especially "extracting" a 32x32 chunk out of the main bmp.

Issue #2 is creating the 1024x1024 temp bmp's in the save-and-compress phase. There again I have to set some data somehow (without a bmp header).

I'm thinking very seriously about the program splitting the texture map into 32 pixel high "strips" and saving them all out as temp bmp's and loading each one as I need them. That'd be several hundred strips though

Maybe 512 pixel strips... :-\ That'd mean there'd be a "strip" for every "TA Tile" of your map. No worries, you wouldn't notice the difference, the difference is in the memory requirements during the tiling phase.

And can someone explain to me what "FastStat" does!? Whoever originally wrote the map converter really used RAM like it was unlimited. Here is struct with 9 ints (36 bytes) and an array of over 400,000 of them is used. @.@!! 409,600 to be exact, 14 megs of memory. This is in addition to the 409,600 array of ints and the 409,600 allocation of Bitmaps to hold the tiles.

I'm starting to think an ArrayList should be used with a foreach() statement That would dramatically reduce the memory stamp.

Oy.

Not bad for 1 days work though eh? :D

-Buggi

I maybe asking too much here but can we get a preview feature?

I don't like recompiling maps over and over again trying to adjust the max height and water depth to where I want it

maybe a little app that takes the heightmap and renders a 3d untextured map with water showing what the map will look height wise in Spring.

Keep it simple

Nice shot, buggi. Now complete that thing stat!!

KOOL :D

Any chance of a predicted water height, based on zwzsg's formula?

level of grey of sea shore= - 255 * (value after -n in the mapconv commandline) / ((value after -x in the mapconv commandline) - (value after -n in the mapconv commandline))

The faststat is there to speed up tile comparison by not having to compare whole tiles that arent like each other.

And 14 mb is really like nothing when we are talking loading bmps in the GB area.

That whole preview thing... oy...

That'd require a HUGE amount of functionality I was saving for a fully fledged map editor.

I was just trying to create a GUI/optimized version of the command line utility.

It's all C# by the way

-Buggi

Well, I've decided I must create my own special Bitmap class to employ the desired speed 'n stuff.

It's going to be interesting, to say the least.

Creating the minimap is going to be the most interesting part Like how to create a 1024x1024 image out of an image you can't even load into memory completely...

OY!!

*cracks open 5 pepsi's*

MAUAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA

-Buggi

Buggi wrote: I had to!! @.@;; Don't hate me.-Buggi

I don't hate you... I am writing an application in VB.net remember

can it add wreckage yet? rocks made of metal to reclaim?

I'll ignore sinbad for now

Okay, just thought I'd update you all on the progress.

So far I have it loading processing and compressing the tiles for the main texture.
Also it loads and processes the height map.

Next are features, joy.

It would be interesting to add a "features map" and take geo's off the metal map. Then you could use other colors for other crap.

But, for now I'm focused on getting a functional map out of this bastard.

-Buggi

Buggi wrote: ...
And can someone explain to me what "FastStat" does!?

-Buggi

Its used to hold the "uniqueness" of the tile. Its uses some stats algorythms to create a number of values like average brightness on R,G,B channels etc.

The stats are then used to find an existing tile that's close (<compression factor) to the new one. If it finds one then it uses that instead.

A new preview...



Please, drool away from the keyboard.

:D

-Buggi
(now a Spring map expert. )

.
... D-A-M-N ...! ! ! ...

That looks GREAT .... when do you plan on releasing it
to the Spring public?


Looking forward to its release .....

gotta crush a bug when creating the minimap that I just discovered... other wise it would have been released last night.

Also adding more features :D

-Buggi

Brilliant work, we await its release.