Lummox really knows how to work the backend.

Yeah it's awesome We're investigating some tricks where we can keep this. Something along the lines of doubling the delay on all frames so we could slow it down just a little bit while keeping this sort of speed.

About the update it self I'm not exactly sure what he did to improve fps but I do suspect it has something to do with this:
http://www.byond.com/docs/notes/510.html


on another note here's another blessing that came with 510:
Shadows no longer overlap. Though this was mainly an aesthetic problem it does give us a little bit more confidence showing the game outside of this community. This is a pretty early iteration as we work out the layering issue seen here!

I'm not sure why there's such a marked improvement in performance (but I'll take it!), but I think it's probably more of a frontend thing than a backend one. The frontend rendering loop is handled a lot differently now, although ultimately a lot of the same code gets called as before, so I don't see how that'd make such a big difference. The only backend issue would be that if KEEP_TOGETHER is being used a lot, maybe the grouping algorithm is pulling a lot of icons out of the list before any sorting is done, but that's typically not a huge performance hit anyway.

I have to admit, though, I'm stumped why there appears to be such a boost. I was only adding new features, so this must be some kind of serious serendipity.

Warning: Bad graphics card on low settings

This is a "ninja-fighting" game, similar to Naruto GOA, but without any references to the copywritten anime. I've been working on this occasionally for the past couple of years. It uses Masterdan's graphics but it's programmed solely by me. I need to start adding a lot more skills and finish NPC menus and it should be semi-playable sometime this year hopefully.


PS: (Something happened with that middle fireball , I know :P

Lummox JR wrote:

Ahem.

With 510 and just one line of code added to one of my old dusty projects...



Before:
- As a hero entered a room, I would attempt to fade them out and then back in. Notice you can see all the layers that make up the hero. Quite ugly.


After:
- With 510, so nice...


In Action:
- Minor flickering around eyes is due to recording and not seen in game.


Thanks Lummox. 510 is going to be a game changer I think.

before 510:


after 510:



http://puu.sh/mNQJG/bc0c3e27cf.zip
If anyone wants to play with it.

It begins, the great era of over used lighting effects

http://files.byondhome.com/TheMagicMan/light%20beams.png

I can't wait for the light beam saturated screenshots.

Tobba wrote:

You can do something like this:

MOM

MOM

MOM GET THE TISSUES


AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH THIS IS WHAT I'VE WANTED FOR SO LONG

D4RK3 54B3R wrote:

before 510:


after 510:



http://puu.sh/mNQJG/bc0c3e27cf.zip
If anyone wants to play with it.

The hype should be centered around this guy.

Looks like something you'd see in unity or some other fancy shancy engine.

Bravo1 wrote:

I need to see some examples as to how some of this is put together.

I've been trying to play with it and I'm having zero luck getting anything of use.

This was actually possible to do before 510, IF you have only one lightsource that can cast shadows, with some clever layering trickery. http://www.byond.com/forum/?post=1578429

With 510, the idea is: You have your lighting plane, that's set to BLEND_MULTIPLY and with a color matrix that sets it to be a flat dark gray or however dark you want the ambient to be. In the lighting plane, you have your orbs of light. These orbs are on BLEND_ADD and use KEEP_TOGETHER, and the shadows they cast are added to them as overlays.

That way, first the shadows black out the areas that the lightsource doesn't reach. Then with the light source on BLEND_ADD, the shadows won't block other light sources.

But since KEEP_TOGETHER doesn't work quite right, as Tobba said, you can't do the overlay part of this to properly mask the shadows to the light that is casting them.