1. 3D engines, 1st-person sh'em'ups, etc.

Chuck wrote:
>I don't think Euphoria can handle a real-time 3d engine with texture
>mapping etc. The basic engine isn't that bad. I've seen one written
>in basic which ran well although it was a simple plot and fill with
>solid colors type of engine and didn't include any texture mapping at
>all -- this is where the big problem lies.
...

>I do believe Euphoria will work well for first-person view 3d games
>such as the *old* bardstale games or more recently the SSI Eye of
>the Beholder series.


I wouldn't be that pessimistic, although the workaround could be quite
complicated, unless we see a native code compiler for Euphoria some
time in the future. In the meantime, I believe the solution lies in
low-level coding in Assembler, direct memory writes, etc. Which
brings me to a subject that I'm sure others are going to wince at--
a "supplementary" language for Euphoria. I've been doing some stuff
in Forth for years, so the natural solution that comes to mind is
a micro-Forth written in pure Assembler and tacked on onto Euphoria
code. From what I've seen so far, E. is quite capable at handling
memory up to a certain extent, and this idea of a makeshift secondary
language, be it "real" Assembler or a beefed-up macro version of
Assembler might work for some.

I'm currently planning--not writing yet--an Assembler preprocessor.
It's proving tougher than I thought. I wrote a tiny Forth compiler-
compiler some time back, which doesn't produce threaded but real
assembler code, and am playing with it too. But.. I'm *lazy*,
so I just thought Robert could give us a hint--does RDS plan to
include an inline assembler in future versions? Just curious. If not,
I have no choice but to go ahead <sigh>.

Alexander

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2. Re: 3D engines, 1st-person sh'em'ups, etc.

When I'm pessimistic it's because I don't consider writing a lot of
inline assembler as writing programs in Euphoria. I personally
think that if you have to write the most cumbersome, complicated
parts of a program in assembler, it doesn't say much about your
language of choice. I don't believe Euphoria can handle texture
mapping, a 3d engine and run a game using native code without some
new assembled functions or routines therefore I don't really think
you can do this in *just* Euphoria at least not do it and maintain
any level of speed or gameplay. Of course I'd love to be proven wrong.

Chuck

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3. 3D engines, 1st-person sh'em'ups, etc.

Alexander Yakovlev writes:
> But.. I'm *lazy*,
> so I just thought Robert could give us a hint--does RDS plan to
> include an inline assembler in future versions? Just curious. If not,
> have no choice but to go ahead <sigh>.

There definitely won't be an inline assembler in v1.5.
Several people have requested something like this.
It would be very useful for some people.
I also think it would be a fairly big job. I don't expect
that RDS will do it in the forseeable future.
If you need any assistance with it, let me know.

                *** Beta Release ***

v1.5 beta-1 will be out in a couple of weeks.
It will be a full release.
New features, (in addition to tick_rate and
time-profiling of the alpha release) will include:

    * fast bitwise operations on atoms and sequences:
      and/or/xor/not with speed similar to add or subtract -
      i.e. *not* calling machine_func() or machine_proc()
    * arctan
    * support for hardware interrupt handling
    * much faster update of the trace screen in graphics modes
    * small enhancements to ed and install
    * optimizations to speed up many programs by a few percent
    * bug fixes
    * one or two more small items

I imagine that the beta release will be out for a month or so before
the "official" release occurs. Meanwhile RDS will continue to ship
the v1.4b Complete Edition, with an offer of a free download from
the Web of the official v1.5 when it's ready.

A preliminary Windows WIN32 version roughly compatible with
v1.5 for DOS will be released in a few months. It will be rather crude
to start with, but will evolve.

Regards,
  Rob Craig
  Rapid Deployment Software

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4. Re: 3D engines, 1st-person sh'em'ups, etc.

> A preliminary Windows WIN32 version roughly compatible with
> v1.5 for DOS will be released in a few months. It will be rather crude
> to start with, but will evolve.
>

Sounds good.  It would be helpful if in this first release if there were
also a
way to call to DLLs.

Steve

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