pre-3.2.0-rc1

Found a bug in R'n'D? Report it here!

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bojster
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Post by bojster »

Hm... since RnD needed all sound files to start, even if the sound is turned off in the settings, doesn't that mean that it takes more memory? Even if not, it takes longer to load...

[edit]
Hm, are stones/emeralds supposed to roll from keys? Because they do, and didn't use to.
I've just tested the game a bit, the tape loading is super fast now :-) Also I didn't notice any problems with appending to the tape as you mentioned before.
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Martijn
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Post by Martijn »

Is there a way to speed up the game?

more bugs

- when a rock falls on a diamond you see the rock fall behind the diamond. looks strange.
- you hear no exit opening sound
- when you enter the exit, the level ends when rockford is still outside.
- you still see a black square appear when you walk into the acid
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Post by Holger »

> Hm... since RnD needed all sound files to start, even if the sound is turned off in the settings,
> doesn't that mean that it takes more memory? Even if not, it takes longer to load...

Yes, that's right. That's because one could decide to re-enable sounds -- in that case, the sounds currently have to be loaded. So an option "--no-sounds" should be better, which would then disables sound and music code (and loading) completely.

> Hm, are stones/emeralds supposed to roll from keys? Because they do, and didn't use to.

You mean in the R'n'D engine?

At least in the original EM, they do roll off stones -- level 41 from original EM is a good level to test this.

There are quite a lot of such little differences between the R'n'D and the EM engine...

> I've just tested the game a bit, the tape loading is super fast now :-)

Yup. :-)

> Also I didn't notice any problems with appending to the tape as you mentioned before.

That's bad, because it will make finding that bug (which seems to exist, as I had a tape which was recorded using appending that did not play correctly after recording) a lot harder... :-/
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Post by Holger »

> Is there a way to speed up the game?

Currently not (besides using the X11 version instead of the SDL version, which only works on Unix platforms, of course), but I see no reason (and are really interested in) why the game runs slowly on your (very fast) system. :-o

I now have checked why the latest pre-release worked a bit clumsy on my W2k box, and found out that I still had my radio recording daemon running, which ate up around 20% CPU time (it's only an 800 MHz system). After stopping that daemon, the game ran fine and smooth. It should run even smoother on your system. Could you please check the CPU usage before/when running the game? You can view it in the Windows task manager.

Any others out there with access to a Windows box? Did anybody have performance problems when playing 3.2.0rc1, for example when it comes to scrolling? I have no idea what happens on Martijn's system. :-(

> more bugs
> - when a rock falls on a diamond you see the rock fall behind the diamond. looks strange.
> - you hear no exit opening sound
> - when you enter the exit, the level ends when rockford is still outside.
> - you still see a black square appear when you walk into the acid

I'll check these bugs and see what I can do. :-)
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Post by Martijn »

Version 3.1.0 and earlier versions never ran as smooth as I was used to with other Boulderdash clones, like DX-Boulderdash and Safrosoft RoX (RnD is the best I think). The screen never scrolled 100% fluently. I hope you know what I mean. The screen bumped a little.
But I always thought: RnD requires a faster PC (I had a Pentium II 350 MHz with 6 or 8 MB RAM before).

Now I have a good PC and I still encounter the same problem. BUT there is a difference. When you play levelsets with the RnD engine (the contributions for example), the scrolling of the screen is only delayed a little bit. It's only a bit irritating. But when you play the new EM levels with the EM engine, the game runs really slowly and at some places you see a vertical line, I mean: you see that two parts of the level are splitted. It's hard to explain.

So I would like that RnD runs as smoothly as DX-Boulderdash for example. But I don't know if it's technically possible... But now I see it as a bug because the windows version has to be the same as the linux version. I keep playing it in windows, because all my favourite boulderdash games and other computer games are designed for windows.
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Post by Flumminator »

> > Also I didn't notice any problems with appending to the tape as you mentioned before.

> That's bad, because it will make finding that bug (which seems to exist, as I had a tape
> which was recorded using appending that did not play correctly after recording) a lot harder... :-/

I can acknowledge this bug, having had a bad tape myself. But I overwrote it,as the bug was already known
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Post by Holger »

> Version 3.1.0 and earlier versions never ran as smooth as I was used to with other
> Boulderdash clones, like DX-Boulderdash and Safrosoft RoX (RnD is the best I think). The
> screen never scrolled 100% fluently. I hope you know what I mean. The screen bumped a
> little.

Yes, I think I know what you mean.

This is because R'n'D uses a fixed frame rate of 50 frames per second, while the display usually gets refreshed more often, like 70 Hz, 80 Hz or even 100 Hz on modern CRT monitors, or 60 Hz on most TFT displays (although I'm not really sure now if that 60 Hz on TFTs is the real display refresh rate).

This results in asynchronous screen refresh (the physical display gets refreshed at a time when the game is just halfway through refreshing the screen buffer), which causes the "tearing" effect when scrolling in R'n'D.

DX-Boulderdash and RoX both directly use DirectX and (most probably) use a feature that not only allows to use a display refresh rate that exactly matches the screen buffer redraw rate, but also do this refreshing precisely between two physical display frames, so you never see any "tearing" when scrolling. (This is also how the original Amiga games did this, which is also the cause why some games had a different speed in Europe and the USA, because the default Amiga screen refresh rate is 50 Hz in Europe and 60 Hz in the US.)

This feature is nearly impossible when running in windowed mode, but would be possible when using fullscreen mode (although I don't know at the moment if SDL supports setting the display refresh rate in fullscreen mode, which would be needed to use this feature).

> But I always thought: RnD requires a faster PC (I had a Pentium II 350 MHz with 6 or 8
> MB RAM before).

Although a faster system principally doesn't hurt, it's no cure for the "tearing" problem in R'n'D.

> Now I have a good PC and I still encounter the same problem. BUT there is a difference.
> When you play levelsets with the RnD engine (the contributions for example), the scrolling
> of the screen is only delayed a little bit. It's only a bit irritating. But when you play the new
> EM levels with the EM engine, the game runs really slowly and at some places you see a
> vertical line, I mean: you see that two parts of the level are splitted. It's hard to explain.

But I know exactly what you mean. ;-) This vertical (and also horizontal) "tearing" line is caused by something different: The EM engine implementation currently uses a system that was designed to speed up graphics refreshes when scrolling, by blitting the buffer in four portions, with changing X and Y positions when scrolling until they wrap around. This is indeed a nasty effect if there is no vertical display synchronization, and I will almost for sure change this to the "normal" method (with "normal" tearing ;-) ), although this will cause an additional full-buffer blit for each frame (blit the four parts to a backbuffer and then copy the whole backbuffer to the screen) unless I use further optimization like in the R'n'D display engine.

But one thing I would still like to know: Is the EM engine really _slower_ than the R'n'D engine on your system? I don't mean "clumsy" scrolling or "tearing" effects, but if moving from one side to the screen to the other side is really slower than in the R'n'D engine. I have tested this now on different systems (Windows 2000 on 800 MHz Pention CPU, Windows XP on 1,6 GHz Mobile Pentium CPU on a laptop system) and it's as fast as the R'n'D engine in all tests so far.

> So I would like that RnD runs as smoothly as DX-Boulderdash for example. But I don't
> know if it's technically possible...

I would also like to know this, because it may indeed be possible in fullscreen mode. I have to check if SDL supports this, as I surely won't program the DirectX API directly.

> But now I see it as a bug because the windows version
> has to be the same as the linux version.

That's absolutely right. (At least when comparing the SDL versions on both platforms.)

> I keep playing it in windows, because all my
> favourite boulderdash games and other computer games are designed for windows.

Of course -- that's why there's a Windows version of R'n'D available. I don't want to evangelize anybody to use a better operating system. ;-)
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Post by Holger »

Regarding the tape append bug in the EM engine, Flumminator wrote:

> I can acknowledge this bug, having had a bad tape myself. But I overwrote it,as the bug was
> already known

I've just found and fixed that bug. Will be in the next pre-release version...
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Post by Martijn »

Well, I was wrong. Because of the 'clumsy' scrolling and those vertical lines, it seemed that the EM engine runs slower than the RND engine but looking back it's the same speed as the RnD engine.

But it would be really better if you removed those lines...

Building in that smooth scrolling in fullscreen would be really cool, because the 'clumsy' scrolling is irritating. I play never games in windowed mode, I hate that. But that's personal.

BTW the general game speed is a bit too slow I think. But that's discussed before and there will come a speed adjustment option, won't it?

I see that Down Under Mine 16 level 1 is not possible. Your path is blocked by acid.

And:

The normal keys are displayed in the menu now. But the emc style keys aren't!
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Post by Flumminator »

* Level number is not displayed while playing (but was displayed in 3.2.0-0)
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Post by Holger »

> * Level number is not displayed while playing (but was displayed in 3.2.0-0)

Oops. It seems that I had optimized it away. Fixed!
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Post by Holger »

> Well, I was wrong. Because of the 'clumsy' scrolling and those vertical lines, it seemed that the
> EM engine runs slower than the RND engine but looking back it's the same speed as the RnD
> engine.

Thanks for this report! I really had no idea anymore what might have gone wrong...

> But it would be really better if you removed those lines...

That should be possible...

> Building in that smooth scrolling in fullscreen would be really cool, because the 'clumsy'
> scrolling is irritating. I play never games in windowed mode, I hate that. But that's personal.

Today I read some mails on the SDL mailing list, and came to the conclusion that a really flicker-free and tearing-free R'n'D won't be possible at all, because even if it would be possible to get a real 50 Hz display refresh frequency on modern hardware (which might be possible), today's monitors have faster phosphors and would display 50 Hz with a lot more flickering. (But I have completely no idea at the moment which possibilities might be there with modern TFT displays.)

> BTW the general game speed is a bit too slow I think. But that's discussed before and there
> will come a speed adjustment option, won't it?

Yes, it's definitely on my TODO list (and I think it's one of the more important things); but it's a bit funny because a few days ago I received mail from somebody who asked for controls to make it *slower*, because he wrote that he thought the game would be too fast. :-)

> I see that Down Under Mine 16 level 1 is not possible. Your path is blocked by acid.

Hmm, as far as I can see, you can collect all emeralds, run around the acid pool on the right side of it and successfully finish the game.

> The normal keys are displayed in the menu now. But the emc style keys aren't!

That's right. That's because currently there's only enough room for four keys... ;-)
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Post by Flumminator »

> > I see that Down Under Mine 16 level 1 is not possible. Your path is blocked by acid.
> Hmm, as far as I can see, you can collect all emeralds, run around the acid pool on the right side of it and successfully finish the game.

I think he was talking of level 0. Either the emc-engine has some nasty trick to solve this or it is a level conversion problem I suppose.
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Post by Martijn »

Yes, indeed it was level 0.

So a flicker-free version of RnD for Windows will never come? If not then the speed adjustment will solve the problem partially, because currently you notice it the more and more because Rockford and his enemies are walking too slowly. Some flicker will remain then but that's not disturbing I think. But maybe a new SDL version will make a tearing-free version possible?

By the way, what is SDL exactly? Is it a programming language (like Visual Basic, java etc.) or what?
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Post by bojster »

It's a set of libraries handling many things, like graphics and sound, also ported to many systems, do a game using SDL is to great extent platform-independent. To learn more, check http://www.libsdl.org/index.php (you would have already done it if you bothered typing "SDL" in google).
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