[Gambas-user] Gambas was live on Twitch

[Kevin Fishburne]

On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 10:25 AM, Kevin Fishburne < 
kevinfishburne at ...1887...> wrote:
>> This is the Twitch export (to YouTube) of the live stream I broadcast
>> earlier this evening:
>>
>> https://youtu.be/lPUDxkkb4u4?t=5m30s
>>
>> 46 minutes of me working on OpenAL in Sylph using the stable Gambas PPA
>> on Linux Mint 17.2 Cinnamon. I probably needed more beer.

On 09/08/2015 04:47 PM, Jussi Lahtinen wrote:
> I'm sure your game loading times could be heavily optimized.
> What method you use? Are you loading everything once, or rest by demand?
>

Hey Jussi. It loads most game assets on startup, although between stages 
it loads stage-specific color, sprite and wall (OBJ model files) data. 
Generally all the other data is shared between stages. I do this partly 
for convenience but mostly because I want to minimize load times between 
stages and eliminate any "load lag" or frame-dropping during actual 
gameplay. The game's fast, so the smoother it remains during play the 
better the experience for the player. The philosophy here is "feel the 
pain once, then forget it ever happened".

The actual mechanics for loading the assets are Tobias Boege's 
ObjModel.class for loading Wavefront OBJ files (3D models), Image.Load() 
for OpenGL textures and Alure.BufferDataFromFile() for OpenAL audio 
samples. When a stage is loaded is also creates arrays of display lists 
so they can be shown dynamically according to an arbitrary view distance 
in order to increase performance.

I think the main reasons it took so long in the video is that I recently 
downgraded my workstation to older hardware (don't ask...) and it is 
loading all assets over an NFS share. Despite the gigabit LAN it's still 
slower than a mechanical drive or SSD. In any case, the initial load 
time is only going to get slower as more assets are added to the game, 
though I don't imagine it'll become unbearable by the end (less than 60 
seconds, hopefully, on a decent system).

-- 
Kevin Fishburne
Eight Virtues
www: http://sales.eightvirtues.com
e-mail: sales at ...1887...
phone: (770) 853-6271