Snow!

[Gleeok]

Cool. Hands down, the best snow particle ZScript in existence. Don't question it's usefulness or compare it to layers people, just try it.

It looks much better with the radius 1 circle.

And, incidentally, a circle with a radius of 1 actually has a width of 2 (since, radius is the distance from the centre to the edge )

Due note that circles seem to be pretty damn slow in allegro. I'd bet drawing those five pixels using putpixel would be a whole lot faster, but then you wouldn't have the option of drawing different sized circles.

Finally, perhaps you could make a full particle system, but I doubt it. As it currently stands, there's no room to store any other information about a particle other than its position.

You might like to know that Grikarugun has had a dynamic particle system in it for a little while now. :) (I've just been busy guys, sorry)

Plus, a more complicated system would be rather slow for anything more than a handful of particles.

Actually I'm reasonably sure it's faster.

[pkmnfrk]

Due note that circles seem to be pretty damn slow in allegro. I'd bet drawing those five pixels using putpixel would be a whole lot faster, but then you wouldn't have the option of drawing different sized circles.

Are you sure about that? I would think that the overhead of calling Screen->PutPixel() 5 times would offset any gain from not drawing a miniature circle.

Remind me to profile this at some point.

You might like to know that Grikarugun has had a dynamic particle system in it for a little while now. :) (I've just been busy guys, sorry)

I'll have to check it out. Are the scripts available?

Actually I'm reasonably sure it's faster.

Perhaps, perhaps not. But, I would bet a million rupees that a general purpose particle system would be slower compared to one tailor made for, say, snow.

Edit, RE PutPixel vs Circle:

I just did some testing. Although I got slow down for flake quantities > 500 (or so), I discovered something else in favour of using Circle. Although I have absolutely no idea how the primitive drawing system works in ZC, I can make a guess based on this experiment.

Essentially, I built in a way to switch between 5 PutPixels and 1 Circle. At 500 flakes (thats 500 circles vs 2500 PutPixels), half the PutPixel flakes didn't show up! I would switch between the two, and watch half the snow flakes blink in and out of existence. I am of the opinion that I used up all the Primitive drawing command buffer (or something to that effect).

So. I'm sticking with Screen->Circle for now.

[Gleeok]

Edit, RE PutPixel vs Circle:

I just did some testing. Although I got slow down for flake quantities > 500 (or so), I discovered something else in favour of using Circle. Although I have absolutely no idea how the primitive drawing system works in ZC, I can make a guess based on this experiment.

Essentially, I built in a way to switch between 5 PutPixels and 1 Circle. At 500 flakes (thats 500 circles vs 2500 PutPixels), half the PutPixel flakes didn't show up! I would switch between the two, and watch half the snow flakes blink in and out of existence. I am of the opinion that I used up all the Primitive drawing command buffer (or something to that effect).

So. I'm sticking with Screen->Circle for now.

Hmm, that's an interesting one....


Wow, there's a bug or something in there. I couldn't even profile putpixel because of it. This is what I used:

const int LOOPS = 1;

global script slot2 
{
	void run() 
	{
		while(true) 
		{
			for(int i = 0; i < LOOPS ; i++)
				for(int x = 0; x < 256; x++)
					for(int y = 0; y < 176; y++)
						Screen->PutPixel(6, x , y, 2, 0, 0, 0, 64);
			Waitframe();
		}
	}
}

It completely crippled the engine. I wonder why?