Random question (mostly/only) to/for the devs

[Nicholas Steel]

Aha. I see what you mean now. Borders within borders... I'll add sbig back in for that I guess.

Can you check something? In the same settings as that pic, look in the 2.5 allegro.log and see if triple buffering is enabled.

Tell me the precise message it should say when Triple buffering is enabled. I can have it say "Triplebuffer available" when setting Double Buffer and Triple Buffer to 0 in ag.cfg, and I can have it say "Triplebuffer not available" when I set those values to 1. Either way it doesn't seem to do anything or at least has no impact on input lag, the same goes for vsync, setting that to 0 or 1 seems to have no impact on anything. Display is tear free so long as Cap FPS is set to 1, lots of screen tearing when set to 0 regardless of every other setting (as well as running at 2,000fps).

All this is tested in fullscreen mode.

[Gleeok]

If it doesn't say anything then it's triple buffered. (unless you override in the config file.)

How is the off-screen background blue only in 2.5... Maybe I can add another option "bg_color" for this and have it default to 0 (black).


[edit] @franpa : Does it look the same in 2.5 if you set the resx, resy to 640x480 and let your graphics card do all the work?

[Nicholas Steel]

Yes @Gleeok , 640x480 in 2.50 RC5 is identical in appearance/scaling to 1.92b183's 640x480 with sbig=1.

[Gleeok]

So why don't you just use that then?

It is working as expected then; at 1920x1080 you get a x4 scale to 1280x960, which leaves 60 pixels on the top and bottom of the main screen. It's always preferable to let your graphics card do what it's good at rather than have allegro do it in software (and less good I might add) when it comes to mag filtering/fitting to a display/whatever.

It shouldn't be blue like that though. I'm still looking to see what's happening there...

[Nicholas Steel]

It shouldn't be blue like that though. I'm still looking to see what's happening there...

@Gleeok , the surrounding space is only blue while you have paused the game with the Escape key. You'd think letting the video card/monitor scale it would be fine, however it adds a blur to the picture kinda like bilinear filtering but not quite as bad.

[Gleeok]

@Gleeok , the surrounding space is only blue while you have paused the game with the Escape key.

Gah. That explains why I couldn't find it. (I should of noticed the little drop-down menu in that pic.)

Like majora said though, if allegro stretches the display it uses a nearest neighbor algorithm and looks like crap. (run an older version in 800x600 to see it). I don't know what you want me to fix.

[Nicholas Steel]

Nearest Neighbor is good though, specifically because of the fact that the game uses low resolution tiles for graphics so any kind of blur greatly reduces the amount of details in the graphics. Having it scaled with some blurry filter like what monitors and even the GPU does, can make it notably harder to identify hard to see secrets like cracks indicating a wall can be bombed.