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Hello<br><br>Recently, I've made some changes to the way that the MADE engine does<br>screen transitions and palette changes. Essentially, whenever the screen<br>changes in Return to Zork, there were some nifty effects which moved the<br>player from one screen to another. In these effects, extensive changes in<br>the screen palette were made in each frame (and we're talking about 50+<br>palette changes over 2-3 seconds). Palette changes were very easy to<br>do then and really cheap as an operation. <br><br>Nowadays, they're the most expensive operation, as the whole screen<br>gets "dirty" and all pixels need to get updated and redrawn. In effect,<br>the original screen transitions in Return to Zork made the game unplayable<br>under low end platforms. In desktop platforms, they resulted in high CPU<br>spikes (90%+) for 2-3 seconds, which was acceptable to a degree.<br>I made several simplifications to the screen effects, removing several<br>palette changes. This made it possible to play the game normally on<br>low end platforms. However, the screen palette isn't quite right...<br>For reference (courtesy of eriktorbjorn):<br>http://www.update.uu.se/~d91tan/ScummVM/rtz.html<br><br>The relevant changes were made in /made/screenfx.cpp, and it's quite<br>straightforward to change to the original effect.<br><br>So... what can be done is to revert to the original behavior for desktop<br>platforms (where we can provide the same effect as the original game)<br>and present the simplified (but uglier) version to portable platforms with<br>low end CPUs... or even refactor the code a bit more and make the<br>palette change less abrupt.<br><br>The question is: is there any way, an ifdef probably, to figure out if the<br>platform that the game is running under can handle CPU intensive tasks?<br>We could then assign some kind of flag, which will show the full effect<br>in platforms that can handle it, and a cut down version in low end<br>platforms<br><br>Regards<br>Filippos<br> <br /><hr />Hotmail: Trusted email with Microsoft’s powerful SPAM protection. <a href='http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/196390706/direct/01/' target='_new'>Sign up now.</a></body>
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