Potential Games

This article is mostly of interest to RPG Alpha Playtesters. Characters, creatures, some surface features (trees), and sprites are being painted as on-the-fly effects, atop the underlying terrain. The underlying terrain was still being background rendered to an off-screen image, rather than on-the-fly.

As a performance test, I’ve added an (internal) switch to paint the underlying terrain with the new effects system, short circuiting the (soon-to-be legacy?) background rendering altogether. The latest test release (labeled 2008-05-02-1442) renders the terrain in this fashion.

The concern is that the effects-based on-the-fly painting system will not be fast enough to handle painting all 256+ on-screen terrain tiles, plus surface features, characters, creatures, as well as other special effects sprites. Nonetheless, it seems to be working for me, on my non-graphics-accelerated Linux development machine.

There are some known issues and glitches. Items, towns, corpses, and other surface elements will not be drawn during this test (they’re still bound to the legacy rendering system).