Rendering Issue and Questions

[GregSquire]

I just came across Sprite Candy a few days ago, and I have to say that I'm quite impressed. I'm currently working on a Blitz3D project and this might be just the thing I need to create my HUD and Menus. However the game that I'm working on is meant for the casual market, and I'm concerned with a couple things that I'm hoping can be cleared up.


First, I tried out the Sprite Candy Demo on my machine at work (the day job), and found that it has some issues with rendering in some places (It worked fine on my machine at home with a NVidia GeForce FX card). I'm not sure if these are issues with Blitz3D or Sprite Candy. It may be trying to do something that the card doesn't support maybe. Anyway the demo worked fine up until the section just after the scrollable text (6th page). After that the text on most pages is messed up and most of the sprites as well. Some parts of the scene still work, like the rotating 3D room in the background. However, the sprites just appear as solid white boxes and the text appears as a patch of solid white area with some holes in it (it looks something like an old punch card)

Here the system specs on that:

Dell PWS530 Workstation - Xeon 2.6GHz CPU 768 Mb RAM
RADEON 7000 (QY) chipset with 32Mb (ati2dvag.dll ver 6.14.0001.6255 12/18/2002)
DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)


Secondly, I got the impression that when you buy Sprite Candy, you are getting the full source library (in .bb format). Is that right? Or is the .bb file making defines to an interface with another DLL or other external library?


Lastly, are there any code samples out there to create GUI widgets other than buttons, such as checkboxes, and slider bars?

[Moses]

yes you do get the full source when you buy along with many samples that are quite easy to follow. The examples don't include any code for making a full gui, however, it shouldn't be hard to add.

[GregSquire]

Thanks for the reply. That answers the last two. Anybody have an idea on the first? I've uploaded a screenshot of the problem here.

[Tommy]

I had the same problem (ATI Radeon 9200SE). An update of my ATI graphics drivers solved all problems.

Hope that helps,
Tommy

[GregSquire]

Okay, I did a windows update on that machine which updated the ATI driver and it is now working. The solid white boxes are now gone, however there seems to still be some issues with performance. The FPS counter never got any higher than 50 fps. It averaged around 40-45 most of the time and in some places dropped to around 30. (On the performance test screen [500 puzzle pieces] it dropped to 22 fps) Also on the screens with mouse movement and clickable buttons this slow performance was especially noticeable. The sprites that followed the mouse would lag behind even if the delay was set to zero (meaning no lag).

Also I've tried other Blitz3D games (like "Best Friends Forever") on this machine as it runs fine, so I'm sure the performance issue is not a Blitz3D issue, but more an issue of some Sprite Candy overhead. Since I'm targeting my game at the casual market and someone could very well have an older video card than even this one. What things could be done to improve performance, mostly in the area of clickable buttons and other custom GUI widgets?

Edit: I also just tried setting my windows desktop down to 16 bit color (instead of 32 bit) and this improved performance some. With that change the average is about 60 fps. There is still noticable lag in mouse movement (not quite as bad, but still very noticable). Also, the performance demo page was averaging around 29 fps. Is there any way to make the demo run full screen?

[GregSquire]

I should also mention that I tried Blaster Delta on this same machine, and I saw the same slowness happening. The mouse and button response was very slow, and even the keyboard controls in the game were rather unresponsive. This machine should meet the minimum specifications, but for some reason it's still slow. FPS was in the 50's usually.

[Jake]

Hi,

I know no way to force the demo to run in fullscreen.

Talking about performance: SpriteCandy performs quite well and is really fast. I tried some other 3D Spritelibs (including my own, simple one with very few overhead) and all of them were slower.

Don't want to hype SC further (allthough I could , but on my machine (slow CPU, fast GPU) it beats all other available spritelibs.

Sure, you can write faster, highly optimized code for a special task, but considering the huge possibilities of this lib, it's overall performance is great.

[GregSquire]

I just purchased Sprite Candy (despite my fears about performance on older cards, based on the above issue). I edited and recompiled the demo to run in 640x480 fullscreen, and I noticed a substancial increase in performance on the above machine. The modified demo ran around 63 FPS on most all pages (performance test page was at 32 FPS). This brought it up to an acceptable level (no sluggish mouse), so I'm happy to say that I thus far pleased with my purchase. Thanks again for creating this awesome library; it should be a big time saver for me.

[zac]

I think you'll be happy with your purchase, I know that I am. I haven't gotten around to use it as much as I had first planned, as Bmax have taken some of my time lately. But for the things I have used it for, it really shortened the production time and it added some really cool features which wasn't originally planned. And since you get the full source, you can changes things if you want something to work differently, which is really nice.

[aaa11]

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