Hi, I'm currnetly writing a game in assembly, hopefully I'll have a beta ready in two weeks times to show here but for now while I still have the luxury of being able to rewrite whole sections of the code relativly easily I was wondering should I optmise for mmx.
Its a 3d space game, but its nothing too fancy so it should run on old pre mmx computers. The optimisations I'd be thinking of would be nothing majour as most calculations are floating point not integer, however I can think of a few places wher movq would speed up things.
The question is would I be canceling out too many people or is mmx pretty much standard minium these days.
Hi,
well, I assume, most of the users in here interested in games really have more then just MMX these days.
However I have to work on a rather old K5 PR-150 (A pentium at 166 MHZ, overclocked). Maybe you should do different versions or the ability to specifiy whether MMX is available on the machine or not in a menu and based on that you use one or the other way.
Stefan
I personally think if you dont have a processor that supports mmx by now that playing games isnt something that you plan on doing with that computer. The only reson why the individual may still have his dinisaur is to probably do word processing, bit of web surfing and emailing.
feel free to optimize
smurf
my addon to smurf is that people like me still use such machine to
do programming. :)
this is the FUTURE you're talking about. go for MMX. hmm... i wonder
who still use pentium one to play game...
anyway, check the net for more detail. :)
my add on is that MMX (from our tests) will not help much a P2+ computer (it will help a P1/166 computer...doh)
our tests show a +1%..+2% improvement .. i guess memory bandwidth is the main limitation :( however the extra registers can help as extra storage space/variables ... but ONLY if you do NOT use the FPU...
but i see you allready use FPU...so...
Bogdan,
Does the FPU share with the MMX registers?
_Shawn
A couple of things, if you are going to use MMX registers and games
are a good area to do this, I would be inclined to put some testing
code in the app to make sure it was available first. You have 2
choices, run both code types and choose which one based on the
availability of the MMX registers or alternatively display a warning
that the program cannot run without an MMX capable machine.
Shawn raised a good point here, FP and MMX share the same registers
on an Intel box so you will have to be careful to handle the transition
from one to another otherwise you get very bad performance penalties.
Regards,
hutch@pbq.com.au
I personally think if you dont have a processor that supports mmx by now that playing games isnt something that you plan on doing with that computer. The only reson why the individual may still have his dinisaur is to probably do word processing, bit of web surfing and emailing
this is the FUTURE you're talking about. go for MMX. hmm... i wonder
who still use pentium one to play game...
Man, that is very hard to people who can't effort computers with more the 1.5 GH and at least 256 MB RAM. And what are you talking about? They can't play games?
This is just your opinion because you seem to think
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I'm confused. it's just an opinion. different people have different
view because they live in different environment. what Zadkiel wants
was an opinion. Let me alone explain my view in full detail. Starti-
ng now:
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what is game? why do kids play game? why do we play game? what type
of game do we/kids play? does kid really care about graphics? NO.
Kids have different view on what game is, so do we. People who play
game when they're bored have completely different view than those -
who plays everyday. I like to play game, very much. But i'm getting
old every second and time to me, is being compressed, second by sec-
ond. So, i have to use it wisely...
A gamer plays game not because of the graphics, music, story. but
FUN! that's certainly who i am. But if a graphics designer plays g-
ame, what s/he looks for is good graphics! because graphics is of -
his/her interest.
Put aside and ask a musician to play game,guess what s/he looks for?
you bet! it's music.
and ask a mathematician to play game, what will the interest be?
stimulation, how the objects and logic were setup.
ask a philosopher to play game, what will the interest be? as you -
no doubt have guessed: Artificial Intelligent!
you see, it's all based on your interest. if Zadkiel decided to cre-
ate a game, he must be certain and well aware of who he's targettin-
g.
so, is FUN and important factor? not really. I know you might disag-
reed with me, but FUN is only important in the long terms. Fun howe-
ver does caught player attention immediately (on their first try).
and in the long terms, it perhaps get them to return playing your -
game. And return is a QUESTION of INTEREST.
kids nowaday sit and play game on web. Flash, Java/javascript for e-
xample. Why? because it's fun. It was created by kids with the same
mind and their lifespan thinking. Sometime, no matter how hard we t-
ry to think like a kids, we tend to fail. I have a little brother w-
ho like to create game in flash. He always say "wow! this is cool. I
think alot of kids will visit my page."
but to me, it's nonsense. the graphics he made is crap. well, that's
because i'm not him. i don't see game the way he sees it. Nowaday I
look into game as of graphics (because that's my life since i was 10
years old. beside graphics, it's Artificial Intelligent of units an-
d FUN. and the game best suit me is: Slave Zero. what about music? -
i can play game with no music. but i cannot handle playing game with
no sound. there's a different)
"Since this is the future, go with MMX" <-- i said that because he's
developing his game in 32bit environment, what i think is that he -
should go with the best. And at that time of posting, "MMX" is what
was on my mind.
game in 16bit environment doesn't need such power. believe it or not,
there's alot of game in 16bit that are UNBELIEVABLE, it just amaze me
!!
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overall, it's all up to your interest and who you're targetting when
you make a game. (there are people who are very picky about GUI:
"stup*d menu, they should design and make it better."
"look at that. what is it? dam, pathetic people,they're using the the
latest directx and still not try to optimize for the best." ect...)
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i will not reply to this thread. this is the last one. you can say -
whatever you want. I wish you all LUCK
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one thing i forgot to add: Outlaw is a good game, i like it
more than quake and doom. I played on Pentium I-120mhz back
when i was 14.Thanks for all the replies.
If ye were wondering this is the game I mentioned a few months ago, when the section of the forum was started. Its the space combat game, but you don't have control over the ship directly, you program their AI in whatever language you like once it can access the dll I'm writing to interface with the engine. At the moment its called Raid, but thats open to suggestions.
I think I'll go for mmx in a couple of places as I do believe it will speed things up.
Disease, I agree with your point, what people expect from a game depends on them, I'm going to try and make this game look as good as I can but to me the physics behind it are more important also I want a powerful API (if thats a fair description) to both allow beginners to easilly get some basic combat routines up and running, but also I want some to let advanced programmer have access to more basic commands giving them more freedom (Like assembly).
One more thing, when I last posted about thin Bogdan suggested writing a simple interpeted language for the game, again to help beginners. I don't have the slightest idea how to do this but if someone would like to come on board in this project and help with this aspect then I'd Like that. As for the engine I don't mind having to do that myself, but I'm never opposed to help.
And finally, regaring Outlaws, well I never played that game, but in my opinion the best 3D shoter ever is still Duke Nukem 3D, I hope Forever is half as good.