New workspaces and frame rates!

Yes, it has been a while, hasn't it! Long days in the office on my recent overseas work trip followed by late night Skype sessions with the family meant that Retro Ports didn't even get a look-in. And when I did have some spare time in my room, I was either watching the TdF live or catching up on previous days' highlights. Quite removed from my previous jaunt over there...

...and back home since hasn't been much different, to be honest. A full work schedule and trying to balance family time, work around the house and physical activity has meant I have little energy or motivation for sitting in front of a computer screen late at night. And yet here I am at a little past midnight!

I've recently cleared my home computer desk - no longer used on a daily basis - and made it my Coco Space. It now houses my home PC (aka the development machine and theoretically Drivewire server), a PAL Coco 3 with CoCoSDC cartridge installed in a space-age acrylic case, and a TerASIC DE1 running Gary Becker's Coco3FPGA with newly-acquired Zippster Analogue Board. However with only a VGA monitor set up currently, and little extra space, I should probably obtain some form of RGB->VGA adapter for the Coco3.

The new Retro Ports workspace!

So, tonight with the wife on a girls' night out I finally got motivated to crack open Knight Lore again! To recap, I just need to improve the frame rate and the random number generator before it's ready for final release. And tonight in preparation, I added an ISR to count and print the frames-per-second in real time.

At its best, on all-but-empty screens, I'm getting about 28-29 fps. The worst I saw, although I've only visited a few screens, was down to about 5 fps when entering the screen and then averaging around 8-9 fps on those screens.

You need to keep in mind that in Knight Lore the fps has a direct effect on the speed of both the player and the objects being animated in the room. So it's not about obtaining a high frame rate (fps) to get smooth animation; the game would be unplayable in that case. Indeed, the proper game speed would - and this is purely an estimate at this point - sit around 15-20 fps. If I could achieve 20 fps on the busiest screens I would be very happy indeed, and would likely need to tweak (and enable) the game loop delay routine to throttle the game play.

As I've touched on in previous posts, there are a number of approaches to the optimisation process; some preserving the original rendering algorithm (which I'd prefer to do) and some that modify it but at the same time produce significant performance gain. I've had correspondence - that I need to locate again - from a few authors who have ported Knight Lore to less capable platforms and managed to get it running faster than the original by enhancing the rendering algorithm. So I have little doubt that I'll be able to get it running fast enough - somehow - on the Coco3!

Hopefully now that I've dipped my toe back in the water, I'll maintain the momentum to work on it regularly.