Flamethrower needs hardware acceleration?

Just a quick question, how long until MMF2 gets hardware acceleration? I could use it now, because I've got a flamethrower weapon in my game. It is really graphic intensive because it is basicly a bunch of big balls that get bigger (in their animation) and they have alpha channels. Right now, it gets down to about 20fps, and I can't make the flames spawn any slower and still have it look good. Not to mention the flame 'balls' are rotated around (quality 0) to face forwards so the blue fire part in the animation comes from the gun.

Try using different animation directions to show more then 1 fireball in a frame, that way you can create less active objects and still have the same visual look. It wont be as fluent as you might want, but it'll boost the speed and look more decent then slowing the amount created without any methods to restore it's former beauty. ;-)

I've thought about doing that but it won't work if there are obstacles, I would look really wierd...

im might be the always-creating of the flame objects, thats slowing it down a bit, but judging by your amount of posts, i'm sure you've considered it

Yea, I add the flames every .10 seconds. That's as slow as I'm willing to go.

The key is to use a bit of cunning when designing your sprites. If you draw quite a bit of detail into your sprites, then you will need less of them to create a good looking effect.

For an example of this, just check out the MMF2 file archive back near MMF2's release. Loads of people posted fire effects that were really slow. I posted one that looked just as good and used a fraction of the CPU power, because I put some thought into my sprites.

Also, use the ADD ink effect instead of alpha channels. It is much faster and more suitable for flames, since flames do not ever darken the background (smoke does, but most flamethrowers burn cleanly).

My fire effects are not the crappy little orange balls that use the add ink effect. It actually looks like a flame, with the yellow white and orange patches swarming around inside it. I'll post it up in a sec.

EDIT: Argggg, it won't let me upload it. I'm gonna' try something else.

Here's the link: http://savefile.com/files/481912

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Originally Posted by LazyCoder

Just a quick question, how long until MMF2 gets hardware acceleration? I could use it now, because I've got a flamethrower weapon in my game. It is really graphic intensive because it is basicly a bunch of big balls that get bigger (in their animation) and they have alpha channels. Right now, it gets down to about 20fps, and I can't make the flames spawn any slower and still have it look good. Not to mention the flame 'balls' are rotated around (quality 0) to face forwards so the blue fire part in the animation comes from the gun.

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I just tried your example, and I could not get the frame rate to drop below 55. What are your system specs besdies the graphics card?

When checking for the FrameRate disable machine independent speed or otherwise it will always be 45-50.

It dropped to below 28 for me.

Ive got a
Sempron 2800+ 64-bit
Windows XP (up to date)
1GB of Generic RAM
GeForce 7600GS

I always have MIS disabled. It still ran at a smooth 55 FPS for me - constantly.

I think it's a matter of RAM more than anything else. I have 2 GB of RAM, but besides that, my computer's a few years old and doesn't have any other major upgrades. P4 2.8 GHz. No dual-core or 64-bit or what have you.