...Will HWA be in beta stages before December 30th? I'd like to try to get a good build of my game for the TDC Christmas competition with HWA to make scaling the window size a bit nicer.
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...Will HWA be in beta stages before December 30th? I'd like to try to get a good build of my game for the TDC Christmas competition with HWA to make scaling the window size a bit nicer.
Yes we will release a beta version of HWA before the end of the month. We planned to release it yesterday but there are some issues we want to fix first.
HOWEVER this will be a BETA version and if I were you I would NOT wait for it for ANYTHING important as some specific features might not work correctly.
This is great news! :D
This sounds great. Will the HWA version still work with extensions as it does (perhaps some like Mode7 and Perspective will have issues?), but other ones will probably work?
clickteam betas have always been pretty stable I dunno
I believe extensions will need to be updated to take advantage of HWA. That would be a good reason to not base close/important projects on the beta of it.
Like Java it may take a bit to be fully powered up.
I don't mean to take advantage, but I just mean to work at all.
Yeah will all existing extensions work and just run as fast as before?
I'd like for people with less high end computers but still fairly good ones to be able to run my game.
*airfist* yay! Great news.
I was wondering about this HWA, though. Will it literally expand MMF2's access to the computer's memory? That may be entirely the wrong terminology... it's been one of those christmasses. Too jovial to think straight...
Anyway, what I'm asking is:
1) Will the update allow me to run, say... 1000+ actives on screen at once without slowdown? (It's unlikely anything I make will need that kind of thing, tbh)
2) Will it be able to read the coding faster and more efficiently? I'd noticed that if I program something with a ton of code (and don't bother to group it) it skips lines sometimes.
Oh yeah, merry christmas everyone! :)
The slowdown would depend on the hardware; if the hardware can support it, then yes, that would be quite possible.
In other words, if hardware acceleration does it's job, and your videocard is capable of running Unreal Tournament 3 smoothly, you can expect very good framerates in MMF2 now.
I would imagine you mean if your video card is even capable of running something like Q3A you'll be okay. :P
At this stage, I think all hypothetical consideration of what you can or can't do with MMF2's HWA is speculation. Though that can be enjoyable.
We do know that, until the Beta, (and of course, the final, optimized release) is that HWA will improve graphic performance using the GPU. What results various cards yield remains to be seen.
This is purely assumption, but HWA has nothing to do with the actual work flow of the games themselves. It merely makes all visual graphics display using a more piece of hardware more suited for the job, then the processor.
To put things simply, the workflow in MMF2 is fine, but when you display hundreds of graphics that are all using alpha channels, ink effects, resizing, and rotating, clearly the MMF2 workflow is going to need to slow down until the processor can refresh the graphics. If you place this workflow on a more suited piece of hardware, such as the videocard, then this bottleneck wont exist anymore.
So yeah, MMF2 will get a noticeable increase in performance, but only if you're one of the few who managed to push it to it's limits graphically, not through hundreds of events.
Again, I'd be honored if either Yves or Francois corrected me on this, but I think I've summed it up pretty well.
So assuming I pasted a 6000x6000 picture into the background, and the framerate is not happy about it, would that make it go faster?
Yes, of course. HWA doesn't affect those.Quote:
Yeah will all existing extensions work and just run as fast as before?
Of couse I can't know for sure since I don't work for CT or anything, but if you consider that the only thing you change when enabling HWA is the way the graphics is displayed, why should the rest be affected?
Of course, graphical extensions will have to be re-programmed to work with HWA, I can't imagine that it would work automatically.
The graphical ones would probably work, but would not be faster as they would still be using software rendering.
It should, because like I said, it's removing the bottleneck that graphics produce on the event execution speed.
Graphical extensions will either need to be converted to use hardware acceleration, or in some cases they may become obselete due to the new pixel shader effects.
Maybe in the future, we can see expandable pixel shaders. That way rather then having things like the lens object, we can have people make pixel shaders like this! ;)