next »

[JLJac]

An explosion can be one single sprite, but that depends on the game's grafical style. A smoke trail has to have at least ten sprites at every given instant, otherwise it will look more like the rocket or burning object is leaving small puffs of smoke behind it. Ten sprites will make a pretty short trail though, you can't have any spaces between them or you will get the puff effect again.

I always give smoke and explosion sprites a random initial rotation, then in a smoke trail or such you can't tell that they all have the same bitmap reference.

If you can have 200 sprites at a time I think you don't need to worry

[Lynx]

Woo!  Good news, I pushed the limit up to 700 or so. 

The problem turns out to be that the pyglet and rabbyt schedulers are both actually fairly slow when you want them to run a ton of little events.  I set up the expiration times for particles to be on 50-msec boundaries and implemented a batch-mode expiration scheme for them.

Still not great, but progress.

[Paul Eres]

GM and Flash.

so you're limited by the tools you use, not by todays tech i believe

i've just finished a flash game and i know what you mean, i had several layers in blending to do dinamic lighting and i needed to optimize a lot of code and even to cut some features to have a decent framerate on 640x480.
The same thing on my engine i believe would run over 3000 fps at that ridiculous resolution, flash and GM sucks

Yes, but it's not just those tools, I've used other things. Some are less limited than others, but all have limits that limit how much you can do with 2D. My point was that until we're at the point where we can use trillions of sprites on screen at 200 fps, we're limited.

[TheSpaceMan]

GM and Flash.

so you're limited by the tools you use, not by todays tech i believe

i've just finished a flash game and i know what you mean, i had several layers in blending to do dinamic lighting and i needed to optimize a lot of code and even to cut some features to have a decent framerate on 640x480.
The same thing on my engine i believe would run over 3000 fps at that ridiculous resolution, flash and GM sucks

Yes, but it's not just those tools, I've used other things. Some are less limited than others, but all have limits that limit how much you can do with 2D. My point was that until we're at the point where we can use trillions of sprites on screen at 200 fps, we're limited.

Yeah thats the way it's allways going to be,  that being said it should with some amazing brainpowers be able to code a engine that in theroy only gets limited by the resolution I think... For at the end of the day there is only so many pixels you can draw on a screen at a final stage...

[Lynx]

Just thought I would throw in this useful tip...

It turns out Pyglet does an awful lot of OpenGL error checking.  This gets turned off if you compile in 'optimized' mode, but you can also configure it as follows:

Code:

import pyglet
# Disable error checking for increased performance
pyglet.options['debug_gl'] = False
from pyglet.gl import *

That line needs to be in before you import symbols from pyglet.gl.

Performance improved, um, dramatically.  And while trying to figure this out, I also brought in Lepton, a particle engine library for Python, and am pleased with how much better the explosions and smoke look.  So pushing at those limits has its uses.