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[icepir8]

I was thinking (and it Hurt) that the big slow down in my plugin is the first time it loads a texture. Well my idea is to save the texture cache to the hard drive and when you run the rom the next time it would preload the textures from the last time so the video would run faster from the start except for the time it takes to load the textures on rom start. I would like some feedback on "Should I take the time to add this feature to my plugin?"

:cool:

[aprentice]

If you make it an "option" then sure why not :happy:

[Doomulation]

If you dump the textures when they're done loading, it shouldn't take too long. It could speed up some i think, so why not?

[AIPER666]

I don't think it's a good idea... if I understand what you mean, I should play again the same level to go faster... For example I have to finish zelda (to save all the textures on the hard disk) and then play it again to increase speed... NaaaaaaH! :)

[Doomulation]

Originally posted by AIPER666
I don't think it's a good idea... if I understand what you mean, I should play again the same level to go faster... For example I have to finish zelda (to save all the textures on the hard disk) and then play it again to increase speed... NaaaaaaH! :)
You don't get the point :P
It's dumping them when unloading the game. And next time u play it, it will go faster.
(You don't intendo to play a game only once, do you?)

[Martin]

I think it's a pretty good idea, go for it :)

[Malcolm]

It would speed things up, plus people would be able to open the textures anbd see what they look like and we wouldn't have anymore "How do I exreact images from ROMs" threads anymore :)

[LD.]

Pfft, who'd make a thread like that?

*hangs head in shame*

I think it's a good idea, go for it :)

[Hacktarux]

i can see only one problem with it:
you have to be sure that keeping the textures in storable format will not slow down the emu too much.

A little off topic, but i have tried 1080 snowboarding on the my linux port of your plugin and i have the following problem : the first two screens show slowly and the plugin is allocating many memory (>200Mb in the copyright screen), and then it crashes when the system can't allocate more memory... Do u have any idea of what causes this problem ?

[icepir8]

Yeah, The crc generation function is fubar. I am righting a new 1.
faster and less prone to multiple loads of the same texture.

[VoodooX]

Execellent idea and i say
'YEAH!'
It might help solve some of the speed issues,which is the only real weakness of ur plugin, man!

btw i dont understand ur entry to the fav game catagory.
Please explain.
also ur sig has half of it missing!

[AIPER666]

It's dumping them when unloading the game. And next time u play it, it will go faster.


Gasp! :!!!: I am and idiot!:sleepy:

[Anton]

Originally posted by Malcolm
It would speed things up, plus people would be able to open the textures anbd see what they look like and we wouldn't have anymore "How do I exreact images from ROMs" threads anymore :)

Yes, yes, yes!

If it'll be possible to have all textures dumped from rom at my HD, I finally will be able to finish my Zelda's "kokiri forest" map for Quake3 :bunny:

[Eddy]

the only weak point i see in ice's gfx plugin is the lack of configuration

[icepir8]

Originally posted by Eddy
the only weak point i see in ice's gfx plugin is the lack of configuration
I will work on that after the ucode autodetect. :)

[1964er]

Originally posted by icepir8
I will work on that after the ucode autodetect. :)

the true weakpoint of ice's plugin. The current ones can get downright frustrating to use.

[Falcon4ever]

But if you create such option wouldn't it create really bigfiles on your hd 60+ mb?

(and if you created the option i assume some people can "prerender" scenes and zip then so people with less speedy pc can play 2)

[crhylove]

first off, i don't see a weakness in icepir8's plug.

it is the best out in some games. and it is the closest to emu my personal fave, dr mario. did u see those screens ice?

what cracks me up is that like so many of my brainy friends, ice can do all this mad complex coding, and then he'll type "i'm righting this or that" instead of "i'm writing this or that." LOL

actually, ice i think the best thing in your plug is the frame buffer emulation, but with it enabled there are some slow downs, so if texture caching will eliminate that problem, then definitely go for it.

and yeah, the ucode autodetect will help n00bs a bit. :D

good luck! i can't wait for the next beta!

rhy

[1964er]

Originally posted by crhylove
first off, i don't see a weakness in icepir8's plug.

...

and yeah, the ucode autodetect will help n00bs a bit. :D

good luck! i can't wait for the next beta!

rhy

:plain2: nothing has no weakness. Your first statement shows ur blind devotion. the ucode autodetect is not just for n00bs. Can you recite all the ucodes for me?

[1964er]

Originally posted by crhylove

actually, ice i think the best thing in your plug is the frame buffer emulation, but with it enabled there are some slow downs, so if texture caching will eliminate that problem, then definitely go for it.


do you know what you are talking about?!? texture caching cant help frame buffer much (if at all).

[Doomulation]

Originally posted by 1964er
Originally posted by crhylove

actually, ice i think the best thing in your plug is the frame buffer emulation, but with it enabled there are some slow downs, so if texture caching will eliminate that problem, then definitely go for it.


do you know what you are talking about?!? texture caching cant help frame buffer much, if youve been paying any attention to what each is about.
Of course it does.
Frambuffer is textures also. And when it's saved, it doesn't need to do framebuffer.

[1964er]

Originally posted by Doomulation
Originally posted by 1964er
Originally posted by crhylove

actually, ice i think the best thing in your plug is the frame buffer emulation, but with it enabled there are some slow downs, so if texture caching will eliminate that problem, then definitely go for it.


do you know what you are talking about?!? texture caching cant help frame buffer much, if youve been paying any attention to what each is about.
Of course it does.
Frambuffer is textures also. And when it's saved, it doesn't need to do framebuffer.

lol. good old doom.

texture cache saves textures to hd for future use. The most evident effect of framebuffer is copying of the screen. This effect is usually useless after the immediate use. caching to hd just wastes space.

the caching is put to best use when caching textures that are repeatedly used by the game. then it saves time. Just because both works with textures doesnt mean they are directly related.

[gokuss4]

well i think the thing with framebuffer is this. see once i turned on copy buffers in jabo's plugin before i opened the subscreen in zelda, and than went in it, and link was shown correctly, and than i turned off framebuffer, and it was still shown correctly and it was goin normal speed the thing with framebuffer is that it copies all the time, and it needs to so it'll show the changes in stuff. unless for stuff like dlists thats a different story i think. but with the texture cache, it could save framebuffer memory on the hd, and load it once when you enter that framebuffer spt (e.g link in the subscreen menu in the equipment selection). thats what i think, this will help out mostly with the copy buffers framebuffer option mostly. but maybe hmm. do you think there is a way where you can do framebuffer every other frame or like every 10 or 15 frames or something like that? cause like in mario kart 64 when you select copy dlists it goes slow right? but the big tv screen goes slow to, but smooth as you are going, but in the n64, it doesn't go smooth, infact it goes choppy on the tv screen on the real n64 in mario kart 64.

[Reznor007]

Originally posted by gokuss4
well i think the thing with framebuffer is this. see once i turned on copy buffers in jabo's plugin before i opened the subscreen in zelda, and than went in it, and link was shown correctly, and than i turned off framebuffer, and it was still shown correctly and it was goin normal speed the thing with framebuffer is that it copies all the time, and it needs to so it'll show the changes in stuff. unless for stuff like dlists thats a different story i think. but with the texture cache, it could save framebuffer memory on the hd, and load it once when you enter that framebuffer spt (e.g link in the subscreen menu in the equipment selection). thats what i think, this will help out mostly with the copy buffers framebuffer option mostly. but maybe hmm. do you think there is a way where you can do framebuffer every other frame or like every 10 or 15 frames or something like that? cause like in mario kart 64 when you select copy dlists it goes slow right? but the big tv screen goes slow to, but smooth as you are going, but in the n64, it doesn't go smooth, infact it goes choppy on the tv screen on the real n64 in mario kart 64.

The slowdown in Mario Kart on the real thing was a bad programming issue, not a hardware problem. In Perfect Dark when you get hit and the screen starts to blur, it draws the scene normally, captures 1 frame, draws the next frame normall with the captured frame blended on top, captures that frame, blends that on the next normal frame, and so on. It does it smooth. Mario Kart uses a similar technique. It draws a small frame into a texture, then draws a normal frame, and uses that as a texture.

PC hardware can do a similar thing. You can set the rendertarget of the GPU to be into an area of video RAM that is NOT the framebuffer, then use that as a texture. This can be done in Direct3D and OpenGL...I can't remember if Glide allows this or not though.

The Kasparov 3d demo makes use of this. http://www.elitegroup.demo.org/demo.html

However...it doesn't work completely on Voodoo3 or older because they lack 32bit color, greater than 256x256 textures, and maybe the render-to-texture support. TNT level should support it fine.

[crhylove]

settle down 1964er. i wasn't saying that texture cache would help frame buffer emulation, i said it might help over all speed, which is an issue in this plug, at least when FBE is turned on.

geez. read my post again.

oh yeah, and settle down.

rhy

[1964er]

Originally posted by crhylove
but with it [framebuffer] enabled there are some slow downs, so if texture caching will eliminate that problem


eh?

[mann]

Originally posted by AIPER666
It's dumping them when unloading the game. And next time u play it, it will go faster.


Gasp! :!!!: I am and idiot!:sleepy:

lol

[crhylove]

texture caching may speed up the over all plug in, thereby making FBE more usable. Hence it may "fix slowdowns". not necessarily FBE.

lol... it's almost a semantic grammatical debate at this point.

/me leaves..

[Slougi]

A problem I see with this is that the HDD is pretty slow compared to reading from memory. My understanding is that the emu loads the rom to memory, and then starts running it. If the textures have to be loaded from HDD, it might slow things down even further, instead of speeding the plugin up. Of course, I have no clue what I am talking about, so please ignore me :)

Edit: Doh, I just thought about this again. You propably mean that all cached textures are loaded at startup, right? Somehow when I first thought about it I thought the textures would have to be loaded dynamically.

[Doomulation]

Originally posted by Slougi
A problem I see with this is that the HDD is pretty slow compared to reading from memory. My understanding is that the emu loads the rom to memory, and then starts running it. If the textures have to be loaded from HDD, it might slow things down even further, instead of speeding the plugin up. Of course, I have no clue what I am talking about, so please ignore me :)

Edit: Doh, I just thought about this again. You propably mean that all cached textures are loaded at startup, right? Somehow when I first thought about it I thought the textures would have to be loaded dynamically.
Of course, loading it at startup is always the case.
This is a techinuqe of which even i use.

[linker]

in YOUR plugin?

[pj64er]

linker, i imagine hes talking about his programs

[Doomulation]

Originally posted by linker
in YOUR plugin?
Lol, I don't have any plugin! I can't even do one :P

Originally posted by pj64er
linker, i imagine hes talking about his programs[/B]
Err, my private builds, yes! Wouldn't call it really apps ;)

[Cyberman]

Originally posted by Doomulation
Originally posted by Slougi
A problem I see with this is that the HDD is pretty slow compared to reading from memory. My understanding is that the emu loads the rom to memory, and then starts running it. If the textures have to be loaded from HDD, it might slow things down even further, instead of speeding the plugin up. Of course, I have no clue what I am talking about, so please ignore me :)

Edit: Doh, I just thought about this again. You propably mean that all cached textures are loaded at startup, right? Somehow when I first thought about it I thought the textures would have to be loaded dynamically.
Of course, loading it at startup is always the case.
This is a techinuqe of which even i use.

Ummmm NO this is NOT always the case. The PS2/PSX systems will prove you wrong in this case. The texture cache is ALWAYS changing on those systems.. just ask Pete Bernadete and Lewpy! ;)

Cyb

[jelbo]

Hi there,

Icepir8, if you have some beta plugin somewhere which supports texture caching/dumping, I'm very interested in it. Actually not for speed matters, but just for saving these textures and use them in various creative ways (like someone said about making Quake 3 levels of them, well, use the textures in levels).

PLEASE help me Icepir8, I would be very thankful. :)

[Harteex]

I'm also very interested in texture dumping...