HPAVC/HPAVC CD-ROM.iso/TUT14.ZIP/TUT14.TXT

Text File | 1994-09-08 | 14KB | 338 lines

                   ╒═══════════════════════════════╕
                   │         W E L C O M E         │
                   │  To the VGA Trainer Program   │ │
                   │              By               │ │
                   │      DENTHOR of ASPHYXIA      │ │ │
                   ╘═══════════════════════════════╛ │ │
                     ────────────────────────────────┘ │
                       ────────────────────────────────┘

                           --==[ PART 14 ]==--



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■ Introduction

Hello there. Exams are just around the corner (again :( ), so I thought
I better get round to doing the next trainer. As usual, there seems to
have been a big delay between this one and the last one... sorry about
that ;-)

Well, this trainer is mainly on four things : Glenzing, faster polys,
fixed point and assembler. The sample program is basically tut 9
rewritten to include the above.

I'll go through them in order, and hopefully you won't have any hassles
grasping the concepts. By the way, do any of you read the text files? I
find myself answering questions via E-Mail etc. that were discussed in
the text sections of the trainers ... oh well, I'll just ramble along
anyway ;-)

Please dont send any mail to [e-mail] anymore ... I
don't know for how much longer the account will be valid (How can a
non-BIS person get onto the BIS UNIX machine in the BIS2 directory? If
his name is Denthor I suppose ;-) Oh well, I got about 8 months use out
of it. The account expires on Christmas day anyway...) So anyway, please
leave all messages to [e-mail]


If you would like to contact me, or the team, there are many ways you
can do it : 1) Write a message to Grant Smith/Denthor/Asphyxia in private mail
                  on the ASPHYXIA BBS.
            2) Write to :  Grant Smith
                           P.O.Box 270 Kloof
                           3640
                           Natal
                           South Africa
            3) Call me (Grant Smith) at (031) 73 2129 (leave a message if you
                  call during varsity). Call [phone] if you call
                  from outside South Africa. (It's YOUR phone bill ;-))
            4) Write to [e-mail] in E-Mail.
            5) Write to [e-mail] to get to all of
               us at once.

NB : If you are a representative of a company or BBS, and want ASPHYXIA
       to do you a demo, leave mail to me; we can discuss it.
NNB : If you have done/attempted a demo, SEND IT TO ME! We are feeling
        quite lonely and want to meet/help out/exchange code with other demo
        groups. What do you have to lose? Leave a message here and we can work
        out how to transfer it. We really want to hear from you!



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■ What is glenzing?

This is an easy one. Imagine, in a 3D object, that all the sides are
made out of colored glass. That means that every time you look through
that side, everything behind it is tinged in a certain color.

In ascii ...
          +---------+
          |      <--|---Light blue
          |         |
     +--------+     |
     |    | <-|-----|---Dark blue
     |    +---|-----+
     |     <--|---------Light blue
     +--------+

So where the two sides overlap, the color values of the two sides are
added. Easy huh? It is also easy to code. This is how you do it :

Set up your pallette to be a nice run of colors.
Draw your first poly.
While drawing poly 1, instead of plonking down a set pixel color, grab the
  backgrond pixel, add 1 to it, then put the result down.
Draw your second poly.
While drawing poly 2, instead of plonking down a set pixel color, grab the
  backgrond pixel, add 2 to it, then put the result down.
and so forth.

So if the color behind poly 1 was 5, you would place pixel 6 down
instead.

If you do this for every single pixel of every single side of your 3d
object, you then have glenzing going. This is obviously slightly slower
then just drawing an item straight, but in the sample program it goes
quite quickly ... this is because of the following sections...


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■ Faster Polygons

In Tut 9, you probably noticed that we were using a multiply for every
single line of the poly that we drew. This is not good. Let's find out
how to speed it up, shall we...

With the multiply method, we went through every line, to find out the
minimum x and maximum x value for that line.

                           +
                   ------/---\------- Find min x and max x, draw a line
                       /       \        between them.
                     +           +
                       \       /
                         \   /
                           +

How about if we found out all the min and max x's for every line first,
then just went through an array drawing them. We could do it by
"scanning" each side in turn. Here is how we do it :

                          + 1
                        /
                      /
                  2 +

We go from point one to point two. For every single y we go down, we
move a constant x value. This value is found like this :

           xchange := (x1-x2)/(y1-y2)

Remember gradients? This is how you calulated the slope of a line waaay
back in school. You never thought it would be any use, didn't you ;-)

Anyway, with this value, we can do the following :

    For loop1:=y1 to y2 do BEGIN
      [ Put clever stuff here ]
      x:=x+xchange;
    END;

and we will go through all the x-values we need for that line. Clever,
huh?

Now for the clever bit. You have an array, from 0 to 199 (which is all
the possible y-values your onscreen poly can have). Inside this is two
values, which will be your min x and your max x. You start off with the
min x being a huge number, and the max x being a low number. Then you
scan a side. For each y, check to see if one of the following has
happened :    If the x value is smaller then the xmin value in your
                array, make the xmin value equal to the x value
              If the x value is larger then the xmax value in your
                array, make the xmax value equal to the x value

The loop now looks like this :

    For loop1:=y1 to y2 do BEGIN
      if x>poly[loop1,1] then poly[loop1,1]:=x;
      if x<poly[loop1,1] then poly[loop1,1]:=x;
      x:=x+xchange;
    END;

Easy? Do this for all four sides (you can change this for polys with
different numbers of sides), and then you have all the x min and x max
values you need to draw your polygon.

In the sample program, if you replaced the Hline procedure with one that
draws solid lines, you could use the given drawpoly for solids.

Even this procedure is sped up by the next section, on fixed point.


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■  What is fixed point?

Have you ever noticed how slow reals are? I mean slooooow. You can get a
massive speed increase in most programs by replacing your reals with
integers, words etc. But, I hear you cry, what happens to the much
needed fraction bit after the decimal point? The answer? You keep it.
Here's how.

Let us say you have a word, which is 16 bits. If you want to use it as a
fixed point value, you can separate it into 2 sections, one of which
holds the whole value, and one which holds the fraction.

             00000000  00000000   <-Bits
             Whole     Fraction

The number 6.5 would therefore be shown as follows :

             Top byte    :  6
             Bottom byte :  128

128 is half (or .5) of 256, and in the case of the fraction section, 256
would equal one whole number.

So let us say we had 6.5 * 2. Using reals this would be a slow mul, but
with fixed point ...

            Top Byte    :  6
            Bottom Byte :  128
            Value       :  1664   <-This is the true value of the word
                                     ie. (top byte*256)+bottom byte).
                                     this is how the computer sees the
                                     word.
             1664 shl 1 = 3328    <-shl 1 is the same as *2, just faster.
            Top byte    :  13
            Bottom byte :  0

As you can see, we got the correct result! And in a fraction of the time
that a multiplication of a real would have taken us. You can add and
subtract fixed point values with no hassles, and multiply and divide
them by normal values too. When you need the whole value section, you
can just read the high byte, or do the following

             whole = word shr 8
         eg  1664 shr 8 = 6

As you can see, the fraction is truncated. Obviously, the more bits you
set aside for the fraction section, the more accurate your calculation
is, but the lesser the maximum whole number you can have. For example,
in the above numbers, the maximum value of your whole number was 256, a
far cry from the 65535 a normal (non fixed point) word's maximum.

There are a lot of hassles using fixed point (go on, try shift a
negative value), most of which have to do with the fact that you have
severely decreased the maximum number you may have, but trust me, the
speed increase is worth it (With longintegers, and/or extended 386
registers, you can even have 16x16 fixed point, which means high
accuracy and high maximum values)

Try write a program using fixed point. It is not difficult and you will
get it perfect easily. Trust me, I'm a democoder ;-)

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■ Assembler

In the sample program I used one or two assembler commands that I havent
discussed with you ... here they are ...

  imul  value      This is the same as mul, but for integer values. It
                     multiplies ax by the value. If the value is a word,
                     it returns the result in DX:AX

  sal  register,value   This is the same as shl, but it is arithmetic,
                          in other words it works on integers. If you
                          had to shl a negative value, the result would
                          mean nothing to you.

  rcl  register,value   This is the same as shl, but after you have
                          shifted, the value in the carry flag is placed
                          in the now-vacated rightmost bit. The carry
                          flag is set when you do an operation where the
                          result is greater then the upmost possible
                          value of the variable (usually 65535 or 32767)
                          eg mov ax,64000
                             shl ax,1     {<- Carry flag now = 1}

For more info on shifting etc, re-read tut 7, it goes into the concept
in detail.

The sample program is basically Tut 9 rewritten. To see how the
assembler stuff is working, do the following ... Go into 50 line mode
(-Much- easier to debug), then hit [Alt - D] then R. A little box with
all your registers, segments etc and their values will pop up. Move it
down to where you want it, then go back to the program screen (Hit Alt
and it's number together), and resize it so that you have both it and
the register box onscreen at once (Alt - 5 to resize) ... then use F4,
F7 and F8 to trace though the program (you know how). The current value
of the registers will always be in that box.


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■ In closing

Well, that is about it. The sample program may start as being a little
intimidating to some when they first look at it, just remember to read
it with tut 9, very little is different, it's just with fixed point and
a bit of assembler.

Before I forget, with Tut 13, the program crashes if you have error
checking on. This is how you sort it out :

1) Turn off error checking     or
2) Make logo a pointer, and get and free the memory     or
3) Read the logo directly to screen     or
4) Use the {$M ......} command with various values at the top of the
     program till it works.

I prefer options 3 or 2, but hey ... the problem was that the logo was
rather large (16k), and Pascal likes complaining ;-)

I am in doubt as to weather to continue doing quotes ... here is a
conversation I had with Pipsy, after the group conversation got around
to weather we were normal or not ...

Me : I'm normal.
Pipsy : No your not.
Me : Prove it.
Pipsy : Just look at your quotes in your trainers.
Me : What? You think those are weird?
Pipsy : Too weird.
Me : You mean that there is a weirdness line, and I crossed it?
Pipsy : Yes.

Bit of a conversation killer that, so we stopped there.

Anyway, this trainer won't have a quote in it ... how about a disclaimer
instead? Feel free to use it in your messages ...

------------------------------------------------------------------------
The views expressed above are mine and not Novells. In fact, I've never
worked for them in my life!

Byeeee....
  - Denthor
      18:57
        9-9-94


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