In article <1992Dec28.071644.385036@magicbb.uucp> Maury_Markowitz@magicbb.uucp writes:
> You see, the Mac requires a whole different system for good graphics speed.
>If you're writing a game, open a window and bypass QuickDraw (like Hellcats).
>However, this takes time and knowledge, so the PC game makers can't be
>bothered. Red Baron/Mac is a perfect example, they use a 320x200 window to
>simulate a VGA screen, and use QD calls to copy pixels to it. So instead of
>using QD to draw the lines, it seems they use THEIR code from the PC (which
>has no graphics calls) to make the line, then copy the pixels over!
> The result is that you can't play it on anything under an IIfx with reasonable speed, whereas Hellcats runs quite nicely at 640x480x256 on my pokey old II.
To the original poster: Hi; my name's Bill Dugan and I work at MacPlay.
I did some of the code for the Mac port of OOTW. Yes, it's a port ... but
as kjh+@cs.cmu.edu pointed out, "port" does not mean "sucks". Personally I
really like the Mac port of OOTW because we were able to take advantage of
the Mac's great graphics; you can play OOTW filling the screen, if you have a
fast enough machine, and the polygons are still quite nice and smooth. That
is the advantage a polygon game like OOTW has vs. bitmap games like Monkey
Island (which I loved, incidentally) or other games that suffer from the
doubling of pixels.
I'd like to mention, though, that just bypassing QuickDraw for the screen blit
isn't a panacea. I made a version of OOTW that replaced two full-screen
CopyBits() calls each frame with tight longword moves in unrolled loops, and
on a Mac IIci with built-in video and a cache card, the speed increase of the
game was around 10 to 12 percent. CopyBits() isn't as monstrously awful as
a lot of people think. Because of the low increase in speed and the high
consequences of incompatibility, we decided to leave Out of this World as a
CopyBits()-only game.
Uh, actually I should mention that this 10-12% number is not typical of most
games since most of OOTW's time is spent drawing a lot of polygons on off-screen
bitmaps. This is written in nice tight 68000 code (which I did not write).
I suppose some other games might spend 50% of their time blitting directly to
the screen, which is not the case with our game.
Anyway, cheers.
Bill Dugan
MacPlay
Incidentally, Out of this World will ship on January 4, 1993.
