Well, mission complete…mostly.

Amazing what a bit of optimization can do. No more framerate drops for Rip Off.
The framerate is limited to 60fps, but unthrottled, the earlier version would usually run at up to 200fps if the screen wasn’t too busy.
But the screen did get busy sometimes, which caused the framerate drop I’ve been working to eliminate.Well, now it’ll run at up to 1000fps and most of the time at about 500fps even if the screen is busy.
There are more bits that can be optimised, but I think this’ll do for now. 😀
I’ve noticed a few bugs though (small ones), so I’ll need to take a look at that before releasing the game, but this extra week of optimization was more than worth it.
🙂

Here’s a screenshot of how it looks right now.

Good news…and bad too – as always 🙂

The good news is that I got some feedback on Rip Off from Oddbob and it was good – the only thing he mentioned as bad was a slight framerate dip for no apparant reason occasionally- which also happens to me. I don’t think it’s so bad in singleplayer mode – on my pc anyway…but it’s there and it’s annoying.

If my PC can play Bioshock it should, sure as hell, also be able to play Rip Off
(ok, I don’t get the best framerate in Bioshock either, but still…) 😉

I also had a friend over on monday night and we played the two-player mode for two solid hours and it was really fun – just like 25 years ago in the arcades…only we didn’t have to spend a lot of money on it. So it was great fun, and seemed bugfree, but unfortunately the slowdown Oddbob mentioned is worse in two-player mode because there’s more things on the screen.

So the bad news is that I can’t release the game this week, as I’d planned, but have to put on my thinkingcap instead and try to find out what part of the program causes the slowdown. Is it the 1000+ cos/sin calculations each second or is there particular function somewhere that is the cause of it?…that’s what I need to find out before I release the game.So it’ll be a little while longer before it’s completely done.

UPDATE:
I felt like experimenting last night, but since I had no athletic 25 year old blonde girl handy I decided to poke and prod Rip Off instead.  I’m now pretty sure I know what’s causing the slowdown and I even have a crazy idea how to fix it, but it’s going to be a quite extensive rewrite – but it should eliminate the problem completely (if I can make it work that is).

Just last night I decided Rip Off was pretty close to being done, so I sent off a beta to Oddbob, to get his feedback on it.
Next week a friend of mine will come over with his joypad and we’ll give the game a thorough twoplayer testing.

Unless something is completely off, it’ll be done soon.

Ohh, and about my plan to port the game to Blitz Max? – I’d love to, but it’s not going to happen…not right now anyway. It’s simply too much work and I’d like to finish it before penguins rules the world. It’s a big loss, because I was really looking forward to have those beautiful glowing vector graphics, but as I said – It’s too much work. Perhaps later.