Knights and Merchants.net Forum

Applying the player colour and decoding the rest of the sprites now happens entirely on the GPU without bugs (previously some sprites would steal the player colour of nearby sprites even if they were, for example, the red fungus - which turned green)
However, in the process something related to the render order got broken a bit, or rather, we found a bug in it and have failed to fix it - so far. The bug was that a stone underneath a building would suddenly appear on top of it if a unit was entering or exiting the building. Of course the stone shouldn't even have been there, but nevertheless, the sudden change of render order is a bug. It should be fixed sometime soon though, when it is I'll probably release a demo with lots of player colours..

Oh and, there is a max of 16 players, that should be enough but if it really isn't we could make it 32 or something like that (at the expense of some additional memory usage), does anyone have a problem with 16?

Why not 128 altogether *jk

Seriously - all is good

What kind of Tiles system do you use harold? And in what kind of file did you get the tiles from?

Well the tiles would be basic quads, except that I had to divide them into 32 small parts to get the edges of the explored area right. The height of the tile (as found in in map) is subtracted from the Y coordinate of the upper left corner, and the other corners are joined to the tiles next to them.
I get the texture of the tiles from a file called map.rx and I have no idea how I got it - it's not an rx file and it didn't exist in the old KAM. It's basically just a bunch of indices into the palette - so very easy to decode.
The map file determines which part of the texture to use for which tile, a description of the map format can be found somewhere on this site.

Did that answer your questions?

Thank you, it did perfectly

Actually i got another question about the ground. How did you accomplished the 'hills' and the mountains? When you create a path the tile isn't just a block.

What do you mean? I already explained about the height..

I don't understand this part, did you understood it harold?

Not really.. maybe he means 'not just a square'? That would make some sense - but not after knowing how the heights work..

Ok now we're using the Z buffer instead of sorting the sprites. Of course it should have been like this all along, but I never took the effort of actually making it happen. Until now.
This makes no difference though, the sorting of the sprites never took that much time anyway.

The terrain is actually drawn after the sprites now, to reduce overdraw. Very minor detail, only people with very bad GPU's will notice this..

Did you measured FPS before Z usage and after, how much performance did you gained?
Also how much different performance is if you swap Terrain render order last vs. first?

There appears to be no difference..
But that's with an overclocked GTX260, which is getting a little old, but it's still a beast

So today I finished most of the XML mission loader. However, the XML format is not yet 100% finished. AI settings and such are still missing.
Anyone unsatisfied with the current XML format (as specified here: www.bits-dev.nl/kam/script.xsd) should tell me as soon as possible.

Any updates?

Sure, but they're not really stable yet
We have soldiers, but sometimes they walk funny (especially the ones with a different speed: horses and siege weapons) and they don't fight yet