Do we still need minicore after adding dynamic scaling to engine

flareteam / flare-game

Fantasy action RPG using the FLARE engine

http://flarerpg.org/

Other

1.13k stars 237 forks source link

Do we still need minicore after adding dynamic scaling to engine #508

Closed igorko closed 8 years ago

igorko commented 8 years ago

Did anyone try to set resolution to 320×240 when playing alpha demo? Does it work?

dorkster commented 8 years ago

I brought this up in a previous thread about the GCW-Zero with @zear:

Could you try changing required_width and required_height in mods/fantasycore/engine/resolutions.txt to 320 and 240 respectively? You will also might need to change the resolution setting to 320x240 in ~/.config/flare/settings.txt for this to work, but it should scale everything down to 320x240 without needing the minicore mod.

Unfortunately, there was no response to that. If anyone with a GCW-Zero could test this, I would greatly appreciate it.

My main concerns about using run-time scaling over minicore are:

Scaling isn't free. Devices that use minicore are already low-powered, so the run-time scaling might make the framerate dip too far down
Memory. Using the normal size textures will use more RAM than the ones in minicore. I'm not sure how much memory is typically available to applications on the GCW-Zero.

zear commented 8 years ago

@dorkster I will try to test it as soon as I find some free time (I was very busy with other projects recently).

Retail GCW Zero units have 512M of RAM (development units - 256M). Memory available for applications on the retail units is ~498M. Scaling on GCW Zero is actually free because of dedicated IPU hardware, however drawing in a larger resolution isn't. Flare on GCW Zero already suffers from long loading times between sectors (measured in seconds). I worry that switching to a regular data set would only extend this.

zear commented 8 years ago

@dorkster @igorko I gave alpha_demo a try at 320x240 on GCW Zero and the results are as follows:

The game suffers from noticable framerate drops. It went from fullspeed to at least half of that - way below a playable threshold for me.
There is a noticable graphical blur that makes smaller objects unrecognisable.
Menu elements and fonts are too tiny to be readable on a 320x240 screen. Although I think that could be adjusted by rendering those elements at a larger scale.

Overall, GCW Zero is still a viable reason for support of the minicore mod.

dorkster commented 8 years ago

Okay, those sound like good enough reasons to me to keep minicore. Thanks for taking the time to test it out.