Thursday, January 14, 2016

Have introduced Lighting effects into my new game engine

One of the things I really wanted to add to my game engine was lighting effects, but the old one forced me to toss this out when it slowed the framerate to a crawl, and now, I know why.

I was using a script that used looping events to make things like fireplaces and lamps glow, and it was really slow because events that are autorunning or parallel processes eat up a lot of processor power, since RPG Maker VX Ace ordinarily does not use the GPU at all and is almost entirely processor dependent by default.

The new script I'm using uses pure scripted events via a DirectX DLL hook, offloading the heavy lifting to the GPU, which means even low level PCs with integrated chipsets are unlikely to see any noticable slowdown since even though integrated graphics are much weaker than actual cards, they still can do most of the rendering without robbing too many processor cycles from the CPU. The script is also much lighter and efficient and avoids processor killing event conditions, so I expect to be able to prettify the crap out of this game now with nicer lights.

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