Monday, September 13, 2010

Developer console, scripting system

Wii is relatively a low power machine, and thus, one of the goals of revolution engine has always been to get the most out of those limited resources. Optimization.
That's why i didn't ever think of adding a scripting system to it. Scripts are low, and everything you can do with a script you can do it by code. But the thing is that, one other of the main goals of the engine is ease of use also. And develop a game is much easier if you have a console and a script system that allows you to modify things on the fly, fine tuning your game to the very best of it. About a month ago, however, adding a script system to Rev wasn't the best of the ideas because lighting system consumed A LOT of resources and computation time was gold-priced. But due to the recent advances in Hardware lighting, CPU is almost free all the time, and this re-opens the door for many resources-consuming subsystems like Physics, AI, and scripting.
So that's all, hardware lighting freed the CPU, so many new and interesting features can now be expected for the next version, more news on them (and probably some videos) as soon as I finish my exams :)

Thursday, September 2, 2010

More hardware, more triangles in screen

Revolution engine lighting system is something that makes me feel proud. It can light objects in a very realistic manner and is very extensible. However, it's very slow since it's all software based, almost all calculations (except for some blending between layers and a couple of things more) are done by software. This decision was made because wii hardware lighting system doesn't work right in homebrew, and if I wanted to have a realistic lighting system, I had to write it.
But, after all, not All of the hardware is working bad, so some parts of the lighting system can be ported to hardware.
And that's what I'm doing: port everything I can from software to hardware (and it's working quite well). Remember that 8% speed boost from 0.5 to 0.5.1? well, now I expect about a 30-40% speed boost :)