Verge3 and the GP2X
Displaying 1-16 of 16 total.
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relaxis
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Hi, basically I joined the verge community because so far it is the only engine that has the ability to create great games that run on the gp2x.
Reading through the posts I can also see that verge has some running erros on the GP2X and although it works - it doesn't work 100%.
Are there any plans to port a non buggy verge3 to GP2X? Perhaps also with limitors within the engine that alert the programmer when a piece of code uses up too much of the gp2x's memory resources...
Posted on 2006-07-04 07:13:33
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mcgrue
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The v3 port to GP2X is all Ness's doing so far. I believe he's still working on it and making good progress.
How well does it run on the GP2X in the current build, anyways? Someone should take some video of it in action. ;)
Posted on 2006-07-04 07:26:14
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Ness
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- Low detail map...3529
- High Detail map...12000
- Dynamic Lighting...5760
- Pathfinding AI...4911
- Particles...2300
- 3D Rendering...23206
- Total Score...51706
:)
(I had to hack the SetResolution()'s our of vergemark to get it to work so...)
In reality it runs quite nicely as it currently is, though some things will slow it down or freeze (lots of lucency, lots of scripted entities on the map at once) Changing resolutions makes the whole thing crash. I think my plan is to try and get the resolutions to change correctly and then try and get the source into SVN as beta so other people can see the horrible mess that is vid_gp2xbase.cpp.
Posted on 2006-07-04 12:17:15
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relaxis
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sound excellent. can't wait. until then...gotta design my sprites and tiles...*sigh*...it takes forever.
Posted on 2006-07-04 12:24:32
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mcgrue
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How much memory does it have to play with?
Oh dear, I might need to make a stripped down version of Sully for the handheld verges :/
Posted on 2006-07-05 04:31:42
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Ness
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About 25MB not counting the overhead of actually running verge, so in reality 23MB or so.
There is another 16MB of upper ram, but it requires special code to use it. So far I haven't run into any problems (actually for a while the FreeImage() bug wasn't fixed causing many games to segfault 10-15 minutes in)
Posted on 2006-07-05 08:37:01
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relaxis
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that's not too bad for ram. It's not like you're going to have 100 entities on the same map at any time. For the record, how much would a verge game take up typically?
For help on unlocking the high ram try searching for help on the gp2x development forum. I think I read an article that said they had managed to free the NAND memory and use it for applications...
Posted on 2006-07-05 12:15:18
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mcgrue
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It really would be up to how the gamemaker implemented it.
Strictly speaking, your traditional memory hogs are your map and your music. On a low-memory system, I'd keep the map sizes small, the map layer counts low, never have more than one song in memory at a time, and load images and sound effects very minimalistically and release the resources as soon as it makes sense to.
In effect, it'd just be writing a much tighter backend than most vc coders bother to do.
It would be an interesting endeavor.
Posted on 2006-07-05 15:45:59
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relaxis
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what's the downside of not loading all the songs into the memory at once?
Posted on 2006-07-05 17:38:49
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mcgrue
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There's no downside to that, frankly. I was thinking more of having 2 or three songs in memory at once so you could fade between the map music and the battle music or whatnot.
Posted on 2006-07-05 18:22:36
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Omni
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Those conditions sound like...well, they sound like the limitations of none other than pure dad-gum console development.
Posted on 2006-07-05 21:16:41
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Ness
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Just think of it as a really low spec computer!
Making your maps small as possible, unloading resources when no longer needed is good practice anyway (that I tend not to follow...)
Posted on 2006-07-05 22:18:19
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relaxis
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Omni, I'm developing games for the GP2X. The GP2X IS a console. In some ways developing for this platform is going to present itself as a much greater challenge in code optimisation than on a pc. Not to mention that it's damn fun to be able to play games on the GP2X that you made on VERGE.
Posted on 2006-07-06 06:19:57
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mcgrue
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I can vouuch for this. The PSP sully demo, while limited, was awesome.
Posted on 2006-07-06 06:37:15
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Omni
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The GP2X IS a console...
I was pretending to be a master of the obvious, guys. It's no fun when you're all serious and stuff.
Posted on 2006-07-06 09:27:15
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relaxis
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Anyway the Golden soul site is up and under development. Here's the splash screen -
http://goldensoulgp2x.cogia.net
Posted on 2006-07-06 10:49:18
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