[Kde-games-devel] KGoldrunner

[Mauricio Piacentini]

Ian Wadham wrote:
> Hey Luciano!
> 
> Welcome back!  Did you have a good trip?
> 
> On Mon, 6 Aug 2007 05:55 pm, Luciano Montanaro wrote:
>> How slow is it? If you start kgoldrunner from the command line, it writes
>> one line each time one frame of the animation is drawn. How many frames
>> does it draw?
>>
> I didn't want to tell you this before you went away but the level-change
> animation (fade out - fade in) is very slow for me.  That's because I have
> a graphics card but it is not enabled in Linux.  However that has not been
> any disadvantage up till now (my CPU is a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4).
> 
> I am getting just 2 or 3 frames on the fade out and about the same on the
> fade in.  I have put a timer into the messages and the frames are taking
> about 0.5 sec to paint, after control goes back to the event loop.  It's sad
> really ... that particular animation used to be really smooth on the Apple II.
> 
> I've figured out (finally) how to draw a black rectangle with a transparent
> circular hole in it, but it seems to take nearly as long to draw that, save it
> as a pixmap and get KGameCanvas to paint it on top of the play area.
> Due to other work and lack of time, I have not investigated further.
> 
> BTW, I think 10 msec timeline interval is too short and would not work in
> Windows with any hardware.  There's a warning in Qt doco about that.

I like the animation, it fits well with the theme of the game! It runs 
decently on my machine, and I think some of the slowdown can be 
attributed to the debug information being displayed in the console while 
the animation is playing. It displays 70 frames in my system.
But maybe you could try keeping the total time of the animation as it is 
now, but use less frames (maybe 1/3 or 1/4 of what is currently being 
used.) This should make it friendlier for slower systems. I would 
experiment with a 40ms interval at minimum (25 fps), but possibly even 
half of it (12 fps, a 80ms interval). It is good enough specially in 
case of animations like this, where the outcome is predictable and our 
brains can do the interpolation :)

Regards,
Mauricio Piacentini