[Kde-games-devel] KGoldrunner

[Luciano Montanaro]

Il Wednesday 08 August 2007 15:51:53 Ian Wadham ha scritto:
> On Tue, 7 Aug 2007 06:25 pm, Luciano Montanaro wrote:
> > The Grossglockner and surroundings are really beautiful, and
> > I finally managed to climb the Stelvio Pass.
>
> Stelvio, huh?  Second highest in the Alps, 60 hairpin bends and the
> place where Stirling Moss (old-time UK racing driver) came to grief.
> Nice ride, Luciano!

Well, the hairpin bends have signs on them with their nuimber... I think there 
were 48 bends during the climb, and 30 or so going down...

Anyway, I really enjoyed the ride.

>
> > But maybe I have configuration issues, because it has problems also with
> > other games: kshisenso, for example is practically unusable: The first
> > tile is highlighted immediately, but after selecting the second tile of
> > the pair, I have to wait for a few seconds (at least three, maybe more)
> > before I see the conecting line and the tiles are removed.
>
> Hmmm.  KShisen is slow for me too, but I think it is since Jeremy put in
> the new move types.  I hadn't said anything till now, but is some tweaking
> needed, there, Jeremy?
>
> > Kgoldrunner is OK, apart from the fadein/fadeout animation.
>
> Much blood, sweat and tears have been shed over KGr performance
> in KDE4.  Ask Mauricio. :-)
>

I've noticed it. with the Qt debug environment macro, you see only the actors 
being updated; so there performance is really optimal, and there should be no 
problem there.

> I think I have a new line on the timing of the fadein/fadeout animation.
> Oddly enough, it goes much faster for me if I use one of the KDE 3
> themes.  I get 15-20 frames for a fade-out/fade-in sequence and quite
> nice animation, but only 5-6 frames in the SVG themes.  This is all
> without any graphics acceleration.
>

This is quite strange. There should not be any difference there. Except...
The bitmap themes have no background. But it should be already be precomposed 
with the level graphics when the animation plays.

> If I re-order the code in KGrGame::loadLevel so that SVG background
> load is done before calling KGrCanvas::fadeIn, I get much more even
> performance.  The sequence of values from the timeline is much more
> consistent and the three frames each for fade-out and fade-in look like
> click-click-click on a camera aperture.  Slow, but visually convincing.
>
> BTW, I've found that drawing a rectangle with a circular hole in it is
> actually slower than the gradient method, once the conflict between
> gradient rendering and SVG background rendering has gone.  And it
> does not look as good as the gradient method.  So I am ditching the
> rectangle-with-hole approach.

Well, I think we can play with alternatives for another while. But the 
complete animation is bound to happen in two seconds anyway, and as long as 
it doesn't actually look ugly, there should be no problem if it's simply a 
bit jerky.

>
> I'll continue to play with these ideas, but things are definitely
> improving.
>
> All the best, Ian W.
>
> P.S.
>
> > The good thing about QTimeLine is that it skips automatically frames,
> > though. So we can have very smooth animations with fast systems, and
> > whatever the system can manage otherwise.
>
> This also happens with QTimer events.  Neat, isn't it?

Yes, that's quite handy.

Luciano

P.S.
I'd like to continue with the background/actors split in the theme managing 
code, if you agree it would be nice to have.