U7

[Max Pyne]

When I enable 2X scaling in U7 the mouse movement becomes really slow and jerky! What should I do?

[suraimu]

Purchase a faster processor?

[Dominus]

enable Fast-mouse in the options (you need the snapshot for that).

[Vigil]

...which helps with the speed, but doesn't help with the jerkiness. I have a P3-733 and get perfectly smooth mouse movement with the scalers *if the game is completely paused*, but when it's playing it's jerky as hell in anything higher than 320x240.

Also, something I thought about that would streamline the graphics menu...is it really necessary to have an option for both the scaler type (point, interlaced etc) and the scaler value (x1 or x2)? After all, none of the scalers work in x1 mode, so x2 should be set automatically when you select a scaler other than point.

[Lord G]

Has anyone thought of making Exult use hardware acceleration?

[Colourless]

Note that Point is still a scaler, using it does not disable scaling, but instead uses a nearest point sampling scaler. 1x vs 2x is used to enable and disable scaling. Point scaling, is only really useful for Windowed screen modes.

If Exult is running jerky when scaling, you most likely need a faster CPU. Realtime scaling is very CPU intensive! That's why we offer a variety of scaling method. Choose the one that give you the best quality/performance ratio that you can live with.

Hardware acceleration is not happening any time soon. And yes, we have though of it and have discussed the idea quite a bit.

-Colourless Dragon

[Max aka Moscow Dragon]

Maybe this is some SDL problem?

My old U7 world viewer scaled 2X the viewport - from 320x200 in-memory viewport to 640x400 window - fine, worked very fast even on P166/S3 Trio.
Surely GDI will use hardware scaling in StretchDIBits if the driver supports this, and I use the single StretchDIBits call to draw the whole screen.

Or you do antialiasing while scaling?

[drcode]

The Eagle and 2xSAL scalers don't just perform antialiasing, but also use some heuristics to make lines look sharper. They don't use hardware scaling, and, as stated above, are highly CPU-intensive. When WJP did some profiling a few months ago, he found that the scalers used about 90% CPU.

[Max aka Moscow Dragon]

Maybe provide an option to switch all smart scalers off and to see everything without antialiasing?
It is not this bad, and will allow Exult to run on P5 machines.

[wjp]

That's what you get when you use no scaling. (Or alternatively the point scaler.) Neither use any anti-aliasing

[co]

... but still use cpu-power to scale the image. afaik sdl only supports scaling yuv images (for movies). with a reasonably fast rgb->yuv converter this would probably be the fastest scaler on hardware that supports it (even an old matrox millenium does scaling, but without filtering).

[Max aka Moscow Dragon]

>afaik sdl only supports scaling yuv images

So what?
Throw SDL away for Win32 version and use just StretchDIBits.
This was what I always said to Jeff.

[drcode]

Be aware that the 'X' in our name stands for X-windows. So I'd be more likely to throw away the Win32 version:-)

More seriously, are you sure that SDL doesn't use something like StretchDIBits? If this is an obvious flaw, the SDL author is generally happy to accept improvements.

[nadir]

Moscow Dragon: that is not a viable solution. I'd rather see support for hardware scaled surfaces done in a platform independent way via SDL.

Tristan

[Max Pyne]

How fast cpu are you taking about? Someone said above they have a P3 and it still is so slow?

[nadir]

Actually I have a Mobile Pentium III running at 600Mhz and it delivers good performance even at 400x300x2 (2xSaI) under Linux/XFree86 4.1.0

[co]

drcode: i took a _short_ look at the sdl-source and haven't seen anything that looks like a special case for windows (or linux), only something that looked like sw-scaling.

nadir: does x export some hw-scaling-function?

[nadir]

I believe it's done via the Xvideo extension. Another route is by using OpenGL.

[Colourless]

Remeber this though, no hardware scaling methods will look as good as 2xSaI, Super 2xSaI and Super Eagle. At best they will be the same quality as Bilinear.

-Colourless Dragon.

[Karl]

Of the 3 high-quality scaling methods, 2xSaI, Super 2xSaI and Super Eagle, which requires the least CPU power, then?


-Karl

[nadir]

2xSaI I believe...