Re: [pygame] Lousy FPS

[Kris Schnee <kschnee@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Brian Fisher wrote:
> On 9/12/06, Kris Schnee <kschnee@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > So I tested the isometric version. 6 FPS, even with the logo and
> > interface turned off. Not good. How can my pasting tiles on a 2D surface
> > be slower than calling an OpenGL list of lists of 3D cube-drawing
> > instructions?
> How can OpenGL textured poly rendering be faster than software? well...

[Long, erudite explanation omitted.]

> ... so lots of reasons... honestly, I'm really just suprised you are
> only getting 12 fps for what's drawn on the opengl screenshot,
> especially if you are using display lists and already have all your
> textures loaded... (mobo with integrated gfx in the chipset?)

Laptop with an ATI Radeon 320M IGP, which runs Unreal Tournament 2004 
pretty well. Much better than it runs my awesome graphics demo!

> So what's the details on the SW guy?

OK. I've put together a stand-alone demo of Pearl, the isometric 
Pygame-only engine. It's about 58KB with the included graphics.
http://kschnee.xepher.net/code/Pearl060913.zip
For what it's worth, you can use the code if you want.

I'm drawing tiles every frame to the screen, which is inefficient. (And 
Psyco doesn't seem to help.) I've got a few lines of code meant to skip 
drawing a tile if it's obviously going to be offscreen, but that's 
probably not very useful. When I was using my purely 2D tile engine, I 
drew everything to a big offscreen buffer and then blitted a piece of 
that to the screen each frame rather than recalculating the tiles, but I 
don't think I can safely do that in isometric mode because sprites might 
go "behind" a tall tile; the landscape can't be drawn all at once. And 
it's likely I'm doing something massively stupid with the settings for 
the surface itself.

> (PS. Aesthetically, I like the isometric i.e. no perspective transform
> look a lot better... you can tell openGL to do that, if you want)

Aesthetically, I like the look of the isometric tiles more than anything 
I've done with OpenGL tiles. Maybe it's just my lack of skill with 
OpenGL, eg. the lack of fancy lighting, but the GL stuff looks 
washed-out and fake while the pure Pygame stuff is more vibrant, like a 
cartoon. Drawing these diagonal tiles is awkward, though, and I can't 
rotate the landscape except (if I work at it) in 90-degree increments.

What I'd really like to have is an isometric-or-3D tiled engine 
resembling the Nippon Ichi tactical RPGs, such as "Disgaea: Hour of 
Darkness." Screenshots and descriptions of these great games are at:
http://hg101.classicgaming.gamespy.com/nipponichi/nipponichi.htm
I know "GalaxyMage" is out there for Python, but it seems to have a 
license such that if I use its engine at all, I have to release all of 
my source code for everything else, which I'd rather not do.

Uh, in looking for info about OpenGL's isometric capabilities, I 
immediately saw this:
http://nehe.gamedev.net/data/downloads/download.asp?letter=I
This site, I already knew, has many OpenGL tutorials, including some 
that've been translated to Python. On that link is a set of code for 
doing an isometric landscape, which seems to defeat the purpose of 
everything I've done on this part of the project... except that it's 
presumably in C only, so that I can't use it.

Advice?

Kris