Latenite 1.0.6.0

Tuesday, 20th June 2006

There's a new Latenite beta - 1.0.6.0 - available from my site. I hope this is the last Latenite 1 release; I'm moving away from the current IDE towards a revised Latenite 2, the focus more on interactivity with the assembler and the debugger (better 'Intellisense', breakpoints, variable watching and so on). This mainly revolves around a much improved text editor, currently in the works.

Not a very exciting thing to look at, but handling text selection, editing, copying, pasting, and highlighting - and keeping it fast - is being a bit of a pain.
For the most part, it is fast enough, but gets seriously sluggish when scrolling up and down at high resolutions (has to repaint the entire control as none of it is buffered).

That little 3D engine for the calculator I was working for (codenamed Nostromo) is not dead, as you might have thought;

(Old screenshot to refresh your collective memories). I have recently 'ported' the TASM-style code to the new Brass syntax, rewritten all of the wall handling code for increased performance and fixed some of the graphical glitches caused by overflow (lines wrapping incorrectly around the display). I have increased the resolution and accuracy of the maths in use as well, but it's still pretty sluggish with large amounts of data and still lacks occlusion and wall clipping to the view.

One (easy) way of speeding things up would be to split the world up into 'rooms' (or zones, pick whatever terminology you like) where each room is entirely self-contained and cannot be seen from any other room. By opening and closing doors between rooms you can add and remove which rooms are in the list to be drawn, keeping the geometry count low.

Of course, for this to work, I'd need a bit of collision detection to be able to work out which room the camera is in.

In terms of occlusion, I'm a bit stumped. As far as I can tell, BSP might be the way to go, but have never been able to write a working 'BSP engine'. If anyone had any links they'd recommend on the theory and implementation behind this, I'd be very grateful.