Robotech: Battlecry video

Yup, I finally got around to making a video of Cxbx running Robotech: Battlecry. Like I said before, Fraps refuses to record it properly, so I had to use CamStudio. I might eventually use another tool, but for now, it works fine. Oh and sound wise, you aren't missing anything.

"So, care to explain what's going on with the graphics?" Hold on, I'm getting to that!

1. Textures: The issue with the textures I'm assuming is the same as what previously happened with Panzer. Probably a swizzling issue. More than likely, there's a certain swizzled texture format that isn't being unswizzled properly. I never had to deal with texture swizzling issues before. Caustik usually does that. What I need to do is create test scenarios for each and every texture format Xbox supports to be sure that we get it right. Speaking of textures, remind me to implement cube textures for MetalArms, okay?
2. 3D enviromnemts: If you look at the 3D environments, you'll notice how the polygons are poorly shaded. Why exactly this is, I don't know. There are two possible explanations. The first one comes from the fact that this game uses quad lists via index primitives to render gfx (D3DPT_QUADLIST). "What's so hard about that?" For starters, quads are not a native feature of standard Direct3D (Xbox Direct3D does, because it's designed to take advantage of the NV2x GPU, which is more OpenGL compatible). So in that case, we need to create triangles from quad vertex data. It's harder than it sounds. The other reason may be shader related, but that I can't confirm. Cxbx's vertex shader parsing is not perfected.
3. Frame rates: This game will likely take more processing power to run than most other games atm. Martin_sw said that DrawIndexedVertices[UP] needs further optimization. Probably does (and that would explain part of Panzer's speed problem). My guess that the extra work to deal with the quad format polygons makes it worse. So that one mech on the menu reduces my frame rates to 49 on average, and in game gfx are generally 30 fps. When the OpenGL port is done, it should be faster (I hope).

So yeah, that's basically all I have to say. Still busy battling for a spot on Microsoft's payroll, but if anything pulls through, I might have less time to dedicate to Cxbx, but rest assured, it's not dead until I say it is, got it?

Shogun.