Anthony817 wrote:and don't go missing in action like that for years at a time, you had us worried something bad had happened to you!
W- well, it was only months this time, I'm sorry ;_;
This is really cool, thanks! I have no experience with making SD isos, but I'll try making one for the new demo.
So yeah, there's a
smol new demo:
https://captaindreamcast.itch.io/dolmexica-infinite.
Still has the stuttering, much to my chagrin, but alas. The problem is the realtime compression applied to textures that are being moved between main memory and texture memory. So the plan is to try out some other compression libraries and/or techniques. There are some better techniques for small files, which should improve performance.
Something I didn't talk about in the last post are the display errors. The most apparent one is the lower bit depth in Dolmexica, which results in some noticeably ugly textures, especially visible in the backgrounds. The second problem lies in one of the blending modes. While additive and alpha blending were easy enough to use with KallistiOS, subtractive blending is less straightforward. In the demo, this is visible at the title screen. If you compare the Dreamcast and Windows versions, you'll notice there are some differences. That's because subtractive blending does not work on the Dreamcast yet. Those graphical errors aren't high on the priority list while the game still runs like a garbage fire, but I thought I'd at least talk about them like I did with the other ones.
Overall, progress felt slow these last two months. My goal for the next demo (early may) is to eliminate the runtime errors and implement all state controllers/triggers, so adding custom characters - the whole thing a moddable engine is for - finally works reliably. I'll expect there'll still be some grave issues, so it'll probably be another demo and not a proper release.