recommend DLLS for general speedup?
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/recommend DLLS for general speedup?
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| Hi all I've got a game that's a fair way towards completion and I'm always looking for that easy to implement extra speed boost without having to rip out major code blocks. Can you recommend any general DLL's that help speed operations in Blitz3d but which are not say, replacement collision engines, physics engines or graphics engines? Any help, much appreciated. |
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| here some wrappers: http://www.blitzbasic.com/toolbox/toolbox.php?cat=16 some of them will speed up your game, others won't. |
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| Aware of those. Apart from the Alpha.dll all the rest are fairly specialised in what they do. I'm wondering if there are any DLL's that can speed up common maths calculations for example, or other commonly used routines. |
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| Not really. What you get in speed will be lost through transition to and from DLL. The only DLLs that can really speed up the stuff are DLLs like toms DX7dll which adds some functionality like render2texture or DXT compression ... But as most of these things need to hack into Blitz3Ds datastructures (normally direct surface structures) there is always a risk that your game will just crash on a different system without any "usefull" reason. Normally caused by drivers not fully supporting DX7 (older ATIs for example) |
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| Yeah, Id guess optimising your actual code is the only way to go... |
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| If your organising your maths inside of functions, I recommend you convert these functions into Gosub routines, as Gosubs are faster than functions! Dabz |
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| Thanks for the replies. Looks like more optimising is the way to go. I'll check out the DX7.dll - might still be useful for fx options that the user can enable/disable separately (e.g. glow/motion blur). And an ATI card would have to be pretty old now for it not to support DX7 features wouldn't it? |
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| Not really. The problem is the driver. Catalyst 4 and earlier 5 versions had baaad compatibility problems with the DX7 "hack in" DLLs ... this could even hold for users of office graphic cards (S3, SiS, older Intel) |
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