Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!sdd.hp.com!ucsd!pacbell.com!pacbell!well!farren From: farren@well.sf.ca.us (Mike Farren) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech Subject: Re: Animate vs Manual Blitter Message-ID: <22111@well.sf.ca.us> Date: 11 Dec 90 12:27:21 GMT References: Lines: 26 ersys!kumbach@nro.cs.athabascau.ca (Kevin Umbach) writes: >I'm writing a video game for the Amiga that has 6 small men (12 by 11 >pixels, 2 planes) running around on the screen. I currently have them >defined as animation objects and I'm using the Animate function to >move them. Even though I'm only using a 320X200 2plane screen, the >anim objects move very slowly. > >So here's my question: > Is it faster to use blitter directly and keep track of all positional > information manually, or do I have to be an expert programmer to > get things moving faster than Animate? My experience with Animate, back when I was doing the port of Crystal Quest to the Amy, was that it was just too slow to do an arcade-game type movement for any significant number of objects (where significant == 3 or more). I whipped up a quick blitter routine in assembly which moved an object as desired (16 X 16 pixels), and it blazed - I could have nearly 50 objects moving around before a noticable speed degradation happened. Of course, I wasn't doing background saves or anything like that, but that would have been easy to add, and wouldn't have hurt the performance all THAT much - six men, 12 X 11, should be a piece of cake. Or, since you're only using 2 planes, how about setting 'em up as sprites, which would take essentially nothing in the way of resources? -- Mike Farren farren@well.sf.ca.us