You should take your screenshots in PNG format, they look better.

I'm too lazy to convert them. Oh, and I rewrote the surface loading code; now it converts the surface format to the native format, and forces them into hardware memory. Rendering a map screen and 100+ objects gives me 70 fps. Sweeeet.

Is that 70fps capped at the vertical refresh rate, because I'd expect you could do alot better.

Are you using the built in alpha blending? Software alpha is really slow.

Looking pretty good Mushu. 2D games > *. This is not something that is open to discussion. [grin]

Jesse: no, its not capped (sadly). SDL uses RLE (Run-Length Encoding) to optimize alpha functions, and I enable it wherever possible. In all honesty, it would probably be just as slow to manually do alpha operations since I'd be doing them on system RAM too :(

SDL wasn't really made for speed, rather, portability and ease of use. That said, I'm not expecting to have 100+ units on screen very often simply because the gameplay focuses a lot more on strategy than mass numbers*. But yeah, my final product target is 30+fps on my low-end machine. Considering all the loss of speed is caused by the inefficency of the gfx API, I'm not too worried about it.

I'll run a profiler on the code if things get really bogged down by something or another. Yay optimization.

VertexNormal: Yase! [grin]

* uhh... except for zombies. Zombies pretty much just hoarde rush you + eat your brains + hoarde rush next guy...

Mushu, this is looking very nice. Really, I love it. Keep up the good work - I'd love to play your game someday [smile]

Emphasis on the someday. Turns out I had to rewritefuktor all my file handling classes because they were coded like crap.

Right now I'm procrastinating on writing a parser for the map loader. Ugh, I hate parsing. And I've got a tummy ache :(

Its only 20h00. I'll probably get it done tonight ish.

Hey, didn't you write a VB game where I was the last boss?

More treezorz!