Hi I have a little performance problem with my game i''m creating. My game consists of a map and a bunch of players with weapons. The players should be able to blow holes in the map during the game and when they do small pieces of the map should fly away and bounce on the map. It looks a little like worms but is not turn based and will in the future have support for multiplayergames. My problem is how to store my map surface since i have to both read from it to check if a piece will bounce or not and write to it to be able to make the holes after the weapons. Since i need this i have to Lock() it. When i store my surface in the memory of the videocard i can draw the map very fast but the reading and writing is slow. Thus when i store the map in the system memory the drawing is slow but the reading and writing it quick. Does anyone have a third suggestion of how i can make this go faster? You might think that the time is so little that it will not matter but trust me it will when you have a lot of objects checking the map to bounce or not. And my game has alot of objects cause it is a true action game help needed /Dogen

Yea
as a matter of fact i am making a new version of liero.
The main thing was to make it look better and of course the abillity to play it in multiplayer.
I just hope someone can solve this problem i have so i can go on.

/Dogen

ok
But how do you sync what has been changed in the system memory with the map that you draw from the video memory?
My problem is that it takes to long time to make the collision detection with the objects and the map.
Or you mean that you should have the map in an array, i think you do. But then you would have to to everything twice, or?

/Dogen

It''s been a while since I heard a lecture on this, but if I recall correctly... video memory is slow to write to but very fast to read from and system memory is pretty much fast to read from(but not as fast as vid mem) or write to. Given this, if you plan on doing a lot of writing to your surface, I would stick it in system memory. Any surfaces you don''t plan on writing to very much stick in video. I''m pretty sure both the primary and back buffer HAVE to be in video memory however. So do all your writing to an offscreen system memory surface, blt whatever you need to the backbuffer when you are ready and then flip to the primary surface.

D