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sklopec | on: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
How so? Doing this with modern OpenGL would be much simpler than the software rasterizer solution.

I think I'm gonna have to do it anyway, because some players claim they get nausea when playing at such low resolution (320x240), and the only way to give them higher resolutions that perform reasonably is to have it hardware accelerated.

Renderer is abstracted away already, but the real difference would probably be occlusion culling... With raycasting, I get it for free, but if I'd go down the hardware accelerated path I'd have to pick something more clever.

Raycasting and software rendering in general tends to scale poorly with resolution, even with vectorization and all the bells and whistles of modern CPUs.

badsectoracula | parent | next
Unless you plan on rendering the level on some very retro hardware (think S3 Virge, maybe Voodoo 1) you can render the entire level in OpenGL with just zbuffer and alpha tested sprites and it'll run perfectly fine - if anything with such low polycount, chances are you're going to make the renderer slower by trying to do occlusion culling on any GPU released in the 21st century :-P. If you pack the geometry in a few vertex buffers (for each unique texture) even per-frame, you'll get four digit FPS in any relatively modern GPU.

As an example this[0] video shows the benchmark from Post Apocalyptic Petra running on my previous GPU (RX 5700 XT) which all it does is build a per-frame (client-side) vertex-buffer in OpenGL 1.1 (the engine was made for actual retro PCs running DOS and Win9x so it does some rudimentary occlusion culling but that mainly affects 90s hardware, not anything released since 2000 or so). If anything, the rendering has so little overhead that half of the framerate is "eaten" by the FPS counter overlay :-P.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64ysz5rXkzw

sklopec | root | parent | next
That's really cool.

Thinking about modern games, a single character model probably has more vertices than my entire level (and yours probably), so it's definitely reasonable to expect occlusion culling for such simple geometry might actually reduce performance rather than increase it.

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xyzsparetimexyz | parent
Sure, but it becomes a question of how far you can push things. Maybe you raytrace the whole thing. Maybe there's some fractal geometry going on. Maybe you use a fisheye lens projection. Maybe your levels are dynamically tesselated. Maybe you have to do a few fancy tricks to achieve equivalent texturing etc.

But ignoring the GPU you have on your system is boring

jonoxtoby | root | parent
Writing a retro-inspired game using retro approaches despite all the modern options is precisely what makes this interesting.