DosTips.com

Update time

The new archive is in the same location as before: http://www.mediafire.com/file/af5656ss58l37jx/lovechild.zip

What's new?

All the effects are now run through the server. In most cases, this increases speed, but in the case of a lot of parsed math expressions, it decreases (I have theories why).

So anyway, I tried to optimize tinyExpr, the expression parser/evaluator. I managed to remove atleast some of the massive recursion, so it's a bit faster now. In the end I also had to simplify the expressions for the plasma effects etc. I think tinyExpr can be optimized a lot more but I won't do that now..

Files:

1. demo.bat. The new entirely server-based demo. Looks slightly different than before in places due to simplified expressions

2. demo-lowend.bat. In this version I have exchanged several effects for less CPU intensive ones. I think this one is more suited for the "couch toy netbooks" ..but anybody can run this, like I said it has several new and/or modified effects

3. demo-old-noserver.bat. Runs smooth as silk on my machine, but apparently on nobody elses..

4. kaleidoscope.bat. This is the old 'server.bat'. It shows the kaleidoscope effect only.

Please let me know how the first two files run on your machines. More smooth than before?


(Note: It's possible to pause the demos by pressing 'p')

No takers? I would just like to know if there was a noticeable improvement in how the demo/low-end demo runs.

Anyway, archive was updated again with a small fix. The music now stops automatically when closing down the window (previously, this only happened when pressing ESCAPE)

There is no noticeable difference between demo.bat and demo-lowend.bat for me. Of course both look much better than demo-old-noserver.bat apart from the fact that you didn't use bg.exe in the new scripts which leads to show up the windows only half-size.

Steffen

Thanks for checking Steffen

Silly of me to miss the "bg" call. I re-uploaded the archive with that fixed.

Looks way better. No strobe light effect and everything is totally fluid.

Great job!

Great, thank you!

confirm about 30-40FPS on demo and demo-lowend. Look fluid on this old and slow machine

Re-uploaded archive (http://www.mediafire.com/file/af5656ss58l37jx/lovechild.zip) because I did some optimization in the demo script, and then renamed the files so that the old demo-lowend.bat is now demo.bat, and the old demo.bat is now demo-highend.bat.

In other words, the old low-end version is now the "official" demo since some of the highend version effects ran slow when I launched it on a Win 10 machine - and we can't have that!

Archive update (added scripts demo-FULLSCREEN.bat and kaleidoscope-FULLSCREEN.bat)

With the newfound speed of cmdgfx_gdi that I posted about recently, I figured: why not try to run this demo fullscreen?



This is 1366x768, but I have tested it up to 1920x1080 (on my Win10 machine, where it did lag a bit at the end)

You will need a decent CPU to run this at full FPS, and please before running do terminate other processes hogging a lot of CPU (such as the horrible Antimalware Service Executable on Win10)

Enjoy - it actually looks pretty sweet running fullscreen!

Final (I would think) release of this thing. Archive updated.

Just a change to make the demo truly run in fullscreen. On Win10 (and Win8?) this now happens automatically if running demo-FULLSCREEN.bat (previously, the bottom Windows task bar would still be showing).

For Win7, 100% fullscreen can also be achieved by running demo-FULLSCREEN-FORCED.bat. Be aware though that this version of the demo writes on top of the entire desktop, including all other windows. This means,for example, that if you try to alt-tab to another window while running the demo, the switch will be made, but you will not see anything else than the demo still running as it renders on top of everything else! You would then have to alt-tab back to the demo (and press Esc to close it, before you can use any other program).


Edit: Also disabled resizing of window for the non-fullscreen versions.