From: Club Neon <clubneon@hereintown.net>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Thu, 01 Jul 1999 15:20:39 -0400

Got to be a faster way.

First let me say, it is great to be back.  Some of you may remember me,
I was the webmaster for the GGI web site for a little while, must have
been almost 2 years ago now.  Would have known me as Chris Meadors.
Anyway, I have created my own Linux installation and am back playing
with GGI.  I have actually done more with GGI in the last 3 days than in
the last 2 years.

But anyway, here is what I'm running into (remember all I did before was
putting a few strings and lines, so I'm rather green):  I'm working on a
multi-layer tile based display engine, with a twist, varible alpha
transparency between paralaxing layers.  Because of the paralax effect I
pretty much need to redraw the whole screen with every move as the tiles
that may have been over-lapping in the last position have shifted at
different speeds.  So far my layer compositing code seems fast enough
(as long as I don't go too many layers deep), but I can't get the final
combined layer drawn to the screen fast enough.

First I tried putting each pixel from the 64 bit values stored in the
final composite through the mapcolor function to the main visual, but
that was only getting me 1 fps.

So then I tried putting the pixels through mapcolor to a memory visual
that was the same size and depth as the display visual and crossblitting
between them.  That knocked me down to about 5 spf (seconds per frame).

The get/putbox combo between visuals got me up to about 2 spf.

I just noticed the copybox function as I was going to sleep, so I
haven't tried it yet, but I don't think it'll get me the 15+ fps that
I'm looking for.

So all you people with 2 years more experience than me, what do you
recommend?  Page flipping really isn't an option, as I want one set of
routines that will work on all targets.  I can get my final composited
data into just about any form, right now untouched it is setup to be a
linear array of (w*h) ggipixels.

Thanks,
Chris