Sunday, June 30, 2013

Cannonball 0.19 - OpenGL Rendering

I've updated Cannonball to support OpenGL rendering. This means:

  • Large performance improvement, especially when using full-screen mode. 
  • Scanlines can now be used in both full-screen and stretch modes.
  • Filtering can be toggled in the config.xml for a softer look, similar to MAME.

The old software renderer will still be supported, but is toggled at compile time by unsetting the OPENGL flag in your build.cmake file. 


There are a few other improvements rolled into this build:

  • A minor bug was fixed in the road rendering. This occasionally caused road pixels furthest into the horizon to be displayed at the wrong position.
  • In widescreen mode, sprite clipping is now correct, so sprites close to the camera aren't deactivated so aggressively. This is most noticeable on levels with wide grassy strips etc. 

I'd consider this build beta for now. Please try it out and let me know if you spot any problems. If I haven't broken anything along the way, I will update the main page. Then it's back to LayOut, which has been neglected a little lately.

Download here.
Marcus has also updated the Mac version here.

Thanks to Legooolas for having a stab at the OpenGL code originally. In the end I rewrote everything myself as I wanted to untangle the SDL rendering code from the native OutRun video code. So now the codebase is a little cleaner in this area.