I found this today on the LinkedIn profile of Andrew Meggs, a former Troika developer: "* Consulted on Temple of Elemental Evil. Rewrote the entire rendering pipeline one month before the game shipped for a tenfold increase in frame rate." Rewriting a crucial part of the engine one month before the game ships? What the hell -- Storm
Tenfold? TENFOLD? Just imagine if TOEE had shipped with the old engine lol. Or even if the game had shipped when it was actually finished. Still we have your engine remake on the horizon Darkstorm? Then maybe I can play through the nodes without saving every couple of minutes.
Yeah, that's the idea I still don't know why the nodes are such a problem for the original engine. They're very very particle-heavy, but other than that quite unremarkable. Oh and even if it *did* increase the performance tenfold. It's a management disaster if you have to replace a crucial engine component after 1 1/2 years of development and one month before shipping. Usually you try to do the "risky" parts of development first, Troika probably used the exact opposite of that mantra. Regards, Storm
Well he did say rewrite. And you usually don't get 10x speedup by doing microoptimizations. That usually implies some architectural or algorithmic change. Regards, Storm
