Performance

Welcome to the seventh report on the progress of the Gameboy Advance version of Payback. If you haven't read the earlier reports then you can find them here. The last month was spent integrating the intro player mentioned last month into the main game code - no mean feat considering that fitting it in the GBA's limited RAM meant shuffling the routines and variables in and out of the GBA's fastest internal memory. Syncronised music was also added to the intro. In addition to this, some time was also spent further optimising the texture mapping routines:

As you can see, peak triangle throughput improved by more than 20%. In addition to this, many optimisations were made to the object and map renderers, saving dozens of CPU cycles per polygon. The routines that handle effects such as explosions and clouds of smoke were also optimised which saved memory and increased performance. Overall, this meant that the game's average framerate increased by around 10%.

Furthermore, the vehicle's name is now displayed when you get in and the camera angles in the replay mode are more varied. Also, the replay buffer was expanded from 10K to 15K, allowing for an average recording length of about 24 minutes and a theoretical maximum of over 21 hours!

What's next?

In addition to the optimisations mentioned above, a lot of time was also spent over the last month fixing bugs, which is likely to continue for the next few weeks. I'm also going to be working on adding save game and control configuration support, as well as hopefully getting a publisher.

I've also recorded a new video clip which you can download using the link on the right. Note that it was recorded on an emulator which does cause some visual glitches and degrade performance slightly. Also, the snow effects on the level shown slow the game down a bit - I'm currently working to improve this. [Next month's report is now available here.]

Please feel free to email us with any questions, suggestions or enquiries. We do not yet have a publisher for the GBA version of Payback. For general information about Payback, please click here.