Subject: Tried a *fast* machine?

From: Chris Hand <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 93 15:57:38 BST

I went to see a friend's new PC on Saturday, and we tried REND386
on it.  I was AMAZED.

It's a 486DX2/66 with local bus video and disk controller (0.3ms access...!).

Now I've used REND386 on a 486/50MHz and the performance is OK.  I get
around 5fps in stereo, 10fps in mono when using ROOM5.WLD.

But this local bus machine was something else!  Calculated frame rates
were between 36fps and 126fps!!  Obviously this is slightly academic given
the refresh rate of the monitor, but this sort of speed really does have
been to seen to be appreciated -- it's so smooth!  Especially when using
a joystick (which is a lot faster than using the keyboard BTW).

If you know someone who has a local bus machine, then get REND386 on there
and try it out.  What I'd *really* like to see now is a 640x480x256
video driver, just to see how one of these machines handles it.  I'd cook
one up myself but don't really know my way around a SVGA register set.

Chris

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From: "Mark T. Pflaging" <[email-masked]>
Date: 14 Sep 93 20:41:06 EDT

I know someone who tried rend386 on a Pentium.  He said the metal head spun 
around so fast you can't even tell what it is.  So yeah, there needs to be 
a way to load this sucker down with a lot of polygons in the near future.  
640K is not going to cut it.  One way to bog it down would be to store 
texture maps in extended memory, since the textures are often large chuncks 
of memory.  Or go to a 32 bit compiler.  Ah well, wishful thinking for now.

Hey I haven't gotten to see the book yet either, (weren't the contributors 
supposed to get free copies, Bernie?)  But anyway I heard it was good, so 
I'll offer my preliminary congratulations.  Also from what I heard it got a 
pretty prominent position in the bookstore, so hopefully lots of people 
will buy it.  I was pleased to hear that Mitchell Waite enjoyed the solar 
system world so much.  Too bad he didn't mention who created it (myself) 
until much later in the book.

For the system at work I combined the solar system with some stars and the 
"spaceship".  (My "official" version doen't have the spaceship.)  The 
official release also has a more detailed explanation of the solar system 
world, for those who want more information than was in the book.  I have a 
version where I attached sound to each of the planets.  It plays back the 
name of the planet (from a digitized file) in Korean when you touch one!  
(Why Korean? Well, why not!)  This addition to the world took about an hour 
(although I had to code some of the sound "driver").

I have made some new additions to my "personal" version of Rend386, 
including "portals" that destroy the current world and load in a new world, 
without ever leaving the program!  Also I have integrated the BOB language 
in with Rend386 (similar to what Eric Elliot has done) to provide animation 
and INTERACTIVE animation.  So I need to add some more commands to the 
BOB-REND386 and spend some time creating new worlds.  But then I will 
release it.  This will be an extension to the "two glove" version of 
Rend386 that I have put up on the net, so you can see all the source except 
for the Object Glove part (the glove driver).  If anyone wants info on 
Object Glove I'd be happy to forward it.

		-Mark Pflaging