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cobbpg
Registered: Jan 2022
Posts: 24 |
Taking NUFLI one step further
I'm working on a new converter for creating images the C64 can display with as much freedom as possible: NUFLI Studio preview video.
The images are NUFLI with the sprite colour limitations lifted: all sprite colours outside the FLI bug area can potentially change in every row. While this is impossible in general due to CPU time limitations, the solution is to generate the speedcode that updates the registers ahead of time. The code generator can make informed decisions about dropping the least impactful register changes to fit everything into the available budget. In practice, most pictures don't require all the 10 possible colour updates on every scanline, far from it.
Another big innovation compared to Mufflon is the improvement in conversion speed. Lifting the sprite colour change limitations makes it easy to fully parallelise the brute force colour search step for each 48x2 pixel area (or 24x2 pixels over the FLI bug), and this allowed me to implement it as a compute shader. The whole process takes about 0.25 seconds on my three-year-old gaming laptop. Besides, when using the internal editor, only the affected areas are recomputed, and they can be previewed in VICE right away (note that the video shows some lag that's probably introduced by OBS somehow; it doesn't happen outside recording).
My hope is that making the feedback practically instantaneous (even when using an external image editor) opens the door for pixel artists to develop a much better intuition about this image format. Also, removing the limitation of only changing sprite colours every second row should make it a lot less frustrating to work with.
I'm not sure what to call this image format. This is 95% NUFLI, the only real difference is that the speedcode is also generated ahead of time (when run on NTSC, there's a patching step done by the displayer routine to make it work), so the files are 4096 bytes bigger (they load from $1000 instead of $2000, the rest of the structure is almost identical). I'm leaning towards "NUFLI2" to make it somewhat search engine friendly, but I'm open to ideas.
At the moment I'm in the process of writing a manual for the tool and a deep-dive article about the technical details. Hopefully neither of those will take too long! |
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Jetboy
Registered: Jul 2006
Posts: 329 |
Quoting cobbpgI'm hoping to be able to release it all later this month.
Christmas is coming early this year :) I just can't wait :) |
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Jammer
Registered: Nov 2002
Posts: 1335 |
SNUFLI like Speedcode NUFLI? And has some ring to it ;) |
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cobbpg
Registered: Jan 2022
Posts: 24 |
Or RUFLI for Rejuvenated Underlay FLI, pronounced like "roughly". :P |
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Jetboy
Registered: Jul 2006
Posts: 329 |
PROFLI?
FLIPROQUO?
COBBPGFLI ?
ONUFLI (Optimised NUFLI, or Oh my god! FLI)? |
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sebalozlepsi
Registered: Mar 2010
Posts: 23 |
NUFLIX |
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Copyfault
Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 476 |
The example video link in the first post is really something! Looks VERY promising and the "response time" you have while... "pixelling" is simply next level!
Not meant too serious, but you should maybe keep this for the next Performers-Demo and name the mode 'NextFli' ;)
But ok, joking aside, I get that the core routine that runs on the C64 is... NUFLI. The improvements are more on the preparation side, where it for sure makes a f**kload of sense to presort sprite colour reg writes... so, somehow I tend to think more of a "new Mufflon" to materialize soon, instead of a new "mode", since it's still NUFLI. Ofc, you already threw in the things that have to be implemented in a future version: full VIC register f**kery! THIS would really justify to call for a new mode, and I know at least one person that has this idea since a few years (Ptoing, DO YOU READ?)
Please DO NOT interpret any evil criticism in this text, it's really solely meant constructive, and I bow in deep respect of seeing that this NUFLI-mode-dependencies have been cracked (in a way) so you are able to feed this through shader logics!
Looking forward to reading *that* article you're writing on all of this :)
Cheeeerz
Copyfault |
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Martin Piper
Registered: Nov 2007
Posts: 718 |
Quoting CopyfaultBut ok, joking aside, I get that the core routine that runs on the C64 is... NUFLI. The improvements are more on the preparation side, where it for sure makes a f**kload of sense to presort sprite colour reg writes... so, somehow I tend to think more of a "new Mufflon" to materialize soon, instead of a new "mode", since it's still NUFLI.
The question of what to name something when the C64 display mode effect is the same, but the data preparation is what makes it special, is an interesting one.
When I did coding for the video sequences in Hunter's Moon, it just uses multicolour bitmap with sprites over the top. There's nothing special about the display mode. But the algorithm compressing all the data, making it fast enough to decompress while optimising bitmap and sprite data, that's the special part. But does the data processing deserve to get a name? |
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WVL
Registered: Mar 2002
Posts: 900 |
Quote: NUFLIX
Winner. NUFLIX sounds good, is a pun to Netflix and can be explained as NUFLI extended (which is wat is is)
Now ehr.. is it possible to modify this to make UFLI max pictures or would a modified MUFFLON work better?
And, where did cobbpg come from? |
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Oswald
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 5086 |
Quote: Quoting CopyfaultBut ok, joking aside, I get that the core routine that runs on the C64 is... NUFLI. The improvements are more on the preparation side, where it for sure makes a f**kload of sense to presort sprite colour reg writes... so, somehow I tend to think more of a "new Mufflon" to materialize soon, instead of a new "mode", since it's still NUFLI.
The question of what to name something when the C64 display mode effect is the same, but the data preparation is what makes it special, is an interesting one.
When I did coding for the video sequences in Hunter's Moon, it just uses multicolour bitmap with sprites over the top. There's nothing special about the display mode. But the algorithm compressing all the data, making it fast enough to decompress while optimising bitmap and sprite data, that's the special part. But does the data processing deserve to get a name?
no, the difference is not only in data prep, it updates more color registers than NUFLI. |
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ChristopherJam
Registered: Aug 2004
Posts: 1409 |
Very cool. Looks like there are a lot of ideas in there I've been meaning to implement for one of the other newfangled modes, but I've been a bit too distracted with crunchers to get around to.
Looking forward to see some new artwork coming out to take advantage of it!
(Oh, and another vote for nufliX btw :D) |
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