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Oswald
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 5086 |
Sorting
are sorters really so slow in games? :) I have made my unrolled version for my theoretical game (;), and it takes 132 rlines to sort 32 numbers o_O worst case is ~200 lines. tho when its the case of 4 numbers have to be swapped only it does the job in ~10 lines. wastes a lot of memory but I like it :) |
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Oswald
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 5086 |
how about binary trees? %) |
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doynax
Account closed
Registered: Oct 2004
Posts: 212 |
Quote: how about binary trees? %)
I doubt it. Any kind of balancing would be way to complicated, and you'd almost certainly encounter nasty edge cases without it. Having to implement an AVL or red-black tree on this machine terrifies me. A splay tree just might be feasible but I'm not sure whether it'd solve the problem. Anyone here with a real CS background who can tell for sure?
Unless you mean a heap sort with it's implicit tree? |
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ChristopherJam
Registered: Aug 2004
Posts: 1408 |
Hmm. I'm sure I've used heap-sort for something on this beasty. May have been hidden-surface-removal for a solid 3d renderer.. (edge events as you traverse a scanline push/pop surfaces) |
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JackAsser
Registered: Jun 2002
Posts: 2014 |
Quote: I doubt it. Any kind of balancing would be way to complicated, and you'd almost certainly encounter nasty edge cases without it. Having to implement an AVL or red-black tree on this machine terrifies me. A splay tree just might be feasible but I'm not sure whether it'd solve the problem. Anyone here with a real CS background who can tell for sure?
Unless you mean a heap sort with it's implicit tree?
Nah... stick to radix sort and the like since they're O(n). General sorting using trees etc are O(n log n) and on this platform they'll have a nice quite big constant put in front also due to overhead. Those constants are ofcourse negliable for very large n's, however a multiplexer doesn't have large n. ;D
For a complete sort I have serious doubts that anything can out perform a well written radix sort (2 step bucket sort as you have shown before).
If you have similar sort order from frame to frame I'd recommend bubble sort actually. They're O(n^2) worst case but O(n) if sort order is similar + they're dead easy to implement and optimize.
Maybe one could have some code that would realise when to use a full sort with radix-sort and when to "just fix" the sort order using bubble sort. This would improve the average time ofcourse but slightly worsen the worst case ofcourse.
Also as Cadaver mentioned, it's seldom the sort order actually changes that much from one frame to another. On could be smart when you get new enemies etc by spreading the sort for the actors that are about to enter the screen, over several frames.
F.e. you will need some kind of data structure to know what kind of actors that will emerge soon in the scrolling direction. You could have those somewhat pre-sorter and/or prepare-sort them on the way there.
Tons of ideas.... =) |
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ChristopherJam
Registered: Aug 2004
Posts: 1408 |
Hmm. For most shooters the enemy paths are completely predetermined. You could pre-sort all of them (keeping dead enemies onscreen with a blank sprite definition), or at least provide new sortlists for any points in time that a bubble sort is going to be expensive.
That would even allow you to determine in advance when a slightly shuffled order is acceptable :)
Speaking of load management, can anyone think of a situation that an 8-sprite muxer that needs to handle a player in an arbitrary position will always be able to cope with that a 7-sprite muxer with the player on sprite 0 would not? (other than forcing the player to avoid certain y-ranges by using scenery collisions) |
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doynax
Account closed
Registered: Oct 2004
Posts: 212 |
Quote:Hmm. For most shooters the enemy paths are completely predetermined. You could pre-sort all of them (keeping dead enemies onscreen with a blank sprite definition), or at least provide new sortlists for any points in time that a bubble sort is going to be expensive. Yeah, that'd probably work. If you were writing Armalyte 2..
But it would be way to limiting for my tastes. You've got to at least have bullets fired towards the player in the kind of game I'm trying to write.
Quote:Speaking of load management, can anyone think of a situation that an 8-sprite muxer that needs to handle a player in an arbitrary position will always be able to cope with that a 7-sprite muxer with the player on sprite 0 would not? (other than forcing the player to avoid certain y-ranges by using scenery collisions) Sure. Bullets in a vertical shooter tend to be separate from the player and able to reuse the player's sprite. As long as they are spawned a couple of scanlines above the player at least.
Besides I'm happy with allowing a bit of flicker every now and then, especially if it's mostly in the two player mode, in return for a greater amount of objects and not having to worry myself to death over how the enemy paths should be designed as to guarantee zero flicker. Best-effort multiplexing FTW! |
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Oswald
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 5086 |
I'm strongly beside that the player sprite shouldnt be handled exclusively, except the case of more than 8 sprites on a line. also if this happens I'd alternatively reject sprites frame to frame, thus in a flickery fashion but still all sprites would be visible. I've seen this in some soccer game, and I like it |
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ChristopherJam
Registered: Aug 2004
Posts: 1408 |
Fair enough on the flicker risk.
I'd actually been assuming chars or bitmap plotting for the bullets, but yes, if they are to be sprites then an 8 sprite muxer makes more sense than special casing the player. |
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ChristopherJam
Registered: Aug 2004
Posts: 1408 |
This one's has taken up residence in my brain..
Now I've gone back and read the thread properly instead of skimming the first three quarters before reading the rest, I've actually noticed the earlier points about a danmaku shooter being the aim well before the Ikaruga subthread, and that the whole idea was to minimise worst case in a very frame incoherent shooter - methinks my insertion sort commentary was a little out of place.
I did have some inspiration last night when I realised that for any displayable set of actors there will never be more than eight sprites in any 21 line bucket (else the first and last will be too close together to display), so then I went off and did some research on optimal sorting for small sets of numbers. I eventually found
this page on Bose-Nelson sorting networks, got a swap macro down to 22 cycles ( ldx a
ldy b
lda actor_y,x
cmp actor_y,y
bge noswap
stx b
sty a
), decided that was too slow and started handcoding cases for smaller lists of sprites in a bucket (eg 70 cycles to take 3 zero page locations containing actor indices, sort them by actor_y and add them to the actor_next list),
but even then, I lose about 26 cycles just to placing each actor onto the end of the zero page array of actors-in-that bucket, which only leaves me an average of 19 cycles per actor for the sorting and adding to the actor_next list if I'm to beat the routine above.
It looks like @doynax' two pass radix sort still wins - I'm impressed! |
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doynax
Account closed
Registered: Oct 2004
Posts: 212 |
ChristopherJam: In practice that radix-sort ended up needing 34 scanlines, for 32-sprites, rather than 28. It just wasn't practical to keep keep the set of sprites compacted like that. Not when combined with certain other features anyway.
So maybe a Bose-Nelson sorting network, whatever that is, could still be competitive? |
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