Use buffers to process graphics. This would decrease slowdowns and lag.
The idea is good, but it involve lots of work.
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If decision is made to implant this, I suggest the work to be spitted to all coders.
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Just to enlighten everyone who wasn't on IRC when this was discussed:
so basically we lag to hell thanks to sprites
mhm
technically it doesn't lag because it's sprites
it lags because those sprites are stored in a very compact way and have to be decompressed and processed before rendering
and they don't bother to cache the result of that processing
so every frame the engine goes to reindex each shp with its palette
and recompute the voxels somehow
which I don't quite understand (or want to)
I may do not know what I am speaking about, but how about creating a buffert?
that requires memory
sure we can try that nowadays
personally I haven't tried that because there are plenty of other things to do that are less messy to do
Of course.
how much memery are we talking about? and how big improvment is a buffert?
I think you're looking for a "buffer", not "buffet"
though that second option is more delicious
as for memory usage, needs some math
if we want to decompress each shp before use, that's probably 50% more space than compressed shps
shps that only use one palette (non-remappables) would need just one buffer, which would be twice the size of the shp itself (16 bit color)
remappables, er, would need a separate buffer for each remap
Keep in mind that this is the best thing that can be done when it comes to decreasing slowdowns and lag. Thing such as "rewrite the drawing code" and such is not going to happen.