Posted December 05, 2020 by Bad Sector
The two big changes in version 0.99l is adding support for Android devices, including some rudimentary touch support (see below) and a big performance improvement in the 3D hardware accelerated versions. In addition a small performance improvement for the SDL software rendering versions was made to avoid unnecessary palette updates.
The Android version is mainly designed with gamepad support in mind (and really mostly tested with the OUYA microconsole though i also tested it a bit with Nvidia Shield) but i decided to try and add some rudimentary touch controls. There is not any sort of visual feedback for the controls (which would clutter the screen anyway) but the control scheme is rather simple:
The 3D hardware acceleration improvement was done by batching the triangles to render per texture. Previously the 3D hardware accelerated backends were drawing each triangle one by one like the software rendering version but this had overhead in slower hardware... and AMD's Windows OpenGL driver which now is about 17 times faster than previously (for comparison Mesa under Linux on the same GPU barely saw any difference). The Direct3D version should now be playable even on something like a Pentium 133MHz with a 3DFX Voodoo 1 accelerator.