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SoaH City Message Board

Are you using HWA?


Looki

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Hey folks. I was just wondering if anybody of you is using the HWA version of MMF2 for his games that use Sonic Worlds.

I haven't seen anybody talking about MMF2 HWA here yet.

HWA means hardware-acceleration, specifically, graphics card acceleration. Usually, MMF2 uses the CPU to calculate graphics, but MMF2 HWA uses DirectX, which uses your graphics card.

Benefits:

  • Much faster. I changed the window size to something like 1280x1024, the engine would still run at 60 FPS on HWA, but drops to 30 on non-HWA.
  • The whole thing is just smoother. Even though the FPS counter is saying 60 all the time, some weird lags could appear while the screen is moving. Not in HWA.
  • Smoother scaling & rotation, if the quality parameter is set to 1 (Does not fit Sonic though)
  • Support for pixel shaders (HLSL) to create effects (Underwater effect, color adjusting etc.)

The disadvantages are that it's beta (pretty stable, though), full-screen does not work, and some (graphical) extensions are not converted yet, so you can't use them properly, but well, Sonic Worlds doesn't use any third party extensions anyway.

http://theclickteam.com/epicenter/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=74202&page=1

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Yes. There were a few bugs that some people encountered. One, some things crashed when trying to use the whole screen. I had to find workarounds [the lightning and flashes in South Island] Also, none of the fade ins or outs work so I had to replace them with alpha channels for now. otherwise, everything runs way faster and lets many people play it without complaining about the frame rate.

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Are they ever actually going to release the full version? Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't it been in beta for a couple of years?

Indeed - The latest beta is more than one year old :(

Yves (Programmer of MMF2 HWA) promised to release the new beta very very soon, though. You can use Worlds in HWA without any problems, as I said before: It does not use third party extensions. Backdrops, Actives etc. work perfectly in HWA.

And yes, the runtime still has some bugs, but I haven't encountered any when using Worlds yet.

Oh, btw, the HWA version is a separate exe. You can just download it, try it out (When loading Worlds make sure to set the display mode to Direct3D 9), and if you don't like it, use the normal MMF2.exe instead.

Transitions and bitwise ink effects do not work either.

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Actually Looki, you can use ink effects in HWA. I've been able too.

I was working on a MM game in MMF2, but every time Megaman changed color,

the game drops by 10-15 fps. If I used 8bit sprites, it's no problem, but 16bit of above...just lags.

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Hey, you can't (I'm 100% sure.).

You are able to use pixel shaders ("effects").

The MMF2HWA exe does not even give you the ability to set/change them!

I don't know what happens when you open a normal MMF2 mfa with ink effects in HWA, but I doubt they'd work.

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