forums.ps2dev.org

[JohnVenture]

Hi there,

There is a neat, free plasma pong game developped on PC by Steve Taylor:

www.plasmapong.com




Could this game be ported on the PSP ? Could the console hardware render the plasma fast enough to make it playable ?

I have emailed the author which has heard about the PSP homebrew community and is interested into eventually starting a port, but isn t sure the PSP could handle the plasma rendering, owning none hiself.

It seems the fluid calculation are very CPU intensive. I don't know much about programming myself so I thought I'd come to you guys.

Any expert advice here ?

[johnsto]

That game struggled a little on the 3.2GHz 6800GT machine I use at work... getting it to run on a PSP would be an interesting challenge...

[groepaz]

then again "plasma" is the one effect where you can cheat like crazy :) ask someone from the demo coders for help, i'm very certain he can make it work on the PSP :=P
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http://www.hitmen-console.org
http://hitmen.c02.at/files/yapspd/

[sandberg]

Normally i would agree with you groepaz, but this is not ordinary plasma like seen 1000x times in demos. It is basically modelled liquid fluid, so it does take up a lot of math to do it. I checked the site for the game yesterday, and there is a lot of links for the math behind the liquid fluid stuff.

But .. Ofcause it is possible on the PSP :-) It's just a matter of finding the right way to cheat :-)
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Br, Sandberg

[AnonymousTipster]

Well firstly the PSP's screen is smaller than a PC's resolution, so the fluid grid can be smaller and lead to less processing. I expect the algorithms could be implemented in the ME quite well if you want to use kernel, and that would leave the CPU free for other tasks. The VFPU may come in useful with that math crunching too.

As long as it's playable, you could make the physics matrix as small as possible, but interpolate the graphical matrix, so it looks more fluid than the calculations are actually calculating.

It may just be possible, and it's an awesome game (ran 30-50fps on 2.2ghz w/ Radeon9800 pro).

[groepaz]