Speed! Speed! I need to be faster...

This was a very difficult week, I was able to finally integrate and run the Mystic framework in XBOX360, finally!, and I was expecting to spend most of this week trying to improve performance of the framework, but after so many tries, it seems that XBOX doesn't have enough horse power to deliver all real time calculations I have in the framework as fast as I was expecting, sometimes I had constant framerates and sometimes from no where dropped quite a lot even in Windows.

I got stuck for about 2 days just optimizing the code as fast as I could and still enjoying the real-time calculations, but finally found a road block and couldn't find a way to improve it more, so now step 2 is to start caching values and make sure that the animations run perfectly. Luckily, I came up with many last minute optimizations and a few more are still in my mind, but I am getting now solid 60 FPS in-game even in XBOX, and this is without using multi-threading in the animation modules, when I added the multi-threading support I started getting even lower framerates from time to time, due to the local variables created per thread, so sometimes caching and re-using the same variables can really help improve the speed of the calculations but makes it impossible for some threaded blocks of code, specially for vertex calculations since I am not using the GPU at this moment for that due to the physics calculations per vertex. I will publish a video of the framework running in-game pretty soon, and it is working very nicely.

Just a quick screnshot, the character in the middle is being rendered using the Mystic Framework, the others using the old skeleton model, I will post a video of the small details achieved with the Mystic Framework animation tool.

Still need to investigate why in XBOX the color replacement technique is not working in the same way as in Windows, but in this case the color of the character in the middle was dynamically changed to green/blue for testing.