I tried the demo. Without the trees, it runs 10fps faster, now 30fps. You really ought to allow the user to select the video mode, that could have a major effect on the speed.
Interestingly alpha versus masked textures makes no difference to the speed. I guess masked textures just aren't optimized in the way I thought they were, which would explain why the masked objects in the distance appear fuzzy rather than being noisy as a true masked texture would appear. That also means that there's no benefit to using masked textures ratheer than alpha.
You could still sort the polygons better though. Imagine you have the following polygons, both one sided, both facing downward:
Note that they do not intersect. That is important.
All you need to do to draw these polygons right is to note that the bottom polygon is completely on the FRONT side of the plane of the top polygon.
In this case, you would draw the top polygon first, and then the bottom polygon. If the polygons do not interssect, there is no way for the top poylgon to ever draw in front of the bottom, because they are both one sided.
So you need to set up your mesh so that all polygons on the front side of any polygon are in the list after it.
Of course, things are not always that simple. It may be impossible to create a list that follows this rule, and some polygons may need to be split. You are, essentially, building a BSP tree,l and I know that is a problem often found with BSP trees. But because you're building grass, rather than a level, you can choose to discard some of the grass rather than clip it if it cannot be inserted into the list.
Turning off terrain morphing might improve speed.
Also, use flip false. By using Flip True, the system is displaying 30fps, when in fact I may be getting 55, because the refresh rate of the video mode is 60. Perhaps this is why I see no change in speed with masking, though I doubt it.
Interestingly alpha versus masked textures makes no difference to the speed. I guess masked textures just aren't optimized in the way I thought they were, which would explain why the masked objects in the distance appear fuzzy rather than being noisy as a true masked texture would appear. That also means that there's no benefit to using masked textures ratheer than alpha.
You could still sort the polygons better though. Imagine you have the following polygons, both one sided, both facing downward:
------- / /
Note that they do not intersect. That is important.
All you need to do to draw these polygons right is to note that the bottom polygon is completely on the FRONT side of the plane of the top polygon.
In this case, you would draw the top polygon first, and then the bottom polygon. If the polygons do not interssect, there is no way for the top poylgon to ever draw in front of the bottom, because they are both one sided.
So you need to set up your mesh so that all polygons on the front side of any polygon are in the list after it.
Of course, things are not always that simple. It may be impossible to create a list that follows this rule, and some polygons may need to be split. You are, essentially, building a BSP tree,l and I know that is a problem often found with BSP trees. But because you're building grass, rather than a level, you can choose to discard some of the grass rather than clip it if it cannot be inserted into the list.
Turning off terrain morphing might improve speed.
Also, use flip false. By using Flip True, the system is displaying 30fps, when in fact I may be getting 55, because the refresh rate of the video mode is 60. Perhaps this is why I see no change in speed with masking, though I doubt it.