Engine overhaul

[ConcernedCoder]

The graphics and sophistication of this game have continued to improve, and it's inspiring! Only one problem... the engine is so crusty! It's gotten to the point where a re-release of one of the earliest versions of this game has a more modern engine than this game. This is what I thought would happen in 0.7.0, but I was naive. We're not running this game on Mint 6 anymore; we need an engine for the Ubuntu and Zorin crowd! I noticed the Linux version has a frame interpolation option that the windows version doesn't have. In a modern, unified engine, these quirks would be unnecessary! Modern engines can run 2D motion graphics at arbitrary framerates, with asynchronous compute! That's what we need.

[swagtoy]

We are working on a new engine called neotux.

The rest of these assumptions seem silly and baseless so I'm going to ignore them. The frame interpolation is on all versions, in any case, we are getting rid of the frame cap in the new engine.

[ConcernedCoder]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oxJadWtcI1E&pp=ygUYbXkgbG9uZ2VzdCB5ZWFoIGJveSBldmVy

[ConcernedCoder]

By the way, I just wanted to say that if anything is going to be at the top priority for the new engine it's VULKAN. Everyone loves OpenGL, but vulkan will ensure lasting modern driver support, smooth performance, and low-level compatibility with all sorts of hardware level optimizations. It should be the first choice, then OpenGL, then SDL.

[swagtoy]

We are using BGFX which will roll vulkan, though I also considered SDL_gpu's api; but if it goes haywire or ends up being a mess, we'll just use OpenGL directly again. The sdl renderer already has a vulkan backend, technically.

The speed benefits are seldom worth it and also depend on how you use it; we are a 2d platformer and barely render that much.

[ConcernedCoder]

Performance gains may be minimal, but I simply crave that low level API. Also, I assume that this engine overhaul would be an 0.8.0 release, and not just a patch.