The Code That Draws Itself
There’s a technique from the early days of game programming that I keep coming back to. It sounds wrong the first time you hear it. The idea is that the fastest way to draw a sprite isn’t to read its pixels and copy them to the screen. It’s to compile the sprite into machine code and then run it. The sprite doesn’t get drawn. The sprite does the drawing. That’s compiled sprites. And understanding why they worked requires understanding exactly what makes regular sprite drawing slow. ...