RE: Are people interested in 2d games libraries?
Ray Smith wrote:
>
> Not really, it does hide all the "Windows" stuff but DirectX supplies
> a way for "modern" video hardware to be used using a single set of
> API's. (The same way OpenGL does).
Yes, that's part of it now, but when DirectX was first introduced, it
was because every game-player who upgraded from Windows 3.1 to Windows
95 was complaining that their DOS games crashed or didn't work or
whatever under Windows 95. So the 'direct' part of DirectX was developed
to get Windows out of the way and give developers a method for accessing
hardware directly without Windows getting all finiky. The unified API
came later.
> If you intend for other people to play your games, then you should
> seriously consider using DirectX (or other modern technologies) as DOS
> apps (especially games that access video memory directly) rarely work
> on modern operating systems (WindowsNT, Windows2000 and I assume
> WindowsXP).
Maybe I didn't say it very clearly in my last message. I'm not
programming in DOS, I'm using Windows. Also, there are no speed issues
involved with the graphics, hence, the standard Win32/Win32Lib API is
more than adequate. There is no need to bang on the hardware unless
you're moving massive amounts of data in and out of the video buffers,
and I'm not. In a Risk game, a country changes colour once in a while,
the mouse pointer moves around and the dice change. That's pretty much
it unless the programmer puts in a bunch of bells and whistles. I
didn't. Even if I decide to sometime down the road, as long as I'm not
animating more than a 160x110 area of the screen, I still won't need a
heavy-duty graphics engine.
Also, an 1152x864, 90-dpi, 24m+ colour display is advantageous for a
highly-detailed map. Which I do have. Both are available using the
standard windows API and are relatively simple to deal with code-wise.
> What are you computer specs?
IBM Intellistation MPro (Dual PII's, 512mb) with an Intense3D Wildcat
(16mb display, 64mb texture) video card with an add-on geometry
accelerator. It's a pair of full-length cards with their own build-in
cooling fan, still considered a high-performance card even today. Here
are the 2D specs:
Vectors, 10-pixel, solid-color (vec/sec) 7.8 M
Anti-aliased vectors, 10-pixel (vec/sec) 3.7 M
Blit, screen-to-screen (pixels/sec) 118 M
Area clears (pixels/sec) 5.2 G
Solid fills (pixels/sec) 310 M
Text, 9x13 (chars/sec) 1,671 K
In it's day, it was a $10,000 card. I was lucky to have it thrown in
with the system when I bought it.
> I run invaders (an action euAllegro game) on a P120 with 1MB graphics
> card reasonably well. Any sort of board game with minimal animation
> should work easily with euAllegro.
Yup, I'm sure they would. All I'm saying is that if I don't need to
access a DOS-type display and don't need fast graphics, there's no need
to complicate my life. I do need a high-resolution map (most Risk clones
use a 640x480 map and I wanted to do something bigger) so there's no
reason to put another API in the middle of things. I'm still trying to
understand the intricacies of Win32 having only coded the Amiga GUI in
my previous incarnation.
As for others playing my game, if I ever do get around to finishing it
and releasing it, anyone with a video card capable of 1152x864 and 16
million colours will be able to play it without any problem as long as
they have one of those modern video cards you were mentioning.
I'm sure your library is great and I'm still going to check it out. I
just don't need it for this particular project. Now that you've got the
download sorted out, I'll be going back to try again.
Thanks, Ray.
-Ron T.
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