Honestly though, you're probably better off using something like Allegro.
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Anonymous2005-01-20 16:31
I was under the impression that they're trying to phase out the Directdraw layer in DX9 ... am I mistaken? I guess I could develop in DX8 instead ... or maybe OpenGL ... so many choices ... "orz
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Anonymous2005-01-20 17:58
OpenGL? Why would you try to do 2D with a 3D API?
Unless you really need some neato lighting effects, shaders and z-buffering there's no use for it. Yet it seems you haven't coded a actual game before. Some realism please.
And I highly recommend you look elsewhere from DirectDraw. It's ugly and there are a lot nicer APIs to use out there, not to mention more portable.
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Anonymous2005-01-20 18:27
Well, you only need to write a nifty 2d-in-3d framework once, and you can write your game based on that to get all the nifty effects like alpha blending, color blending and sprite stretching/rotation for "free".
Oh and shader effects if you're into that sort of stuff.
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Anonymous2005-01-20 21:15
allegro is VERY easy to make a game with. although, it's much cooler to use something like SDL (since allegro has a lot of wierdness left over from DOS)
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Anonymous2005-01-21 0:57
>>5
Don't get ahead of yourself. You're probably biting off more that you can chew without realising it. Besides, if that's the way you want to go, use a different API. Reinventing the wheel won't get you anywhere (unless you want it as a learning exercise).
for example, it has builtin functions to play FLI/FLC animations :)
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Anonymous2005-01-21 21:21
Thanks for the link, I love a good read. :D
I don't think FLI is that odd though, at least since you don't have to compile it in if you don't use it.
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Soulwound!a8SG0gjxDg2005-01-29 20:58
This isn't a 2D engine, but you might want to check out Irrlicht, it's open-source freeware, and you're allowed to produce closed content with it, even for a profit, according to their website.
I've seen a couple demos of it and it's pretty damn smooth, not to mention you don't have to code for a specific rendered because apparently the engine takes care of that for you.
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Anonymous2005-01-30 23:43
Try www.blitzbasic.com. Blitz 3D and Blitz+ very easy to use 2D graphic commands. BlitzMax is 2D in OpenGL, and only for Mac so far, but looks pretty hot.
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Anonymous2005-02-04 10:01 (sage)
You can use the SDL for most 2D stuff: http://www.libsdl.org/ it's very easy to use for n00bs like me.
A new programming paradigm based on parallelism, very easy to get used to, and really simplifying 2D games programming. Comes with a full, simple 2D, input, and sound API built over Allegro. And best of all, what you end up writing is good old C.
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Anonymous2005-02-15 17:36
>>13
Does it exist in other languages that Spanish? Otherwise it's not worth much. At least there's no obvious way to make the website readable... and I'm not touching babblefish :)
Sure use DX if you want your code to be totally unportable.
SDL is where it's at; you can tell it which graphics libraries to use without making any change to your program code. Hence it's possible to tell SDL to use aalib instead of opengl and have Unreal Tournament running in a console. Which is pretty funny.
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Anonymous2005-02-24 10:57
>>16
Given that Windows/DX is the biggest market by a long shot, why care about portability?
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Anonymous2005-02-24 13:17
And besides, portability conflicts with maximum performance. Anything 100% portable is bound to be slower, less user-friendly, and more problematic.
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Anonymous2005-02-24 15:07
Anything 100% portable is bound to be slower
this is not necessarily true. besides, you don't have to support every platform on the planet.
less user-friendly
now that's an interesting assertion. how come?
and more problematic
care to elaborate?
imo, it's not if you know how to produce clean code (see NetBSD). on the contrary, porting your software to more architectures helps you in finding bugs that would've gone unnoticed. now, if you're speaking of eg. os specific feature/oddities, well, ok, but that's what cross-platform libs are for.
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Anonymous2005-02-24 17:18
Slower: Of course, I was just counting Linux on PCs and Windows. Problem is, something portable is not specifically designed to take advantage of each platform and do things the way each platform "likes" them.
Less user-friendly: Tends to be so because most (all of what I've seen) portable GUI libraries provide less agile interfaces and less versatile controls in some things like keyboard control, for example. So unless you're willing to develop a custom portable interface that accomodates best to your application, you'll have to stick to interfaces usually slower than what can be done on native Windows and native X/KDE/etc.
Problematic: Installers aren't really portable, so you either make a mess, or work several times on these. Then there are oddities and special features that will make it experience strange behaviors or sluggish performance, and certain features from some OS you'd kill to have in some other. Because they are not specifically designed for a particular OS or system, something unexpected is a little more likely to happen, like not finding a color mode you need supported by the hardware drivers or whatever.
Both platforms "like" OpenGL, so I don't see where the slow would be coming from. An API-independent graphics engine, of course, is a big advantage, and obviously not for free performance-wise, but I can guarantee you that your call to DrawVertexBuffer() deciding between the DX or GL pathsor something like that is NOT going to be the bottleneck; it's going to be the actual drawing.
For user interfaces: games tend to write their own UI anyway. (this is a thread about games, right... besides there's plenty of portable GUI libraries as well, and speed isn't even an issue there, lol event driven architecture waiting for input 99% of the time)
Installers: oh go cry me a river.
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Anonymous2005-02-25 16:36 (sage)
>>17
It's another tool in the bug-hunting toolbox.
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Anonymous2005-02-27 8:21
>so I don't see where the slow would be coming from
Linux seems to be slower than Windows for multimedia applications. Maybe it's lack of optimized drivers. But I suspect the OS is just not designed to be optimal at that. When they designed Unix 1000 years ago graphics almost didn't even exist. When they designed X 500 years ago graphics were that slow thing you can paint a box on and call it a window, and they made it client/server based which is good for business and bad for gaming.
games tend to write their own UI anyway
That's true. Though other graphics-oriented applications like CADs will use standard GUIs.
Installing stuff on Linux suks. It's either wonderfully automatic and it spurts files to about all of your directories including your lame little home directory, or a complete pain in the ass, and either way you'll have to redo the installer for Windows.
Installing stuff on Linux isn't that hard. The problem is that most people don't understand it well. the /lib/ (or /usr/lib/ or /usr/local/lib/) directory is where the libraries go (think Linux version of .dll). The /bin/ ( or /usr/bin/ or /usr/local/bin/) directory is where the actual executable goes. The /usr/share/ or /usr/local/share/ is where some shared resources go (default theme files, sometimes config files, etc). Usually the default config files go in /etc/ and the personalized ones are in your home directory. As for the confusion with / vs /usr/ vs /usr/local... /lib/ and /bin/ are usually for low-level system type stuff like ls, rm or unlink. /usr/bin/ /usr/lib/ and /usr/share/ are usually for user-level type programs, like GNOME, X11, KDE, etc that are downloaded-installed as binaries. The /usr/local/ ones are typically for ones that you downloaded source-compiled-installed on your own. It's not the most organized way to do things, but if you know what the basic idea is, it's not that hard to figure things out. Personally, I like the OSX way with everything a program is in it's own package. So you know where everything pertaining to a certain program is (minus the personal prefs/caches/etc).
And you call that simple. Why do I have to have my stuff spread over two dozen directories...
My preferred model is: you copy the software to a directory, it stays there, doens't put crap anywhere else, nor uses any registry - just a INI file where the EXE file is (libraries and resources where the EXE file is too, or subdirectories). In fact it doesn't need to be "installed"; it's relocatable, even across different computers, and doesn't mess with anything. Think eMule or Media Player Classic, for example.
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Anonymous2005-03-02 2:18
>>25
NO. USING SOMETHING MUCH MORE CONVOLUTED AND OBTUSE MAKES YOU A BETTER HUMAN BEING.
Problem in Linux is anything beyond what's included in your distribution is bound to be a pain in the ass, and you'll probably need to recompile it for it to work decently, which makes commercial software unfeasible and Linux failing.
Let's take a look at Mozilla - one of the best, simplest software for both Windows and Linux. They had to make their own installer for Linux so it wouldn't suck.
Windows requirements: Windows 95, 98, or 98SE, Windows Me, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, or Windows XP, which translates to "ZOMG ANY WINDOWS YOU WILL HAVE"
Linux requirements: The following library versions (or compatible) are required: glibc 2.*2.4*, XFree86 3.3.x, GTK 1.2.x, Glib 1.2.x, Libstdc++ 2.9.0. Red Hat Linux *7*.0, Debian 3.0, and SuSE 7.3 (or later) installations should work.
Lol.
And of course, forget that. You'll need to recompile it with xft for the fonts to not suck HUGE, GREASY, OOZY COCKS like usual.
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Anonymous2005-03-02 19:10
Compiling isn't a pain in the ass:
./configure; make; make install
...but I really wouldn't expect a normal person to do that. And God forbid if you're missing a dependancy.
I'm an IT professional (SERIOUSLY, nevermind I post here), and I know how to do all that, but I don't want to waste my time recompiling every PoS I want to install on my system, and my boss doesn't like my time spent on this crap either. I'm hired to program the intarweb (actually, a portal), not to check I have all libraries, recompile software, and fix ugly fonts.
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Anonymous2005-03-03 10:33
>>30
youre an IT amateur who programs web... the weakest programming there is
stfu you dont know anything
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Anonymous2005-03-03 12:45
Yeah really, CGI programmers disgust me with the arrogance.
"Oh wow I can do SQL and PHP, I'm king of the world baby!!!"
And actually, I feel more comfortable with low-level C programming, and I like to deal with such stuff in my free time - just not when I have to get something done in a limited amount of time.
You two probably have too much time on your hands, once you get a job and are on a deadline we'll talk about how nice recompiling Linux stuff and updating libraries is.
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Anonymous2005-03-03 13:58
I run FreeBSD and don't have any problems that you describe. When a new version comes out I just do a binary upgrade which takes about one hour (downloading and all). I've had similar experiences with OpenBSD and debian linux (which, admittedly, broke down several times, thus my switch to BSD).
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Christy McJesus!DcbLlAZi7U2005-03-08 13:50
Good distros have package managers so you never miss a dependency. NOT THAT WE'RE GETTING OFF TOPIC OR ANYTHING.
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Anonymous2005-03-11 18:53
>>35
No distro has all packages and software you'll ever need and yeah we're damn offtopic.
Blitz is good at the beginning, but when you want to make a game that have more context than your normal ping-pong game, you better use allegro or SDL, personaly i prefer to use SDL, mainly becuse it's fast, flexible, easy and still powerfull.
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Anonymous2005-04-18 9:02
Use SDL :) It's multi-plattform (windows, linux, etc) and uses standard C / C++.
If you download (bloodshed) Dev-C++ and update it a bit you even get SDL-templates to use, with a neat gcc compiler too.
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Christy McJesus!DcbLlAZi7U2005-04-18 14:34
aalib
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Anonymous2007-08-04 14:11 ID:OlI0oFva
poop
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Anonymous2007-08-05 23:15 ID:K3CHQDVl
BUMP~
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Anonymous2007-08-07 6:32 ID:/FTIfwYW
>>41
I remember a Quake or Doom port that used aalib.
Understandably, it is an obscure app.
Seriously, why are you all promoting different APIs when he has his mind set on DX. There's nothing wrong with DX, it's the industry's standard, screw portability. No one cares about other platforms anyway ;P
And there's nothing wrong with using D3D to do a 2D game, just use an orthogonal projection and you're set.
So, ... you think java was designed for web games?
If you'd look around a bit you'd know that there's tons of decent web games made in java. But that's not what it's designed for.
Java's just a good all round language, easy to use and platform independancy is it's primary asset. Sure it's possible to write a decent game in java, but you have to apply some techniques to prevent java from performing garbage collection whenever it feels like for example. It all comes down to programmer skill.
Also, one of the foremost mathematical applications was written in java.
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Anonymous2007-08-07 10:46 ID:h4DZScH9
<a href="Google" target="_blank">
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Anonymous2007-08-07 10:51 ID:h4DZScH9
WTF! Since when did 4chan update/move their site?!
Portable code is nice. I currently use linux, but many of my friends use windows, and we like to play a capture the flag game I made in SDL. If I had not used SDL or OpenGL, I would have had to learn two libraries. Of course I probably would have made my own library to call these other two libraries like SDL does, which would have just been wasting time.