SDL

Hello <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_biggrin.gif" alt=":D" title="Very Happy" />

I come with good news.. I've begun preliminarily changing the runtime to work with SDL. It's hard work but I can get some stuff rendering.

I'll post here when I have more information.

PS: For people who do not know about SDL, it would mean the runtime would work on Mac, Linux, Handhelds like GP32X and many other systems.

Tim

That's great :D. I wondered when somebody will do this :P. This will bring in more interested people from the Linux world. And possibly more developers, since there is a lot of coders using Linux.

VERY VERY AWESOME

Outstandingness!!

Interesting!

But are you using OpenGL? Otherwise it might be a problem with rotating/scaling/a lot of sprites on the screen, and pixel shaders. <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile" />

Interesting!

But are you using OpenGL? Otherwise it might be a problem with rotating/scaling/a lot of sprites on the screen, and pixel shaders. <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile" />

Hey,

OpenGL is a future possibility but pixel shaders just won't be viable.. it's a Direct-X technology which has only been recently implemented. However, I am confident scaling and rotations should be workable, and that it will be pretty fast.

Tim

very nice!

I think we all owe timtim a big thanks <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile" />

Thank you for the encouragement everyone <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_biggrin.gif" alt=":D" title="Very Happy" />

I've worked on this for a few hours and thrown together a working runtime.. it's a bit hacked as I had to pull out any of the HLSL stuff, and rewrite alot of runtime drawing functions, but it works.

So far rotations are working and relatively fast, alpha channels working fine, and I can play templates like simple platformer no problem.

The biggest challenge is going to be changing some parts of the runtime for other platforms, I noticed some Windows APIs which might be difficult.

If all goes well I'll put up a preview runtime for people to try and make sure it works for them in the next few days.

Tim

Wow... awesome!

Edit: Doesn't openGL support pixel shaders? So would there be a possibility of them at some point?

I think it does, but the language syntax is slightly different. It's possible, but timtim will have to comment.

If all the rendering part of the engine is encapsulated in a separated class then it shouldnt be a problem. Instead of Direct3D calls you put OpenGL calls.

Indeed I dont fully understand why not to have a OpenGL rendered, it will have the same quality and it will make porting much easier.

ouch, now I see the sillyness of my post, one year late and pointing out the obvious :S

The display engine is indeed in a separate class which is fairly easily interchangeable. We used Direct-X because it's easier to pickup and use than OpenGL, and it offers some benefits like the audio API. On reflection though it would've been better if we'd used OpenGL from the start <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile" />.

I heard that there's some problems with OpenGL in the newer versions of Windows, because MS uses DirectX to render the UI of Windows...? Is this true?