Messages

1

Graphics / Processor gets hot and motherboard beeps

« on: November 29, 2009, 08:41:14 am »

It's because you don't sleep at all, the program is running as fast as it can on the processor. Use App.SetFramerateLimit(60); to make it run at 60 frames per second rather than as fast as possible.

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Feature requests / Small request

« on: September 21, 2009, 06:31:31 pm »

PCX is a very simple format, it wouldn't be hard to write your own loader:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCX

3

Graphics / image tearing???

« on: August 28, 2009, 11:33:04 am »

To my understanding you can't vsync a windowed application, it has to be fullscreen.

4

Graphics / Buffer overrun when loading image

« on: August 25, 2009, 03:16:30 pm »

// is for comment

// isn't a comment when it's inside a string.

5

General discussions / Is good enough?

« on: August 15, 2009, 05:30:03 am »

Ok, he gets the same 16.7 Mil. colors but is only allowed to use 256 at the same time  :lol:

Still no. Palette mode doesn't restrict you to 256 colors. You can use any number of bits for that, just as with RGBA.

The trick is that you can change easily what the colors are by swapping the palette.

6

General discussions / Is good enough?

« on: August 12, 2009, 06:55:32 pm »

Since were talking about colors... what about this: You give a painter 256 colors... or you give him 16.7 million colors (including all those 256 colors)... can't he do everything he can do with the 256, when given 16.7 million?

That would be a valid analogy if we were debating bit-depth. But we're not; This is about the pixel format, RGBA versus palette index.

(PS: your sprite example would still only use up 1.22% of memory on a 128MiB machine)

Fine, I'm a perfectionist. So kill me. :wink:

7

General discussions / Is good enough?

« on: August 11, 2009, 07:24:42 pm »

Core Xii, you seem to be here just for trollish flame. If you don't like SFML or other free libs, wouldn't you just pass by?  :evil:  :evil:  :evil:

God, what's with all the hate? All I'm trying to do here is have an intelligent debate on whether SFML is good enough for StarCraft, the topic's original question.

I am not saying SFML sucks. I just want you to acknowledge that it's not the one and only all-powerful solution to all our problems. I already said I use SFML myself, didn't I? Not talking about one's flaws for the sake of not springing argument is just ignorance and stupidity.

Yes, I am serious, and your metaphor is totally off. Do painters only paint photorealistic paintings, just because they have many kinds of paint and brushes? No, they still make all types of painting, despite not being limited to -say- flat brushes.

And now suppose someone comes up with a painter's kit to aid painters in their work. It does not include flat brushes at all. And you're arguing that nobody uses those anyway. (actually, someone comes in and asks if the painter's kit is good enough to paint the Mona Lisa, etc....)

So what? An average PC today comes with, what, 1GiB of Memory? So in one case you're using 0.001% and in the other 0.15% of total memory. Not much either way.

SFML is also designed to run on low-end and embedded systems. (wait, I couldn't find any mention of this on the features page; Isn't it?)

Then use 8 bit colors and shade the sprites individually using different textures as palletes (this is admittedly not supported by SFML)

Why suggest something that's not supported?

I don't think it's getting off topic. We're still discussing whether SFML is good enough for StarCraft.

8

General discussions / Is good enough?

« on: August 10, 2009, 03:53:12 pm »

No, it's not an art style, it's a limitation.

Are you kidding me? Who makes arguments like that seriously? If limitations were not art styles, the only kind of art style we would have is as realistic as possible. Please tell me you were joking with that incredibly stupid comment. The only kind of art we would have would be photographs and photorealistic renderings.

Everything that can be done in palette mode, can be done in 24-bit colors (you just have to limit yourself to a certain pallette).

Here we go again... Yes, you can eat soup with a fork but the spoon just does it better. You can emulate palette mode with 24-bit graphics but it's inefficient, you're forced to draw each sprite multiple times for each palette you intend to use on it.

Here, I'll give you an example. Suppose we have 100 sprites of 16x16 pixels in size, 4 bits per pixel. 16 palettes with 4 colors each, 32 bits per color.

With palette mode, all this takes only 13056 bytes or ~13 kilobytes to store in memory. And you can display any sprite with any palette.

With 24-bit graphics as you suggest, it would require a whopping 1638400 bytes or ~1.6 megabytes to store! That's a 12549% increase in memory consumption!

And here's a suggestion: Why not render in 8-bit grayscale and do a post-fx palette mapper  

Because it's not the same. You can't draw any sprite with any palette with that.


Now thankfully, you probably won't need every sprite in every palette in practice, but my point stands. It's more efficient. And easier.

9

General discussions / Is good enough?

« on: August 09, 2009, 02:09:53 pm »

Why would anyone want/need a palette mode?

What kind of a question is that? That's like asking "why would anyone want 3D graphics?" It's an art style as any other. Not as frequently used perhaps, but an art style nonetheless.

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General discussions / Is good enough?

« on: August 08, 2009, 01:50:17 pm »

SFML isn't even supposed to be a "engine". It's a fucking library for the very basic stuff.

And that's why I would not recommend it for any... complicated projects (anything but the simplest raster graphics). It limits creativity. Every time I consider using SFML for one of my projects I run into some limitation and have to go back to reinventing the wheel. It doesn't have the simplest stuff like palette mode and vectors.

But of course, SFML is still in active development. That's why I'm lurking around here.

11

General discussions / Is good enough?

« on: August 07, 2009, 05:03:58 pm »

99% of the """"""""real""""""" developers just license engines because the developement of an own engine is more expensive. on the market at the moment there are the ID engines (tech 5 now), of course the unreal engine and the source engine, thats it. blizzard is one of the few companies who constantly develop new engines for their games.

Uh... Epic Games wrote the Unreal Engine for themselves. Valve wrote the Source engine for themselves. They're not some generic engines written by an outside party.

These big names are exactly the "real" developers I'm talking about. Your average commercial game developer doesn't write their own engine because it's easier to use an existing one... But that's the difference between those developers, and the absolute top-notch devs like Valve and Blizzard.

Also, again, I must note that the engines mentioned here are again specialized engines, Source specifically designed for first person shooters, etc.

SFML is not the de-facto library for 2D games. It lacks a lot of features like palette mode and vector drawing, and really only excels in rendering raster images.

12

General discussions / Is good enough?

« on: August 06, 2009, 08:10:37 pm »

How many games are there that use Havok? The Source engine? The Unreal engine? SpeedTree?

Havok and SpeedTree are in an entirely different ballpark. They are specialized libraries, Havok specifically designed to simulate physics in a certain way (performance over accuracy), and SpeedTree to procedurally generate trees.

SFML on the other hand is a generic library - It isn't designed to render any type of graphics in particular. Thus a custom graphics engine will always benefit a taxing game.

Now I'm not trying to diss SFML here or anything, I use SDL myself in my indie dev hobbies. You can use SFML for real games like StarCraft, but writing your own graphics routines is still always better (if more laborious).

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General discussions / Is good enough?

« on: August 06, 2009, 01:33:12 pm »

Why would I spend my time re-inventing the wheel when a perfectly good wheel is available free or for the cost of making some of my additions available to the other users of the libraries?

Because the reinvented wheel is 100% optimized for whatever you're doing. Blizzard would never use SFML for StarCraft because by writing their own engine they get every bit of juice out of it that a generic library cannot offer by design.

Ogre3D falls into the same category. "Real" developers don't use Ogre3D either.

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General discussions / Is good enough?

« on: August 05, 2009, 10:19:57 am »

No, it's not. "Real" commercial games like that are written their own, specialized, optimized engines directly on top of DirectX/OpenGL. No actual game developer giant would use SFML. They have offices full of seasoned programmers so it's not a problem for them.

At least, that's how I see it. Could be wrong.

15

Graphics / Can't load sf::Sprite from a function

« on: August 03, 2009, 09:03:35 am »

Core Xii -1 ( new is not required with a manager so its more easy )

Well... I didn't say it was the easy way. I prefer to do things the right way.