Messages

76

SFML projects / Open Source top-down game - Warlock's Gauntlet

« on: August 16, 2010, 07:30:46 pm »

That was a surprisingly sweet game. Though after killing Zygmut (or whatever it was), there was just nothing to do and nowhere to go. Was that the end?

The game is similar to titles like Gauntlet or Diablo.

Funny, I never read what you wrote before playing, but was thinking exactly that while playing. I personally would've liked a bit more Diablo influence in it: more places to go, less linear, items, stats, etc. But that is just my preference.

77

Graphics / [SOLVED] Huge performance hit when I draw a big background.

« on: August 14, 2010, 09:31:02 am »

I have very little OpenGL experience, but looking at where it is called in SFML's code (latest version of 2.0), I don't think wglchoosepixelformat should be getting called that often. Then again, that is assuming I am reading this Very Sleepy output correctly.

78

Feature requests / Memory-mapped files

« on: August 13, 2010, 07:38:01 pm »

I'll mention what I did for handling content since I was very, very pleased with the results.

Basically, what I wanted was a generic content manager that loads any type of content (sounds, graphics, fonts, etc) all on the fly on-demand, with the ability to stream it in the background for pre-fetching (nobody likes to wait). I also wanted to assign a "level" to each content, which included: Temporary, Map, Screen, and Global. These values stated when automated collection would take place. Temporary was always cleaned on collection, map was cleaned when changing maps (which also cleaned temporary), etc. Most importantly, if I tried using any content that was not loaded into memory, it had to auto-load into memory.

With SFML, this was insanely easy, and was my major motivation to change from XNA. With XNA, almost all of what I listed above was a nightmare since it had its own content management system that was very strongly locked-down. With SFML, all I had to change on the SFML side to accomplish this was the lazy loading. To do that, I just created my own derived classes that accept the filename at construction, then override the accessor to the internal reference pointer so that, if it was not loaded, it loads right then and there. If its loaded, continue on.

Very easy, but works beautifully.

79

Feature requests / Memory-mapped files

« on: August 13, 2010, 11:13:32 am »

It's not a question of loading content from files, it's a question of providing a more elegant kind of access to various resources in a monolithic file without having to load all the file into memory (or parse it from one end to another).

Sounds like more what you want is better/different resource management from SFML, which probably would fall under the category of SFML. Though finding a way that suits everybody's needs while still implementing enough to be useful but not too much to be complex... that'd be pretty difficult.

80

Feature requests / Memory-mapped files

« on: August 13, 2010, 12:57:17 am »

I'm not sure what benefits this would bring to the SFML-side of things. When you load content from files (such as images), the file is parsed then stored and handled internally in an internal format. So its not like if you load a JPEG, it just keeps that image in memory in the same JPEG format. This is why the format you use to store images on disk doesn't affect how it performs or the size in memory (except the time it takes to load).

Not saying memory-mapped files aren't useful, just don't see how it relates to SFML.

81

Graphics / Simple static 2d shadows

« on: August 10, 2010, 08:27:49 pm »

I don't suppose there is a chance of a private or beta release of SFML 2, I am not worried if you change it later on and I need to do some minor fixes. I would just like to get this working sooner rather than later.

You can grab the latest version from the SVN repository.

82

Feature requests / Choose Window Parent (e.g. to have Win2 always above Win1)

« on: August 08, 2010, 05:36:01 pm »

Sounds more like something you should look for in your programming language of choice and not SFML.

83

Graphics / Skewing

« on: July 31, 2010, 05:01:30 am »

"Eventually" works just fine for me.

84

Graphics / Skewing

« on: July 30, 2010, 08:22:55 pm »

In the past, I have added shadows by just skewing the sprite and drawing it black. That is, take the top two points of the rect, shift them over about 50%, halve the height, then draw it black with alpha. Though I just noticed that there is no native way to do this with SFML.

How would one go about accomplishing this in SFML?

85

SFML projects / Tengine / Torem Online

« on: July 27, 2010, 10:01:15 pm »

Nothing wrong with trying to make an MMORPG if you have incredible amounts of time. If its just for fun, make whatever you want.

Though as someone who has developed two online RPG engines (vbgore.com and netgore.com), trust me when I say that if you ever want it to be finished (as in, in a playable state) within the next 4 years, use an existing engine. :wink:

I'm doing the same as you and using a wiki for my game design documentation. Wikis sure are great.

86

Feature requests / MNG support?

« on: July 24, 2010, 09:52:33 pm »

Ohh yeah, definitely do NOT create videos by just cycling through PNGs. We're much more technologically advanced than that. Only time you'd do that is for scripted scenes using your game sprites, not actual videos.

I don't think SFML has any support for video, but there are cross-platform video libraries out there, and finding one that works with SFML shouldn't be hard to find.

Someone else would probably have to help you from this point as I don't have much experience adding videos to programs - just nothing I really do. Though ffmpeg may be a good place to start looking. Very powerful, stable, and robust cross-platform library.

87

Feature requests / MNG support?

« on: July 19, 2010, 05:03:51 am »

I don't see much point myself. Its useful in stuff like browsers when you don't have easy access to a render loop, but in games you should be controlling the animations yourself instead of embedding all this information into the graphic file. Otherwise, its a lot of work to support something that is only severely limiting.

88

SFML projects / Top-Down Shooter

« on: July 14, 2010, 01:55:32 am »

Zombies rule

89

Audio / AAC

« on: July 10, 2010, 07:00:54 pm »

AAC is a proprietary format, mr Laurent would have to sell his legs to buy rights to use it, and then hed have tom pay a fee very time sfml audio was downloaded

Isn't it free to use? As long as Laurent doesn't create the codec, simply supply an existing library, then he is off the hook... I think.

If not, an alternate route is to just provide support for it either as a plug-in and just tell people how to find it elsewhere, or provide the source code needed to get it working and just not the binaries.

90

DotNet / PInvoke Stack Imbalance

« on: July 06, 2010, 04:11:50 am »

I don't know why the compiler thinks that the managed signature doesn't match the unmanaged one. It looks ok to me, but I'm not a .Net expert so I may miss something.

This should be fixed in the latest revision of 2.0.

Really? That's good news :lol:

http://www.sfml-dev.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2529