GapiDraw 3.5 dll for emulator

[Kiyote]

[Johan]

[Kiyote]

[Kiyote]

Johan,

I downloaded the new 3.5a package just to make sure, but I think there's a discrepancy somewhere inbetween the code and the documentation.

The documentation says:

No matter what format you choose from, the steps involved to create a font are always:

1. Create a CGapiBitmapFont object.
2. Call CGapiBitmapFont::CreateSurface and supply a valid font bitmap.
3. Call CGapiBitmapFont::CreateFont to calculate the font offsets and widths.
4. Draw some text with the font using CGapiSurface::DrawText.


Step 2 mentions calling CGapiBitmapFont::CreateSurface, but this method is not exported to the flat API. Is this a C++ class-only method? Or is it a method from another object and the CGapiBitmapFont reference is erroneous?

If I skip this step, I get a NotInitialized error return code.

[Johan]

CGapiBitmapFont::CreateSurface is subclassed from CGapiSurface::CreateSurface. CGapiBitmapFont is a subclass of CGapiSurface.

So you should call GapiSurfaceCreateSurface.

[Kiyote]

[Kiyote]

[InexorableTash]

[Kiyote]

[InexorableTash]

Hmmm. Yeah, that makes life trickier.

Since the base class is effectively a member of the derived class, and since the whole .NET-wrapper-over-native-structs approach is predicated on a fixed memory layout for the structures, you should be able to do pointer math to turn a CGapiBitmapFont into a CGapiSurface - just write a dummy C++ app that computes the pointer delta; for any given build of GapiDraw this should be fixed. Then, in your .NET wrappers just add the delta to the IntPtr to convert from CGapiBitmapFont to CGapiSurface.

Of course, this is just theory - I haven't written this. When I was doing wrappers I had the luxury of being able to add native stubs in such cases so that the compiler did all of the hard thinking.

[Johan]

Kiyote: The easiest thing to do seems for me to just add the CreateSurface subclassed method to CGapiBitmapFont. I'll add the RGBA blit functions to the CGapiSurface<n> functions as well.

[Kiyote]

[Kiyote]

Johan, FYI: CGapiBitmapFont_CreateFont can return GDERR_NOTINITIALIZED. This isn't mentioned in the online documentation.

(Is my QA getting annoying yet?)

[Kiyote]

Ooh...ooh...feature request. CGapiBitmapFont. Can it expose the height of the font somehow? I'm not expecting an actual "measure" function, just something that returns the height of the surface used to create the font (less the kerning line)?

[Kiyote]