GOTEBORG, Sweden – November 04, 2004 – Develant Technologies today released GapiDraw 3.50 Release Candidate 1, which adds an incredible list of new features to the GapiDraw 3 mobile game development platform! New features include support for the Tapwave Zodiac hardware accelerator, surfaces stored in feature memory on Palm devices, timers and vblank synk on Palm devices, Palm Dynamic Input Area toggle, and much more, including:
New features in GapiDraw 3.5:
* Tapwave Zodiac support! GapiDraw is now delivered as a 100% ARM Native library on the Tapwave platform, with support for hardware accelerated blits through the twGfx library. You do not have to change anything in your code, GapiDraw will automatically store surfaces in video memory and use the hardware blitter if you want it to. The TileDemo sample application now runs at around 120FPS on the Zodiac.
* Palm GapiTimer support! GapiDraw for Palm now includes timer support to get current frame rate of the device, with the possibility to synchronize the final blit to the display to the vertical blanking period on Tapwave devices to avoid tearing.
* Palm read-only surfaces! For devices with limited amount of heap memory (such as the Tungsten E) it is now possible to use all the available memory for surfaces by storing them in the storage memory ("feature memory") of the device. You can now create visually advanced applications that use virtually no heap memory on Palm OS 5 devices!
* Palm DIA Support! GapiDraw for Palm now fully supports the Dynamic Input Area for user input. GapiDraw can be configured to always show the DIA, always hide it, or let the user show or hide it as usual. The display will resize automatically! GapiDraw can also be configured to show or hide the status bar on devices such as the T3 and T5.
* Better Palm OS Integration! GapiDraw applications now behaves much better as "true" Palm applications, and respects alarms etc for maximum compliance. It is also now possible to choose how keys should be locked.
* Better Palm OS Emulator support! GapiDraw is now shipped as a 100% native Win32 DLL for the Tapwave simulator, which can be used with Visual Studio workspaces for simple and easy debugging. Just install Visual Studio and the Palm and Tapwave SDKs and you can start creating Palm applications right away!
* Windows Mobile 2003 SE VGA support! GapiDraw now fully supports high-resolution VGA displays on Windows Mobile 2003 SE devices. A new display flag GDDISPLAY_HI_RES_AWARE was added to allow GapiDraw to use the full resolution, if the flag is not specified GapiDraw will use QVGA 240x320 resolution on all Windows Mobile devices. Please remember to also add a resource called"HI_RES_AWARE" to your application project if you want to take advantage of these higher resolutions to avoid Windows Mobile 2003 SE to scale all stylus coordinates down to QVGA resolution.
* Anti-aliased lines! GapiDraw now supports anti-aliased lines with clipping using a fast fixed-point WU algorithm. A new flag GDDRAWLINE_ANTIALIAS was added to the CGapiSurface::Drawline function.
* Faster rotated blits! GapiDraw now has greatly improved performance of rotated blits using Blt. GapiDraw will now calculate a minimal bounding box for the blit which will improve performance when blitting small surfaces onto large destination surfaces.
* PocketHAL support! GapiDraw now supports the PocketHAL framebuffer library for improved blitting performance on most Pocket PCs. GapiDraw 3.5 is built against PocketHAL 0.7.4.
* Statically linked library support! GapiDraw is now delivered as both a DLL file and a statically linked LIB file, making it possible to create one-file applications on Palm, Symbian or Windows Mobile.
* Embedded Visual C++ 4.0 support! All Pocket PC sample applications are now shipped for Embedded Visual C++ 4.0 (Windows Mobile 2003 and later), as well as Embedded Visual C++ 3.0 (Pocket PC 2002 and earlier).
Download GapiDraw 3.50 Release Candidate 1 at www.develant.com
About GapiDraw
GapiDraw is the leading mobile game development platform for mobile devices running Palm, Symbian and Windows Mobile, and has been used in hundreds of commercial games, including major titles such as EverQuest for the Pocket PC by Sony Online Entertainment and Atlantis Redux by TetraEdge & DreamCatcher Europe. GapiDraw is available for immediate download and purchase at www.develant.com with prices starting at $100 per application, no royalties involved.
About Develant Technologies
Develant Technologies AB is one of the leading providers of cross-platform application development tools for mobile devices. Develant’s graphics platform GapiDraw is available for Palm, Symbian, and Windows Mobile and has shortly become the standard platform to use when creating applications with high demands for advanced graphics on mobile devices. GapiDraw is actively used in research, CAD/CAM, navigational tools, and hundreds of commercial games for mobile devices. For further information, please visit www.develant.com
