Why EasyCE?

[RwGast]

Hmmm im not trying to be rude jacco, im just curious what advantges EasyCE has now that, that OpenGL clone for the ppc is out. Is EasyCE capable of those kind of graphics too?

[Phantom]

Robert,<br><br>No, EasyCE does no 3D at all. That's not it's purpose btw, in fact EasyCE 1.5 already does more than it really should. The basic idea is that EasyCE takes away the burden of platform specific stuff, and JUST THAT. So: Going full-screen, reading the stylus and the buttons, and nothing else. I added some small things that every game needs, for convenience.<br><br>I hope to release additional libraries that handle things like 3D and mod playing, but that will not be part of EasyCE (although it will of course work WITH EasyCE).<br><br>- Jacco.

[Jaybot]

What OpenGL clone?

[RwGast]

Pocket GL or somthing. I belive your the one who posted the news about it in the dev forum.

[Ian]

EasyCE provides a simple way to utilise GAPI which gives direct drawing to the screen. It's not easier to use than the windows API functions but it gives the best performance and Easy CE does so much of the work that it's accessible to most coders.<br><br>PocketGL is not an OpenGL clone but is a GAPI based 3D textured-mesh toolkit. There are quite a few similarities to OpenGL but nothing like the command set yet. Pierre is working on the next release due in a week or so.<br><br>The actual screen drawing method is the same approach as EasyCE and with a little work both tools can be merged as the source is available. EasyCE is free though I think Jakko wants people to pay something for commercial use? PocketGL is $49.<br><br>Jakko wrote a 3D sample a few months back ( a nice rotating cow ) so he knows how to load mesh files and render textured 3D images but he can't do everything at once. His tutorials are also very useful to me coming from a non C++ background

[Phantom]

EasyCE has a 'theoretical' price of $100 if you use it for a commercial product. In practice, I only ask people to pay that once they earned a decent amount of money (> $500). I don't want anyone to stop from doing cool stuff with EasyCE, but I found that some companies are using EasyCE without giving me credits or an e-mail. That's bad for code sharing, and so I now have this 'price', wich I never actually received btw., and I frankly don't care. Basically, I just want to be able to sue Zio if they use EasyCE without asking me.

[Jeremie]

Phantom, Do you have a paypal account or some other ez-2-pay type of account?  Just curious.<br><br>

[RwGast]

Thanks for all the detail i thought easce was just a graphics library.

[Phantom]

Yes, I have a Paypal account. I don't have a creditcard though so the Paypal is (conveniently) limited to $100. I'll get a Visa soon though, it's getting very inconvenient NOT to have one.

[Jeremie]

Cool, it's sooo much easier to pay online like that rather than send a check.<br><br>BTW, I would definately pay for EasyCE if I made 500 on a game.  Thats a fair enough price.<br><br>Also, I am currently working on a personal game library that lacks some of the easiness and trades it for speed.  Just out of curiosity, do you plan on improving the speed of easyce, or is that at the bottom of the list of priorities?<br><br>Also, I noticed that there is a LOT of multiplication in the easyce code, do you know if the microsoft compiler optimizes that to bitshifting, or would it be better to do that by hand?<br><br>Great work!<br><br>

[cryo]

even with all compiler optimizations turned on, hand-optimized EasyCE is ways faster (and a mess to read and understand). It is not meant to be the fastest GAPI wrapper around, it's name would be FastCE then <br><br>If you're after speed, there is *a lot* you can squeeze out of EasyCE without going into ASM. <br><br>cryo<br>

[GeoffSulcer]

[Jeremie]

[Phantom]

[Anders]