GapiDraw 2.0 development progress

[Johan]

[artax]

A solid date to look forward to

Artax

[Guest]

A great news really!!
I am developing a Smartphone game and hoping Gapidraw will provide better support for Smartphone.

[Johan]

Yep.. I'll post daily updates to this thread what's going on as well.. Keep watching this space...

[tedson]

Yeah! Johan lives. Looking forward to a new release.

[KaiserG]

[Johan]

[Daily update - Tuesday, April 15]

Today I rewrote most of the internal hardware acceleration when running in full screen mode. The current implementation was a hack to get everything working, now it has been designed and put into place correctly. I also corrected several issues related to both full screen and windowed mode (especially full screen mode was really broken). Options for checking for lost surfaces and manually restoring lost video surfaces was added as well.

Plans for tomorrow: The usual code review of today's code in the morning, then check to see if direct display writes can be enabled in full screen mode (facilitating effects such as a 75hz mouse cursor when the frame loop updates at 15hz)... I will also start on a new nifty feature to be implemented:

CGapiAlphaSurface

Now what's this? How about a 32-bit surface with place for both image and alpha in one place.. That can read PNG images stored in 32-bit RGBA format directly! No more alpha split etc. Just one easy to use surface.. Performance will improve significantly as well. Both pixel and alpha information is read using one memory read with a minimum amount of cache lines used... Hopefully I'll have a beta build with CGapiAlphaSurface done on Thursday...

Catch next update tomorrow...

[Johan]

[ Need help with Smartphones ]

Right now GapiDraw works fine on Smartphones. Toki Tori and Odyssey from AIM are two fine examples of this. But included Smartphone support code be a lot better than it is now.

Smartphones are still unavailable where I live, so I could use help from those of you that have access to such devices. What I need is basically pure code, extensions to CGapiApplication to make it catch window messages such as "incoming phone call". Code that works on real devices. Code that has only been tested on the emulator is unfortunately not of interest.

Thanks for your help
//Johan

[Johan]

[Daily update - Wednesday, April 16]

Download latest build here:
http://www.gapidraw.com/GapiDraw110(2003-04-16).exe

(1) Hardware acceleration
Lots of improvements have been done to the hardware acceleration. Not only should it be faster but also use less resources and be much stabler than the previous beta.

(2) Direct access to the display in full screen mode
Now things are looking interesting. If your application runs in full screen on a stationary PC you can now draw directly to the display as simple as m_display.FillRect() for example. This can be used to facilitate fast mouse cursors even if the game runs at 5-10 Hz.

(3) New CGapiApplication
GapiApplication is now single-threaded. The old class was improved and renamed to CGapiApplicationMT. Change all links from "GapiDrawApplication.cpp" to "GapiApplication.cpp".

I need some help

Please try all the sample applications windowed (DEBUG MODE) as well as full screen mode (RELEASE MODE). Especially the MFC and Collision Mask applications are interesting as they use video surfaces and a backbuffer that is stored in video memory. Please try to break these applications by switching, gaming, whatever.

Thanks
//Johan

Tomorrow: CGapiAlphaSurface..

[Johan]

As some of you will notice: the black banner is back.. This time however the final GapiDraw 1.10 will be released on time, May 1. So you may begin to test your game with the new DLL immediately.

tedson: By the way.. I added some functions for you and your BoundsChecker.. Check the "Functions" section in GapiDraw.h... If you call those functions, classes will be allocated by the DLL and BoundsChecker will no longer report memory leaks...

[Noty]

Dear Johan,

First of all, thanks for your wonderful work.

I downloaded GapiDraw110(2003-04-16).exe today and slightly modified my codes to conform to the changes.
However, I could not find the gd110.dll/lib for Smartphone platform. Should I chnage back to gd104 temporarily to avoid delaying my development progress?

Thanks for your reply in advance. 8O

[Johan]

[egarayblas]

[Johan]

[Daily update - Thursday, April 17]

Download latest build here:
http://www.gapidraw.com/GapiDraw110(2003-04-17).exe

I have included builds for Smartphones (ARM and X86 emulator), and the PPC 2000 & PPC 2002 emulators with this release. Test away... Better find the bugs now before the final release is out...

I have begun work on CGapiAlphaSurface and it is proceeding along well.. Should have it up and running quite soon.

[Spacemonkey]

Hi, tried getting this working with smartphone and I get a pile of linking errors (unresolved external for things like CGapiApplication.Run()).

I think I might be using the wrong lib, what's right for smartphone? should I be using ppc-arm or tpc-arm or ????

Thanks for the help. I'm currently just starting work on a RPG for smartphone, got the graphics engine mostly done, and want to get it up to 1.10 as it's not gonna be released until after May 1st (by a long time )