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lief
11-07-2005, 04:39 AM
Any one else here a regular asphyre user?

(i got hooked back on the powerdraw units, switched from delphix for the accelerated blending stuff, haven't looked back...)

Sly
11-07-2005, 07:38 AM
I had a look at Asphyre yesterday with a view to using it, but didn't go ahead with it. At this stage I'm leaning towards Irrlicht, or continuing with my own efforts at writing a rendering engine.

I was involved with Powerdraw when it was first released, and contributed a few fixes to it. However I never continued with it. I've always considered the use of components or heavy use of Delphi classes to be overkill and quite inefficient. Maybe that comes from my console development background where you have to be careful about every function call that you make.

edit: Actually, scrap that about Irrlicht. After a longer look at it, I'll keep going on my own rendering engine.

Robert Kosek
11-07-2005, 03:18 PM
I've been using Asphyre, since it's robust and efficient, and simple enough for a hack like me to comprehend. :) Not that I've really got anything to show for it though.

I might make a really simple renderer in GL after "wolfenstein" for a first. Not sure if I could do much more w/o being confused.

LP
11-07-2005, 07:32 PM
I've always considered the use of components or heavy use of Delphi classes to be overkill and quite inefficient. Maybe that comes from my console development background where you have to be careful about every function call that you make.
I don't quite agree with you on this. Enough to say that "OOP vs Procedural" topic can turn a talk-to-death discussion in similar way as "Pascal vs C++".

I believe though OOP can actually increase your overall efficiency since you're dealing with large amounts of small pieces of data that can be manipulated easily and precisely and thus you can optimize on large-level scale. (By the way, accessing a single class physically can be no different than accessing record via pointer, so what's the matter?)

In Asphyre Pro we used both - to optimize both on large and small-level scales (check Billboarding implementation, for instance, which can even use SSE to transform the vertices in AsphyrePrimitivesEx.pas).

It would be a little rough to say that to avoid using OOP is related to lack of experience (check http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1323127) but I think that to use OOP is tricky, but if you use it right, you'll get long-term benefits than of Procedural alternative.