Writing a better 2D engine. (Phoenix 2D Game Engine)

[Robert Kosek]

There is a TPHXCanvas, which is a little inefficient, but is very canvas-like.

[Diaboli]

i meant like a component that you can put on a form. like the TDXDraw, wich can be placed on a form and scaled and whatnot.

[Andreaz]

Yeah there's one of thoose, but it's in the editor source bundle that i havn't released yet. I'll upload a zip with em (however they are in the state of working, and that's it)

http://phoenixlib.net/files/Util.zip

[Diaboli]

thx! now i just have to find out how to use it...

EDIT: wich i just did...

[Bones]

Hi ..
I just wanted to say thanks for this library.

Its simple, powerfull and chock-full of usefull and easy to use functionality that takes the grind out of delphi 2D games developing but leaves the fun bits in.
When I discovered how easy to use everything was and saw how professional the resource management tools were, I just decided I had to express my support and admiration.

I can't tell you how happy I am that I found this and really hope sincerely that you will keep up the great work.

I will soon be moving my IK+ online project over to phoenix from Delphix

[Diaboli]

Hmm... does the TAnimatedSprite's Z property do anything?

In my game, a character is a set of different sprites put together. to get this working in UndelphiX, all i had to do, was to adjust the sprites Z-property so that a character standing behind another actually WAS behind it. this does somehow not work in Phoenix2D.

Mind explaining how Z-Buffering works here?

Example:
Body1:= TBody.Create(...);
Body2:= TBody.Create(...);
Body1.Z:= 0;
Body2.Z:= 1;
Body 2 is in front
then i tried
Body1.Z:= 1;
Body2.Z:= 0;
Body2 is still in front.

What is more is that i have to have different parts of a character on different layers, because one layer only takes one image (one layer for bodies, one for suits, one for hair, etc). this also ****s stuff up when to characters walk through eachother, and hair is ALLWAYS printed on top of bodies, unrelative to anything.

This on top of the Z-Buffering problem is giving me a headache.

Why not let EACH sprite have the ability to have its own image? I tried implementing that myself, but couldnt figure out how rendering and such works with openGL, so i gave up...

Pls Help?

Besides this, the engine is brilliant

[Andreaz]

Well the z-buffering should work by default (unless it's disabled somewhere else) try calling

glEnable  (GL_DEAPTH_TEST);

before rendering the sprites and test if it helps. One thing to note thought, the blending might cause problems if you enable deapth testing, a sprite that is rendered before another sprite cant blend with the following one (this is a limitation of OpenGL and DirectX and has nothing to do with Phoenix). If you only has one color transparency you can avoid this by calling

glAphaFunct(GL_GREATER, 0.1);
glEnable(GL_ALPHA_TEST);

and this will skip all transparent pixels further up in the opengl pipeline.

The reason behind the sprite layers (wich was a new adition to the 1.0 release, the betas had one texture per sprite) is simply a speed matter, you can render 10x times the sprites by batching sprites into a larger spriteset instead of needing to rebind the texture for each sprite.

And for a hint on how to render one image per sprite:

//------------------------------------------------------------------------------
procedure TMyAnimatedSprite.Render;
var Image: TPHXImage; // Move to private decleration
begin
  Image:= ImageList.Find('MyImage'); // move to constructor

  glPushAtrib(GL_TEXTURE_BIT); // Save the binded texture
  Image.Bind;

  glPushMatrix();
    glTranslatef(WorldPosition.X, WorldPosition.Y, WorldPosition.Z);

    glCallList(Image.DisplayList + PatternIndex + 1);
  glPopMatrix();
 
  glPopAttrib();
end;

[Diaboli]

found this "bug":
[pascal]
procedure TPHXAnimation.Update(State: PPHXAnimationState; FrameTime: Single);
var Frame: TPHXAnimationFrame;
begin
// Only update if active
if( State^.Active) then begin
// Add the time to the state
State^.Time := State^.Time + FrameTime;

// Get the current frame
Frame:=FFrames[State^.Index];

// test if we shall change to the next frame
if( State^.Time > Frame.Time ) then begin
Inc(State^.Index);

// Test if we reached the end of the animation
if( State^.Index = Count) then begin //What if state is larger than count?
[/pascal]

I found the problem when my sprites suddenly stopped worked when changing animation length from 4 to 1. wich would effectively make "State^.Index" larger than "Count".

the solution is obvious...

(and i have just spent an hour and a half trying to figure out what made my sprites disappear when i stopped moving)

[Andreaz]

Hehe, yeah that was quite dumb tbh, in normal circumstances it would never occur (ie calling reset after editing the animation) but well.

[BigJoe]

Hi

Have any information from next version?

Thx
BigJoe