Haha, yeah I might check out Allegro later.
Yeah, I guess the PXL site is a little confusing. It claims you need at least Lazarus 1.4 and FreePascal 3.0. I had Lazarus 1.4.4, so I figured I'd be fine, but I guess Lazarus 1.6 is the only version that uses FreePascal 3.0, so you pretty much have to use that one
So I've spent some time looking at the samples, and trying to replicate some parts of them. It took me some time to get anything to work, since the FreePascal samples apperently were written using "delphi syntax mode"(in the project options). This meant that even when I copied code directly from a sample it still wouldn't work until I switched that.
I'm sure that if I knew proper FreePascal syntax I probably could have written things differently, and made them work anyways. But that's pretty hard when I have no idea how things are supposed to look.
It's extra confusing since several samples are old and have been ported several times between different versions of the engine.
So far I've only been looking at the timer that came with the library(TMultimediaTimer). I've been looking for a new timer for some time, since the Lazarus TTimer has felt kinda unstable to me.
I got it working, but I'm not sure if I'm really using it right.
Maybe I've misunderstood something, but from what I see from the samples, all it seems to do is trigger constatly on the Application.OnIdle event.
This means that as soon as the program does something different, the timer stops counting.
Is there a way to avoid this? I'd rather not have all graphics stop updating just because the game has to run a heavy calculation.
If not, is there a better timer out there that I could use? Or is this just how timers work in general? Should I just make sure I make my code so effective it doesn't noticably interrupt the timer?
haha, yeah I understand!
I really do appreciate the help you're giving. I really respect people who went through the process of learning things completely on their own! Although I'm not sure I'd ever have the time(or dedication) to figure all this out myself!
Bookmarks