Do I need a graphics engine?

[ajol]

Let's SPAM a bit.
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End of spam.

Haha, yeah I might check out Allegro later.

I must say that I'm a bit surprised by hearing that. I guess that large difference between older stable version of FPC/Lazarus and newest might be the cause for this. Besides since FPC/Lazarus is completely free PXL author is probably expecting that everyone is using latest version which could not be said for Delphi developers since they have to be paying yearly subscription in order to keeping their development environment up to date.

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

But checking and studying the demos might also be enough. It was for me but I must admit that I had at least some basic knowledge on working with graphics before from short time usage of few other graphical engines before their development was canceled. For some reason I mostly started using of these graphical engines just before they got canceled so I never even got learn to use them properly as I did with Asphyre Sphinx 2 and later Asphyre Sphinx 3.
Any way I recommend you start fiddling with demos and if you run in to some questions ask them here on PGD and we will try to help.

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?

I didn't mean to scare you but merely say that there is no graphical which would be so much better than the others because it does not allow you to screw up.
Any way if you do happen to screw things so badly to bring the graphical engine to a halt do post your problems here and we will solve them together.
And yes many times you can learn most by screwing up first That is how I learned most about computers.
Back in the days I used to purposely delete or rename various windows files to see what would stop working
And I even fried few computer components but this was not on purpose

Any way we are here to lend you a hand when you will need it. I myself didn't had this luxury or didn't know where to get help when I started fiddling with graphics myself. So I had to learn it the hard way.

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!