DelphiX is alive

[Huehnerschaender]

High folks,

I am just programming a game with my friend and I decided to use DelphiX for programming.

I do the programming and my friend does graphics and sound.

The game itself will be something never seen in the shelves. It's no shooter, no strategic game, no adventure, no roleplaying game.

Maybe I will tell you more about it later. But first I'd like to see if this forum is still alive, and if we could help each other.

The project we are on is meant to become something real professional, so I want to do my job as good as I can.

So my question here is: Is there anyone who is really fit in DelphiX/DirectX?

Another intention of me is to put my experiences here in the forum. Anything new I discover will be posted here, tricks, hints, functions, samples, effects etc. But I need some people to share and trade experiences.

If anyone is interested in all this, post a reply.

Greetings,

Huehnerschaender

[WiZz]

forum is alive :), DelphiX is very old and uses only DirectX 7 (maybe higher), i recomend to use unDelphiX or Omega headers. i am waiting more info about your game :)

[Huehnerschaender]

forum is alive :), DelphiX is very old and uses only DirectX 7 (maybe higher), i recomend to use unDelphiX or Omega headers. i am waiting more info about your game :)

Hi WIZz,

I know that DelphiX only supports DirectX 7, but the game will be in 2D and DirectX 8 support does not bring much advantage, cause as I know DirectDraw didn't change since DirectX 7.

I already tried out mixing 2D and 3D for special effects, seems to work fairly good. If UnDelphiX gives advantage in this, I will consider about changing to it. Do you have experience with this? I read somewhere that UnDelphiX brings also some advantage in framerate also in 2D, is this true?

The game will be something like a mixture of about 20 games, each working together with the main game. Do you know Yahtzee? This is the main game. Sounds stupid and easy, huh?
But it isn't that easy. You will play Yahtzee, but have to manage much more than this. There will be some minigames, like Tetris, Senso, Poker, Darts, BlackJack, 4 wins etc. There will be Jokers, Extras like bombs to be placed on the gameboard of another player to steal points from him and so on.
The whole game will be lead by a female gameleader, who offers minigames to the players, or nacks them when doing no good job, players can play minigames against each other, or against the leader, the Joker system will bring some more fun into the game, you can steal a Yahtzee from your opponent, or put a ghost on his board. My friend does a great job in the graphics and sound so that all this comes on the screen very beautiful.
Maybe I post some screenshots here later.
At the beginning you can choose between 20 !! different players, each with his own graphics (when speaking, laughing etc) and his own sound samples (there will be about 200 different spoken sentences for each player).
Ok, thats enough for now.

Greetings,
Huehnerschaender

[WiZz]

wow, sounds cool. good luck to you guys.

[Huehnerschaender]

wow, sounds cool. good luck to you guys.

Thank you WIZz,

do you know something about the performance increase when using UnDelphiX instead of DelphiX? Are there some benchmarks available?

Greets,

Huehnerschaender

[cairnswm]

UndelphiX also uses the DirectDraw interface. So also still DirectX7.

Some of the latest screen cards are not supporting DirectDraw properly anymore. This is the main reason that DelphiX isn't such a good choice anymore :(

PS. I loved DelphiX but found its problems a bit too much for me.

[Huehnerschaender]

Hi William,

which interface do you suggest to make a 2D Game using Delphi as programming language? Are there Headers available for DirectX 9? I don't want to handle the whole 3D-stuff because the game will not need it.
You say that some of the latest graphic cards may not support DirectDraw anymore. But would old graphic cards support DirectX9? The game we are on is meant to be no action game, it's a board game for up to 3 players. This means, that the normal player will be older than 20 years, even much older (40-50 years). I think that these players will not upgrade their hardware each time there is something new on the market. They mostly will have "older graphic cards" etc. So we have to decide which way to go. Support only latest hardware or rather support average hardware risking that the game may not work on some of the latest PCs.
It's a difficult question, but I think, that the main user group will have a standard PC, so DirectDraw seems quite ok for me.

What do you think about this?

Greetings,
Dirk

[WILL]

Hey Dirk. If you are searching for another graphics solution, why not try using OpenGL? JEDI-SDL with OpenGL is a great alternative to DelphiX.

You can also use OpenAL for audio. It's not too hard to code for either.

The best part about that is that you can go cross-platform later if you choose(use CLX instead of VCL if you are planning this for later) and OpenGL is supported just as well as DirectX is on Windows platforms plus all the other ones(Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS).

Try going to http://sourceforge.net/projects/jedi-sdl/ and take a look.

[cairnswm]

I have switched to GLXTreem for my games (all my games are 2D games - currently puzzle games only but hopefully Isometric games soon). Unfortunatly I'm experiencing technical difficulties with these components also.

I have started looking at some of the templates on www.sulaco.co.za to try get to a lower level of access to opengl components.

When I break down my requirements for 2D game development I have the following requirements:
1. Initialize Graphics Screen
2. Load an image (JPG or BMP) into screen memory
3. Draw the image somewhere on the screen.

Those are all the options I require - anything else is just extra and not needed.

Other requirements for games such as Sound, and networking etc are not necessarily part of the graphics requirements.

My goal now is to get all 3 points working with direct opengl calls instead of a graphics library. I'll then send the demo program to people having problems with my GLXTreem games to find out if its GLXTreem or OpenGL causing the problems.

PS. OpenAL is also not problem free - I have one user who can run my game alright but is having problems with the sound....

[Huehnerschaender]

I always thought OpenGL is mostly used when needing 3D graphics. I never put a thought on using OpenGL for 2D.
In my game I need things like alphablending, drawsub, blurring, etc. Are all these things available in OpenGL when programming in 2D? And how about performance?
I want the game to run smooth on a P3 800 Mhz, cause this is the standard PC I want to advice for my game. Anything which will only run smooth on latest hardware will decrease the number of users, and as I mentioned I don't want to make a game only for 20 year old people who spend all their money in latest hardware.
I also need sound, playing AVIs, networking (there will be a networkplay where the players can chat with each other in addition) and all this stuff. DelphiX has components for all of this.
I don't think that I want to port the game to Unix or Linux in the future. Since this is my first project meant to be commercial (except of those I do at work of cause) I just want to try out, if such software is missing on the market. I don't want to spend 2 more years on it recognizing that nobody wants to play the result. You know what I mean?
I began with the project in 2002 and I used graphics32 library. Now I am porting the whole code to DelphiX and the result is very good until now. I still have about 100 fps on my developement PC (Centrino 1,7 Ghz), about 80 fps on my Athlon 2000XP and about 40 fps on my PIII 800. This is quite good, because I am nearly ready with the main game which needs the most ressources at a time. Using G32 I could only achieve half of the framerate. If the game will run at 30-40 fps on a PIII 800 I am more that satisfied. This is still a good framerate to display smooth animations in 2D.
Yesterday I ported the particle engine and what can I say? Wow... DeplhiX does a very good job with it. I have never been that smooth with G32. I also need less graphics, cause in G32 I always needed an additional alphamask for the graphics.
So for now I am very satisfied with DelhiX. Btw, yesterday I spend an hour on converting to UnDelphiX, so the application is a little bit more up to date :D
Do you know good sites with samples and tutorials for programming OpenGL in 2D? I would like to take a look at it and try several things out.
Bye,
Dirk

[_inferno_]

Hi,

How are you going to play video with DelphiX, huh?

[Traveler]

Using video width DelphiX isn't that difficult at all actually. You can for example use the media component and use DXDraw as the canvas. You can even use this methode to get Full screen video!

[Huehnerschaender]

And there are also other components out like DSPack which are able to play videos (avi, mpg etc).
They have their own output-canvas and so you can overlay the video to the game content if you want to play videos in addition to the game.