Asphyre 4.0 to Target Turbo Delphi

[WILL]

Afterwarp Interactive, the developers of the Asphyre component suite for DirectX-based games will be focusing on Turbo Delphi development for it's next major release.

It is said to become availible within the next two months and will not only be availible for the Professional edition, but the free Explorer edition aswell. Because they wish to support both editions, the final release of Asphrye 4 will not be VCL based to support this.


Further information about Asphyre may be found at www.Afterwarp.net ('http://www.afterwarp.net/').

[JernejL]

interesting, but why on the earth are they going to be vcl-less to do so? couldn't they ask borland to let their bpls load?

[Robert Kosek]

couldn't they ask borland to let their bpls load?No, because there are restraints against non-default packages in the Explorer version. A work around is to drop the AsphyreReg.pas into DCLUSER, but you can't do this for everything.


but why on the earth are they going to be vcl-less to do so?Because of the above. A work around would be to not be objectless, just vcl-less. So all the objects and functionality there remains present, just more easily accessed through a few smaller objects.

[WILL]

Something to consider with non-visual VCL components is that it's mostly just eyecandy for those that like to see all those neat little boxes tossed onto a form. (But not always. Some games/tools are unique in design.) Which is perfectly fine, I did this for a few years with DelphiX back in the day. ;) Of course in changing them from VCL, the Object Model remains weither or not you use the 'components' aspect of it or not, thats the basis of the Object Pascal language it's self.

But for many 'veteran' game programmers the feel good factor of having only needed to drag and drop a component icon into the form quickly fades as he realizes that there is much more code to do reguardless. And in some ways he can even get a small to sizable increase in speed or decreased filesize without.

I guess you can think of VCL (to a game programmer) as a temporary crutch for beginners and more likely to be considered when creating tools for content design and testing/debugging.