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
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