Who is writing a game?

[User137]

That is close to how nxPascal game class handles it No worries, it's perfect for making smooth 60 fps animations, while keeping CPU and GPU use near 0%.

Actually i can show you. It supports frameskipping too for rendering (could make it optional though):

  t:=nxEngine.GetTick;
  if t<nextTick then begin
    Application.ProcessMessages; Sleep(1);
  end else begin

    FrameSkips:=-1;
    repeat
      inc(FrameSkips);
      nextTick:=nextTick+FrameInterval;
      GameLoop;
    until (nextTick>t) or (FrameSkips>=10) or FNoFrameSkipping;
    Draw;

  end;

[hwnd]

Ok, but is it possible to take some constant and use the nxPascal "tick" to generate different animations with different framerate?
Slower / faster.

In my case, every block could have tile animation with his own frame rate. Some anims need slower FR, some bigger FR and still be same on any PC?
I mean animation that has slower framerate, will be actually faster in my friends computer, who has more faster pc.

So can i divide my FR value with something from that loop?
Im beginner in timers and animation, but i always wanted to make my editor timing better.
Just dont have enough knowledge.

[User137]

Ok, but is it possible to take some constant and use the nxPascal "tick" to generate different animations with different framerate?
Slower / faster.

In my case, every block could have tile animation with his own frame rate. Some anims need slower FR, some bigger FR and still be same on any PC?
I mean animation that has slower framerate, will be actually faster in my friends computer, who has more faster pc.

This is demonstrated in the nxPascal demos many times. You have:
- nx.GetTick <= Returns multiplatform GetTickCount. It is a millisecond timer running onwards, each 1000 being 1 second.
- nx.GetTick2(range: integer; scale: single) <= Same as above, but you can limit it to certain range and scale
- nx.FrameTick <= FPS counter called GetTick in the Flip and stored it here. You don't need to ask it from system so it could be marginally faster, but this is 1 frame late.

What i prefer to use is the GetTick2(). For example:

nx.SetColor(1, 0, 0, 0.8+0.2*sin(toRad*nx.GetTick2(360, 0.5)));

It makes a red color with alpha being in range 0.6..1.0, smoothly going by sine-wave. With range 360 it always returns value from 0.0 .. 359.5. You can use different ranges and speeds for each animation. If you want it to loop animation patterns from end to start way, you can use modulus math:

trunc(nx.GetTick2(4, 0.001)) mod 4

This would return values from 0..3, like 0,1,2,3,0,1,... And being so slow that it only changes once per second.
(actually this is going so theoretic i might have to test to verify It's how it's supposed to work though.)

edit: Verified, returns single though.

But naturally you can animate your stuff with like:

AnimPos:=AnimPos+AnimSpeed; // Where AnimSpeed is any floating point number

With the default fixed FPS, it works same speed on every computer.

[Jimmy Valavanis]

COBOL?!?! Wow...I didn't know that was being used still
So what do you do for your job that needs COBOL?

I'm curious too about COBOL. I liked the language when I learned it a lot of time ago.

Huge, boring, old, compicated social seq/pension system. Neither a game, nor Pascal

[WILL]

Hmm... so have any of these games surfaced anywhere?

[SilverWarior]

Unfortunately I must admit that you guys will probably have to wait quite some time for my game to get finished (the one I started for 2nd PGD mini competition). While I managed to build some realy cumerstone UI (with a few bugs and memory leaks) overal progress hasn't moved a lot from the status at which it was on end of 2nd Mini PGD competition. Main reason for this is the fact that I'm having some programing motivational problems lately (havent done almost any work in past few months).

Also I decided to focus most of my atention to another project which would in the end alow me to quicky and eficiently buid a nice UI for my game using similar approach as used when working with VCL or LCL in lazarus. It will alow me to simply say I want some controll at X,Y position with W,H dimensions using certain pictures to represent each parts of the it(client part and borders part).
In the end my goal is to make this Library which would provide me with this functionality to be designed in such way so that it can be used with almost any graphic engine.
Frankly there is still a lot of work to be done.

And after I finish work on my library I will probably focus my atention to another project of mine which would hopefully alow me to easily make necessary graphics for my game. I also belive that this Tool might also come in handy for other programes so I intend to put a lot of work into it.
Currently I have some parts of this tool already made but they still aren't conected int whole so for now I have verry limited functionality.
Also since I'm actually thinking of making whole UI with my Library that I mentioned before I'll have to develop my library at least to certain point where it would be stable enough to be used.

Anywhay when each of theese projects of mine comes to a point where they could actually be usable I will post more information in My Projects section.

BTW Do you guys have any good tip for increasing motivation for programing. I could surely use one.

[WILL]

More people should be posting in the My Projects section.

We need to see more games being made!