DelphiX > Asphyre

[Huehnerschaender]

Hi Steven,

seems that you don't have the actual release of Asphyre. The VScreen demo runs well in latest version. There was a bug in definition of taCenter which is already defined through Delphis units itself. Lifepower renamed it to taMiddle in the latest version, this tells me you are not up to date with Asphyre.

As far as I know the Hasteroids demo has an exe included, so you can take a look of what the demo does. To compile it you have to install the bass system, which is free to download (but not free to use commercial).

The Ascii-demo is not of much importance to you if you want to create games. It's an addon lifepower wrote to make graphical demos in Ascii-mode. The renderer will convert bitmap graphics (and animations) to Ascii-character colored graphics. Only makes sense for demos (which was lifepowers intention).

Asphyre itself has no sound system available (yet). I remember lifepower mentioned a possible sound system in the future. So you have to use other units or code your own. Wav-playing should be quite simple, though.

To find out if hardware acceleration is available I guess it's only 2 or 3 lines of code, so I don't see a problem there. Just try to initialize Asphyre using hardware and if an exception occurs use software mode.
But be warned: Software mode is quite slow. You would need a fast machine to obtain good fps-results.

a) DelphiX has one timer for the game loop. I normally have this running at maximum speed and adjust all my sprite movements accordingly. Is this still easy to do with Asphyre? I notice it?¢_Ts timer appears to have a render and process procedures.
Can I easily stick to my old way?

Asphyre has only one timer, too. But IMO Asphyres timer is more powerful. Take a look at the demo sources to find out the difference of the three timermodes. I am not sure, but I think the timer is already documented in the helpfile -> take a look at it.

b) It seems keen on using it?¢_Ts vtDB component for storing data, images etc. I?¢_Td rather control all that myself. Is it easy enough to load my own bitmaps from streams? I?¢_Tve only just started looking but I can?¢_Tt see how to load an image from a stream.

I myself use VTDB. But I know that it is possible to load bitmaps from file. I just took a look at images-component, it does not have a procedure to load bitmaps from streams, but hey, the whole system has source code included, so if you need loading from stream, it should not be difficult, since you already have the code for function loadfromfile and so you know how Asphyre needs images to be added.

c) The easy of created tiled background in DelphiX is great. Is something similar available in Asphyre?

What exactly do you mean? I never used tiled backgrounds in DelhiX, but I use tiled background in my project for dogfight compo. Had no problems with it. Is there a component in DelphiX to create tiled background? :?:

Are there any other instructions for Asphyre anywhere?

Unfortunately I don't know any sources or instructions how to use Asphyre and the documentation is not finished yet. It is not easy to find exactly what you need, but I found it not too difficult. Take a good look at the demos. How is this done, how is that done. Then experiment with it. That's what I did and now I am able to write games with Asphyre...

Anything else I can do for you?

Dirk