Quote Originally Posted by SilverWarior View Post
Don't worry some of us are reading all the forums

First I would recomend yout to switch to Asphyre Sphinx 3 graphical engine if posible (you don't code in old Delphi or use Asphyre Sprite Engine).
http://www.afterwarp.net/products/asphyresphinx3
Why? While Asphyre eXtreme is a god graphical engine it is old graphical engine which is formaly no longer maintained (existing bugs may not be fixed).
It is true that Asphyre Sphinx 3 is a 3D graphical engine but it still alows you to render 2D graphics. It supports all the latest hardware features (DirectX 7, 9, 10 and even 11, OpenGL 2.1) but still works on older hardware. It supports 32-bit Windows, 64-bit Windows, 32-bit Linux, 64-bit Linux and Mac OS X platforms.

Now I know what you might be thinking: "I don't need 3D graphics, I currently have no intention of porting my game to other platforms." But hey someday you might change your mind and do decide that you wanna do sone of this. And when that day comes would you rather be using a graphical engine which already supports all this, or switch to another graphical engine, learning hot to work with it from the start, redesigning your code to be usable with that engine, etc.

And now to your answer:

Asphyre draws most of things using either AsphyreImage-s or various AsphyreTexture-s.
TAsphyreImage alows loading its contents from TBitmap using:

function LoadFromBitmap(Source: TBitmap; NeedMasked: Boolean; MaskedColor: Longword; Tolerance: Integer): Boolean

Now if it isn't a secret you could post the Bitmap generation code here and we will see if we can rewrite the code to get same resuts using only Asphyre. This might provide you with more performance.
First of all thanks for the quick reply, I'm glad there are a few people reading this forum!

I would have started this conversion with Asphyre Sphinx 3 but I'm still using Delphi 7 and I don't have a lot of time so I thought I'd stick with Extreme for now. I'm really only converting this particular game because it simply doesn't want to work in full screen mode in Windows 8 with DelphX - it just freezes.

However as soon as I have done I have every intention of switching to Asphyre Sphinx 3 and the latest Delphi.

I have managed to get my game to load and initialise, as well as display it's main screen and menus, so conversion is going okay, I love Asphyre already!

It's just at various points in the game (usually just on menu screens) I create and modify the contents of a tbitmap and write it directly to the canvas.

Sometimes this is done every frame, I know, very messy and slow, but it worked and I'm just patching together this conversion so I was hoping there
was a straight forward alternative in Extreme.

I'm aware of the LoadFromBitmap procedure for AsphyreImage, but is it safe to perform that on every frame with the same AsphyreImage? If so then
my patching will just require me to have a AsphyreImage that I constantly change and then draw. A nasty but simple fix. Speed is not important - crashing regularly
would be :-)

Being able to directly write onto the canvas every frame with a Delphi Tbitmap seems so far to be my only stumbling block.

After this is all done I'm really looking forward to using the latest Asphyre for new projects.