Writing a better 2D engine. (Phoenix 2D Game Engine)

[Andreaz]

I must say that I'm interested, very interested.

Firstly, what I'd want from such an engine is that it wouldn't turn into something like the A5/6 engine. IE, something clunky, overscripted and has no source access.

Personally the feature list you've put together appeals to me and really contains all I'd want for 2D work. My only suggestion would be instead of coding your own fileformat for the packages, why not use Abbrevia instead? It's zipfile archiving and has directories and can encrypt as well.

Other than those two points I must say you've got me intrigued. If you can get most, if not all, the points on your feature list into an OpenGL 2D engine DelphiX replacement, you will probably get me as a user right off the bat.

It will be open source for shure, and my intention is to make it very modular, atleast without limiting the speed and ease of use.

As a package format i was planning on using the format me and Tokter wrote for glxtreem, (was only avaible for the v1.0 via cvs). But shure, a external lib is doable aswell.

Hey Andreas!

Sounds like a great project idea. There aren't too many OpenGL based 2D libraries for Pascal compilers these days, if any really. So I hope this one takes off!

From a support side of things, I'd be quite happy to see this thing support Free Pascal(and/or Lazarus) aswell as Delphi. FPC and Lazarus are very quickly becoming the flagship pair of the Pascal development world, but Delphi is not gone by far either. So I think to maximize your target userbase you'd want to offer good support for both compilers and/or component models. [size=9px](Refering, of course to both VCL and LCL should you make a [non-]visual component version of this new 2D library.)[/size]

With reguards to the modeling and structure of your library, I find that if you keep the functionality very modular and simple where we can pick and choose our level of graphics engine 'hand off' then we as developers will be moe pleased than not in it's usage. It's of course a balancing game, right? Hold our hands too much and it becomes a beginners crutch and they'll all eventually move onto something they can use with a bit more of an intuative understanding. You leave too much to the developer to do himself, he feels a bit overwealmed and moves onto something else that is more within his realm of understanding of OpenGL and graphics in general.

As for packaging. I like simple, but I also like (LOVE actually! ) options. So why not just write an interface for yours aswell as this Abbrevia I've been hearing about so much?

Oh and graphics formats... Must have PNG and BMP! I was a little shocked to find out that SDL did not support it by default. It's an open format for crying out loud! *sigh* oh well.

Yeah, support for other platforms then delphi would be nice, i have quite limited experience with lazarus and the likes myself, especially regarding the design ide, wich is a big part of making a accessable package . But this should be doable for shure

My intention is to make it as modular as possible, so you easilly can mix parts from the package with custom components and raw opengl code. But to get the design editors to work in a easy and accessable way will requre to interconnect certain parts, package routines comes in mind.

I feel you should be quite pleased with the format that freeimage (http://freeimage.sourceforge.net) supports:

• BMP files [reading, writing]
  DDS files [reading]
  Dr. Halo files [reading] *
  GIF files [reading, writing] **
  ICO files [reading, writing]
  IFF files [reading]
  JBIG [reading, writing] ***
  JNG files [reading]
  JPEG/JIF files [reading, writing]
  KOALA files [reading]
  LBM files [reading]
  Kodak PhotoCD files [reading]
  MNG files [reading]
  PCX files [reading]
  PBM files [reading, writing]
  PGM files [reading, writing]
  PNG files [reading, writing]
  PPM files [reading, writing]
  PhotoShop files [reading]
  Sun RAS files [reading]
  TARGA files [reading, writing]
  TIFF files [reading, writing]
  WBMP files [reading, writing]
  XBM files [reading]
  XPM files [reading, writing]

However the freeimage version i'm using is distributed as a dll so will be some platform issues there that will require some kind of fallback i suppose.

Hi Andreaz,

Welcome back!
I like your idea a lot. I've been doing some 2d opengl programming myself, the last few months. At first it was a bit of getting used to, but it's actually fairly easy to learn, once you get 'it'.

Some things I'd like to see is a solid 2d particle generator, and some good sound support, preferably openAL.
Another thing might be netwerk support, but that should be a very low priority thing.

Oh and graphics formats... Must have PNG and BMP! I was a little shocked to find out that SDL did not support it by default. It's an open format for crying out loud! Surprised *sigh* oh well.

I doubt bmp is a format you'll want to invest time into. IMO, if you want alpha support its either tga or png, for all the rest its jpg.

Thanks

Yeah, i've noticed, been visiting your page quite regulary

With 2d particle generator i suppose you mean a particle system ? In that case there will propbably be one down the line, maybe not as advanced as the later versions of the glxtreem ones but nontheless.

Sound is also a thing on the todo list, only been working with fmod myself, but nothing says it cant support multiple sound libs.

Some things for Sprites
:arrow: Transparency
:arrow: Rotation
:arrow: Scaling
are musts

Why use Lua for the scripting engine. I'm a Pascal programmer and would rather write my scripting in Pascal as well. There are many pascal scripting projects out there - DWS, paxScript etc etc - why not integrate one of them into the 2D libraries.

One reason I stopped using GLXtreem (Still have it installed though) is that I found it inconsistent accross different computers. This is something that must be made more stable in the new Libraries.

Are you considering doing this as a Andreaz only project or are you considering opening it up as an open source collaboration project? I would certainly like to be involved if you did do somethign like this.

Yeah, scaling and all those stuff for sprites will ofc be supported, mosy likly via texture transformations to limit the need to modify the vertex buffers to much.

Well my idea of to use lua is mostly because of its speed and the ability to precompile scripts, shure it's c style code so that may not be optimum, but it should be possible to make this pluggable to use different languages i guess.

The computer inconsistency in glxtreem is mosly because there's limited fallback functions for the more advanced opengl calls, ie its targeted on somwhat top of the line gpus. Another limiting thing is the testing platforms i have avaiable, wich basicly is only my own computer

To be honest, glxtreem has mostly been my test platform for different graphical technologies that i have put together in a library that people could use of their liking. Thats why when someone has asked if they may use and modify any of the code from a component in the package for their own use I have given a all go

Actually, the idea of making it a community project appeals me, there's alot of compentent coders here with great ideas so I think this would only be good for the project.