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

[Andreaz]

Yeah, sounds good, what other features is it that you feel is needed before the 1.0 release ?

[tanffn]

GUI - More controls (TList, TcheckBox, TRadioBnt, TMemo, more?) and finish the existing one (i.e text scroll for the edit box, resizable and skinable (windows style) form)
Sprites engine - easily create and control sprites and their events. (maybe you have that, didn’t look at the code *)
Physics - would be nice collations transfer of energy, friction, gravitation/force points.
Collision - make it vector based not rect based (each object can have n collideable lines), add pixel test collision.
3D features - allow loading and rendering of models (instead of pre rendering the animation), and generally allow/integrate all of the possibilities you have in a modern 3D card.
Alimentary drawing routines - draw line, circle, polygon, etc.

* More examples that easily demonstrate the operation.

There are many more things that you can add but I think the above is the elementary features that is needed to be added (apart from Physics, 3D features).
Sadly the current semester don’t leave me any of free time.. but I will try to help you in any of the above topics.

[XTRiZ]

Hi,

i might be wrong here but the collisiontests availible in the sprite demo is rectangle, polygon and circle. Not only rectangle.

I think it looks great, keep up the good work, every single demo works for me..

system:
AMD X2 3800+, 2GB Ram, 2x GF 6800 256MB. Integrated 7.1 Channel Sound (On the Ati Fatal1ty MB) ..

Rgrds,
Peter

[tanffn]

i might be wrong here but the collisiontests availible in the sprite demo is rectangle, polygon and circle. Not only rectangle.

ops: You're right, I missed that. Collision works great.

I'll test the sounds demo tomorrow at work, I'll have plenty of computers to test it on.

[Andreaz]

GUI - More controls (TList, TcheckBox, TRadioBnt, TMemo, more?) and finish the existing one (i.e text scroll for the edit box, resizable and skinable (windows style) form)

Checkbox and radio button is already there, ListBox is wip (even included in the component palette in the editor). I'll readd the scrolling of the edit aswell (was in the glx version, but never got around to copy it over)

I'm not shure what you mean with skinnable as each component is rendered as a image, this makes resizing components somewhat difficult to handle (stretched gui controls don't look good, trust me)

There's also a progress and a table included already. The current rendering method makes more advanced controls, such as a scrollbar quite tendersome to implement, the texture coordinates for each part of the component is static, wich makes for alot of work when there's many faces, (a button is 4, a scrollbar is atleast 12 or so).

This is the drawback of the image based approach of the gui, the positive thing is that you can have the gui look just like you want.

Sprites engine - easily create and control sprites and their events. (maybe you have that, didn’t look at the code *)

Tried to make it as easy as possible, have a look at the code and say what you thinhk :twisted:

Physics - would be nice collations transfer of energy, friction, gravitation/force points.

I feel this is somewhat of a two sided issue, the current engine is very easy to handle, no need to mess with vectors and forces and such if you dont want to, but it's still possible to add it yourself. The goal of the engine is to have it very easy yet powerfull and this might clash.

Collision - make it vector based not rect based (each object can have n collideable lines), add pixel test collision.

Allready ansvered, pixel collisions is not so straight forward as the pixel data of the images (read texures) is never saved (to save memory) and there's really no way of extracting it from OpenGL. This is still something i want to do but I can't really come up with a good way of doing it.

3D features - allow loading and rendering of models (instead of pre rendering the animation), and generally allow/integrate all of the possibilities you have in a modern 3D card.

There wont be any 3D routines in Phoenix, atleast not until all the 2D functions are polished. And i've already made a 3D engine aswell

Alimentary drawing routines - draw line, circle, polygon, etc.

Planned, started but not finished

* More examples that easily demonstrate the operation.

More demos is comming, there will be some game demos in the future aswell, and there have been some interest in writing tutorials aswell.

There are many more things that you can add but I think the above is the elementary features that is needed to be added (apart from Physics, 3D features).
Sadly the current semester don’t leave me any of free time.. but I will try to help you in any of the above topics.

There's a few more things i have in progress, a tile engine is one of em, with support for both rectangular and isometric perspectives and with sprite collision support. Going to add perspective calculations to the sprite engine aswell so it also supports isometric perspective.

[XTRiZ]

I fired up my BDS2006 env, and thought i could load your examples .. hehe, the sprite example for example, this one isn't really for BDS ??, .lpi gotta be another env. But hey renamed, removed a ifdef, and started to try to compile it, but i guess i have to do more testing as it doesn't compile.. Are you going to put in some BDS examples later too ??

rgrds,
Peter

[cairnswm]

.lpi is for Lazarus.

But last time I checked there were only minor changes required to get it working in Delphi (But I used D7)

[tanffn]

Thanks Andreas for the clear response

I'm not shure what you mean with skinnable as each component is rendered as a image, this makes resizing components somewhat difficult to handle (stretched gui controls don't look good, trust me)

I mean use 6-8 images to buld the form/window.



a-d edges, e-f (+2 for asymmetrical form) are small and are drawn several times to complete the entire length.

[Andreaz]

I see what you mean, had some discussions yesterday about redesigning the rendering of the gui engine, partly so it's easier to do it the way you sugggested:

Instead of now, where you select a image for each component, the engine will have a list of wanted pattern indexes, for example:

button_normal
button_down
checkbox_normal
checkbox_checked

and so on. Then in the gui editor the user will be able to pick a pattern index for each of the predefined faces above, thus the gui will only consist of one image with alot of patterns.

[tanffn]

I don’t think it worth making a major change to the GUI, resizable components are ‘nice to have’ but I don’t think its mandatory. I actually proffer the 3D features that you said you won’t include :roll: