Prometheus News

[code_glitch]

'load sounds' that is on its way. Its already possible to do so with the current sdl_mixer based release of Prometheus_Audio but has high memory usage as it loads the entire sound to ram... Textures from stream is partially implemented since it can load from Sdl surfaces in memory with the Image.LoadFromSurface() procedure and collision functions is a neat one I did not think of yet (weekend coding perhaps) once the bugs in my new opengl code and memory optimisations are sorted.

In terms of the engine you mentioned, it is not really direct competition since Prometheus or PrometheusLib (full name) is not an engine in itself but a colelction of data types, functions and procedure much like sdl to make coding a lot easier whilst retaining the best flexibility. However, one of my main focuses is on performance which is usually improved on every revision. (ran some benchmarks a while back here: http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com...c-benchmarking but might I add we are now 15 revisions later. Unfortunately I am in the process of writing the documentation so it may be cumbersome to pick up although nearer the start of the project I wrote this article which may give you a feel of what prometheus aims to achieve for making coding easier: http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com...brief-overview

however, the last link is seriously old and considerably slower it gives a good rough idea on the project...

Hope this helped you in some way and since I am getting quite a bit of free time expect many new releases in the next few weeks. Major one coming up this weekend.

PS: Do NOT use the latest release of prometheus, it is riddled with bugs as meego experimentation revealed... I would revert to r37 or around there until I commit the next revision. Almost forgot, due to my over-zealous linking of external libraries prometheus binaries are around 700kb but use 1-4 megs of ram for simple applications... If you are planning to run this on am Amstrad you may encounter problems. Although I doubt they have opengl anyways

EDIT: scratch that going back revisions, new revision out wed-thur. I'd recommend waiting it out until then if you can XD

[gintasdx]

Well I will wait for a stable release. There is a dead game engine which may come handy for you S2DL for making game states engine and collisions.

Goodluck!

[code_glitch]

Man looking at that makes me grin - I have the bases covered from other engines in Prometheus. Heading towards a stable release soon by the looks of it (I reckon around r65 or so).. At the moment, its mainly bug fixing since I removed a LOT of sdl garbage for OpenGl so now everything is like wtf I was using that sdl resource now its gone... So its along the lines of whipping up some super simple test programs like this:

program TestApp;

uses
    Prometheus_Vid,
    crt;

var
    Dat: Image;
    c: Int64;

begin
    PrometheusVid_Start();
    CreateWindow(800, 600, 32);
    
    UpdateWindow();
    
    Dat.Load('Data.png');
    
    c := 0;
    repeat
        c := c + 1;
        Dat.Resize(c, c);
        Dat.Rotate(c);
        Dat.Draw(110, 110);
        UpdateCanvas();
        ClearCanvas();
        delay(10);
        until c >= 1000;
        
    writeln('DONE');
end.

Lucky prometheus makes them short XD. Oh and cheers for the pointers to that source - some interesting stuff in there that may just find its equivalent functionality added to prometheus somehow... And thanks for the luck - will definitely need lots of that too.

If you're going meego, perhaps look into Zengl. From what I have heard that will compile on just about anything with a CPU and a decent OS (not to say anything it doesnt compile on yet is not decent) if you don't mind the complexity. Otherwise Prometheus could handle your basic functionality but multitouch is one I need to implement. Might be difficult though, since current event handlers are sdl (under I re-write them haha) and that is not multitouch

cya round on the forums I guess. Back to work time.

[code_glitch]

Still not many prometheus users, but I use it so I might as well publish my code... Just thought I'd let the community know of some upcoming features in prometheus:

-Layer & Tile properties in Map variables
-Implementation of all variables in Map variables for full support
-A new XFont which pre-renders characters from a TTF file for that extra speed boost! YAAA! Good thing here is we can do it all on the fly so we don't need a conversion utility outside your program, although I can make one if required
-In order to get s very small speed boost, a cache system is being added to Maps so that if your data reads 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 Prometheus only searches tilesets once rather thatn 7 times, although it purely depends on the map... Although the next step is to render the same tile everywhere: Ie. All tile code 5 rendered then 6 then 7 rather than sequentially by position. This, of course, will have switchable modes.
-Sdl code is being phased out some more, and hopefully will now be removed from resource loading in favour for code based on andrus amazing zengl, window code to follow.
-Extensions to the window creation system will let you have full screen, resizeable, named, iconed and themed windows with/without borders and etc...
-And last but not least I may release a snapshot of the new OpenAL Prometheus_Audio depending on whether the bugs get fixed.

So all in all, a dabble more than your regular update, and in my mind a well earned refresh for Prometheus. All this in the next few days to 2 weeks at the latest. Hoorah!

[WILL]

Still not many prometheus users

I keep telling you... documentation...

[code_glitch]

Oh yes, that thing... Its getting there. According to the pascal doc generator thing I need to make an XML file? At the moment, documentation covers 15% of video, so I'll try and get it up to the 80s or 90s by the next few days...

Aside from that, implementation of Prometheus_Video is swelling quite rapidly now so thats some good news at least. Especially looking forward to the fonts improvement since It seems to be 10% slower than anything else Perhaps I'll commit that to SVN first.

[gintasdx]

Yo! So what is going on inside the development? No fresh news and I hope there is some tasty news about Android part.