One big image instead images list?

[fabianokm]

Is it absolutely necessary to use a list of images to draw sprites with DelphiX? I'm building a game, but it uses a lot (and that's really a lot) of images, and it won't work on old Windows (because of that GDI limitation).

What I have on my mind: instead of having a lot of sepparate images for every sprite, I have one big BMP file with all the sprites drawn on it.

The problem is how to draw only a specific region of that big BMP file to the screen. I tried doing that pixel by pixel, but it's just too slow.

Any ideas?

Regards
Fabiano

[Traveler]

Drawing only a portion from an image can be done like this:

DXDraw1.surface.Draw(10,10,rect(10,10,50,50),yourSurface,false);

I've tried using large (800x600) images in the past as well. However, when using them in combination with a DXImagelist, it made my game go much much slower. So, the only way it works is when you don't use the DXimagelist, and load the images during runtime.

[Useless Hacker]

As I said on GameDev, if your sprites are all the same size, you can use the PatternWidth and PatternHeight properties and use the PatternIndex parameter of the ImageListItem's draw function.

[fabianokm]

Thanks for the suggestions, both of them were really useful.

[Sofus]

How do you load a large image during runtime. :?

[BigKnockers]

[pascal]
var
BigImage: TDirectDrawSurface;
begin
BigImage := TDirectDrawSurface.Create(Form1.DXDraw1.DDraw);
BigImage.LoadFromFile('C:\BigImage.bmp');
end;
[/pascal]

That should do the trick,

[fabianokm]

For some unknow and strange reason, when I use images larger than 3000 pixels, the Draw procedure only draws noise. So I split my image into 3 smaller images and created 3 surfaces. It's still much much faster than using the images list (I can see that difference in DXTimer1.FrameRate).

[Avatar]

I guess you graphic card support textures up to 1024x1024 ... But more than 3000 px is really huge ...