nxPascal

[User137]

Well, i am the only developer and i don't really receive much/any feedback at all on what it can do, or what it should be able to do. I'm under assumption that nxPascal works on Windows, Linux and maybe Mac, with Delphi and Lazarus. Of course if that wasn't true, i also assume people would tell me error reports about it, even smallest compiler warnings. This simply because i am using crossplatform units of Lazarus, and any hints to Windows unit are conditionalized for Delphi only. I do not have Android/iOS to test with, nor anybody that would be able to test for me, so i haven't looked into it yet.

Yeah the wiki is something at least, but again it's 1 of the things also that i haven't received any feedback of thus far I am not sure what things people would most want more information about. Some of the units may have changed abit since writing those pages.

[hwnd]

If there is no feedback then it means that there are no bugs and all required features are implemented.
People are enjoying them. Like me.
But of course bugs should be reported and features requested. I have reported some of them and even requested features which you have implemented / modified. Thanks!!


But if we talk about Android, then i can test Android stuff a little bit. I have a phone with Android 2.3.6.
But i dont know much about Android. I tried the Eclipse IDEs etc, but my PC is too old and slow to even run the Android emulator. I tried to make few simple apps but that was it.

All in Java.

[JC_]

For android is very good solution ZenGL - demos, some phone functions, touch, etc. Better is test applications directly on phone or use Linux, there run emulator much better.

I use both, nxPascal for PC, ZenGL for Android

[Daikrys]

you could also have a look at blue stacks

[User137]

I am propably going to ignore android development for (very long?) time being. There exists programming environments better suited for it. I will focus on the PC. And lets face it, it's the only platform for real gaming. What is going on the market does not concern me, games can be real virtual worlds to complement real life in a fun way. Small portable device is physically incapable of making that as rich experience.

I have been recently making 1 sort of 2D game, but it uses custom shaders. nxPascal can draw terrain with 1 shader, VBO and many texture units, game objects with other shader, and fonts on top with standard OpenGL commands. I did came to realize that switching to a shader is difficult, actually as much that i had to inherit from TGLShader and make a new class for each new shader. It really is that difficult because each has different uniform variables to pass, and different kind of rendering needs, i even needed a different structure in vertex array. Much of that can be copied straight from renderer class though.

So i am a little excited on what this engine could do in right hands. I was thinking of making a small 2D shader demo of a fish aquarium. It would render all first pass in frame buffer, and then render the second pass through a wave shader. It would make all objects within water to wave along with it

As always, you can suggest what kind of tutorials or additions you would like to see in nxPascal. How could i emphasize enough, that making simple 2D-game is actually easy, that this engine is new-programmer-friendly? On simplest level it comes down to nx.Draw(x, y), that's enough to draw a whole Pacman game if you wanted to.

[JC_]

As always, you can suggest what kind of tutorials or additions you would like to see in nxPascal. How could i emphasize enough, that making simple 2D-game is actually easy, that this engine is new-programmer-friendly? On simplest level it comes down to nx.Draw(x, y), that's enough to draw a whole Pacman game if you wanted to.

Thank you for nice work.

I have a few notes:
1) there is no demo for control (mouse and keyboard) - key repeat, key down, key up, keypressed, doubleclick.
2) frame rate limiter is not accurate, is set to 60 FPS but jumping from 62-63. It is a bit problematic in the calculations of moving objects etc. It should be exactly 60 FPS.
3) will be fine basic demo with accurate physics (movement) independent of the framerate

[hwnd]

Hi.
I don't have much interest in programming lately, because of good sunny weathers, because of different projects on my car etc etc. But today i just tried to rebuild my map editor and Delphi 7 throws me an "Range check error" in nxGL at line 1731, which is: Data[i*4+3]:=255; // Full alpha

I have enabled full range checking etc all that debug stuff. Because i want to see in my project where is leak or where is too much data.

I don't know if you read this or not but you should or could add this code between {R-} and {R+} but better is to fix it, so it's always in range.

Im currently using rev84.

[User137]

1) there is no demo for control (mouse and keyboard) - key repeat, key down, key up, keypressed, doubleclick.
2) frame rate limiter is not accurate, is set to 60 FPS but jumping from 62-63. It is a bit problematic in the calculations of moving objects etc. It should be exactly 60 FPS.
3) will be fine basic demo with accurate physics (movement) independent of the framerate

Didn't notice this message before. The Picking demo makes use of mouse, keyboard and frame timing. There is a difference between how many times frame is rendered, and how many times gametick is calculated. Frame times can differ because frameskipping is in use by default. However amount of gameticks per second should always be the same on every machine. These are controlled with methods SetFrameInterval() and SetFrameSkipping(). By default the frame interval is set to 16, where 1000/16 makes for 62.5. 1000 is not divisible by exact 60, you would get 16.6666666. But this is closest you get to vsync ratio of 60 fps. Also all this is the reason i made GameTemplate demo To make it very easy to start new project, with all the input and frame handling placed ready.

You seem to have different version to mine (3339 lines in nxGL.pas by the way...), i have different code on that line. Also i tried setting range-checking on in Delphi 7, and then called the TGLTextureSet.AddEmptyTexture(), which seems to be function you mean. I don't even get any compiler hints. Not getting any hints in Lazarus either. Delphi code uses SysUtils.PByteArray type for the data array, which means
TByteArray = array[0..32767] of Byte;
Sure, textures like 512x512 with alpha channel use over 1 million bytes of data, and would sure go over boundary.
Would you check if this fixes it?
Data^[i*4+3]:=255;
Because after all we refer to pointer allocated data, not static array. And now that i think about it, it could possibly be replaced with setlength() implementation.

[hwnd]

Like i said in my previous post im using rev84. Older one. I havent messed with this stuff for months.
Maybe getting the new version will help. Will try it later today or tomorrow. And if this doesnt fix this i will do the texture test.

EDIT: rev86 didnt fix it. So later i will try the texture test. Atm im too busy and gtg.

[Murmandamus]

If you're using that declaration, then any RGBA texture which is bigger than 8192 pixels (~91x90 pixels!) will cause a range check error. Shouldn't that be a much bigger array, like Array[0..4294967295] Of Byte?