I'm honored, and surprised, to be the first one to post here. I just saw your WebCasts on-demand, and that was truly enlightning. I bet you will be the grandfather of many games!
I'm a CS student, with some knowledge in graphic engines but with total lack of experience in developing for Windows (any flavor of it). I would be thankfull if you could drop me a line or two of directions. Straigh forward to my questions:
- About the Graphic Framework, I'm trying to develop a 2.5D game, this is, I'll have some objects with static Z, albeit different, and just a few with dynamic Z. In those with dynamic Z I will need the perspective effect and 3D collision checking. I will need transparency and alpha blending in some of the objects.
I am focusing strongly in performance. I dropped Direct3D because by going that route I won't have Windows mobile 2003 support, wich is a commercial minus and also I wondered if Direct3D wouldn't be perfomance-wise poorer comparing to a crafted game engine with just the features I need.
So I guess I'm left with GDI or GAPI, what I know from GAPI comes from Geoff Schwab in MSDN whose appear near yours "Games with Cheese". I guess I could do it with GDI, with some tricks to implement to some degree alpha blending, the 3D collision detection is no problem also, what I'm worried about it's the perspective effect on variable Z objects with Transparency. I saw in your webcast that it is problematic to scale transparent objects, could you tell me something more about this? The problem with the transformation is that the color key pixels get corrupted, ie get their color values changed?
On the other side GAPI, from what I've seen you have a lot of freedom on top of GAPI, and there are some nice and free libraries to use. My team has enough graphics engine knowledge to digg into building or adapting those available, the one thing that I feel lacking and I have no idea how to do it, it's the sprite support.
So getting all togheter, if we want to support as much platforms as possible, have 2.5D game with variable Z transparent objects and alpha blending in static Z objects, the 3D collision detection thingy, and last of all, the possibility to tweak performance to the extreme. GDI or GAPI? None of these?
I'm really thankfull for the WebCasts and the attention on this post.
I'm honored, and surprised, to be the first one to post here. I just saw your WebCasts on-demand, and that was truly enlightning. I bet you will be the grandfather of many games!
I'm a CS student, with some knowledge in graphic engines but with total lack of experience in developing for Windows (any flavor of it). I would be thankfull if you could drop me a line or two of directions. Straigh forward to my questions:
- About the Graphic Framework, I'm trying to develop a 2.5D game, this is, I'll have some objects with static Z, albeit different, and just a few with dynamic Z. In those with dynamic Z I will need the perspective effect and 3D collision checking. I will need transparency and alpha blending in some of the objects.
I am focusing strongly in performance. I dropped Direct3D because by going that route I won't have Windows mobile 2003 support, wich is a commercial minus and also I wondered if Direct3D wouldn't be perfomance-wise poorer comparing to a crafted game engine with just the features I need.
So I guess I'm left with GDI or GAPI, what I know from GAPI comes from Geoff Schwab in MSDN whose appear near yours "Games with Cheese". I guess I could do it with GDI, with some tricks to implement to some degree alpha blending, the 3D collision detection is no problem also, what I'm worried about it's the perspective effect on variable Z objects with Transparency. I saw in your webcast that it is problematic to scale transparent objects, could you tell me something more about this? The problem with the transformation is that the color key pixels get corrupted, ie get their color values changed?
On the other side GAPI, from what I've seen you have a lot of freedom on top of GAPI, and there are some nice and free libraries to use. My team has enough graphics engine knowledge to digg into building or adapting those available, the one thing that I feel lacking and I have no idea how to do it, it's the sprite support.
So getting all togheter, if we want to support as much platforms as possible, have 2.5D game with variable Z transparent objects and alpha blending in static Z objects, the 3D collision detection thingy, and last of all, the possibility to tweak performance to the extreme. GDI or GAPI? None of these?
I'm really thankfull for the WebCasts and the attention on this post.
Best regard from portugal,
João Acabado