Geoffrey

The system I use has what you call animation frames as objects in their own right (I call them cells). There is a function to find one by name, and after that you can pass around a pointer to it just like you do with the parent in your example. In fact, the cell knows it's parent so you don't need to pass that around separately. So my code to create an instance looks something like this:

cell = cell_manager.lookup_cell("example_cell_name");

new_sprite = std::auto_ptr<dx_sprite>(new dx_sprite());
new_sprite->set_cell(cell);

I still cannot help worrying about someone thinking I copied them and starting some sort of Twitter mob to destroy my company before it begins.

I'm not sure if you meant this literally, but I'll say this anyway - if you're a new developer such a mob is probably just as likely to make you (via publicity, people checking out your game to see what all the fuss is about) as to break you (via negative publicity) anyway. This is probably especially true if your game is interesting enough that others will step up to defend you as well.

I suggest you spend more of your time worrying about simply not being noticed!

I looked into that, but i was reading it didnt do full color cursors...i read somethign about it needing to be black and white.

I believe that was the case a *long* time ago. But I've tested a full colour system cursor on Windows 7, Vista, XP and 98 so I don't think you'll have any problems!

Hi,

I have just a little bit of experience creating sound effects from developing The Trouble With Robots, here are my tips for beginners:

1. Minimize background noise. Turn of unnecessary equipment, close windows, and avoid recording when something noisy is happening nearby. Put the microphone as far away from your computer as you can. It's easy to see the difference these things make by recording silence in different conditions and comparing the levels of fuzz you get - and this is much cheaper than sound proofing!

2. Try to make your sounds as loud as possible without 'clipping' (which is where the sound waveform goes above the top or below the bottom level that can be recorded, resulting in a crackling sound). This is preferable to recording a quiet sound and amplifying it a lot, because that will also amplify the noise.

3. Record lots of variations of each effect. This way you can choose your favourite, and potentially introduce alternatives if the sound is played frequently.

4. Experiment with speeding up and slowing down recordings. As a rule, speeding up a sound makes it sound like it came from something smaller, whereas slowing it down makes it sound like it came from something larger. The latter is particularly useful if you're recording household objects which are typically smaller than the game objects you want to represent.

5. Be patient. Often you won't get the sound you want on your first attempt, so try different things until you have something that sounds good. If a particular effect is troubling you then don't give up, but put it down and come back another day with fresh ideas.

- Geoffrey White
http://www.digitalchestnut.com
http://www.facebook.com/thetroublewithrobots

Thanks for the advice, it took me a while to get around to implementing this (it's almost like I have more enjoyable tasks on my TODO list than resolving driver issues...) and I've yet to go back and fully test this on the affected systems.

I've gone for Adam_42's suggestion, identifying the offending device but having a setting that can override this to either always on or always off (in an easy to edit .txt file).  My logic only includes the VendorID and DeviceID because I don't have enough data points to select more narrowly - and the issue does occur on the latest drivers.

Bacterius, your attitude is appealing and it's true that there could be hundreds of variations I don't know about (it's a shame I don't have the resources to test many more systems).  However, I feel that I should do my best to make the game work on as many systems as possible, and since the fix shouldn't cause much harm when it's wrongly applied, I think I want it.

Yes, I believe that is exactly what you get in a PNG file.

Glad I could help.

By the way, R32G32B32A32_FLOAT is a huge format and probably isn't widely supported - I suggest you use something a bit lighter like A8R8G8B8.

What texture format is the glow effect stored in?