VoracityPPC and HauteCapture Addendum

Published February 07, 2006
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This post is an addendum to two posts. First, VoracityPPC is progressing apace.



And second, with the HauteCapture utility, this is what it saves if you export a screen capture:



I checked also to find that putting the picture on the clipboard for pasting elsewhere makes the image look exactly the same.

So, apparently the "screen capture" part is free, but saving or copying it to the clipboard is the part you have to pay for.

...

Unless you just do a screen capture of your desktop screen, and crop out the PPC capture.

As far as I can tell, there is no time limit on the software, so it looks like I have a really great screen capture utility for PPC, I just have to add a couple of steps to the process.
0 likes 3 comments

Comments

johnhattan
Looks better, but at this point I must ask why you're bothering with GAPI for Voracity.

Since the amount of animation required in the game is almost nil, you're likely better off just going with DIBSections. Heck, you could even Paint Shop Pro yourself a single bitmap 31 squares long and one square high (ten with gray, ten with green, ten with yellow background, one black) and blit chunks of it to the screen in response to a paint message.

I could understand the need for GAPI with Jetlag, as the scrolling and arcade aspect requires a non-trivial amount of bit-fiddling, but Voracity is so trivial in the animation department that anything other than bitblt() is overkill.

As an added bonus, abandoning GAPI for the game would eliminate the need for a screen-grab utility, as you could run the game in an emulator and snap away with the PrtScn key.
February 07, 2006 03:53 PM
TANSTAAFL
Actually, there is no GAPI usage for VoracityPPC, and in JetLagPPC, I only use GAPI for input from the hard keys.

For graphics in both, I use DDBs, created with CreateCompatibleBitmap and selected into an HDC created with CreateCompatibleDC.

With JetLagPPC, I originally went with the approach I use for most JetLag implementations: a 2D grid with values for "block", "tail", "wall" and "token".

It was slow.

So I went with the approach I used in Flash for JetLag: Crystal. There are 35 rows, and each row has a block on it. Same idea for the tail. There are 5 tail pieces and the token. I render each every frame. I use FillRect to do so. JetLag could actually be a lot faster than it is, but it would be unplayable.

With VoracityPPC, I needed the gameboard concept, and in addition, because the board was so large and needed a lot of time to completely redraw, it also includes a valid/invalid flag for each cell. It speeds along the drawing process except for the beginning of the game, which is when I show an "Initializing Board..." screen.

VoracityPPC's board is draw using Rectangle(for each cell), DrawText(for each cell), and Ellipse(for the token).
February 07, 2006 04:49 PM
Rob Loach
Damn nice... Any plans of a release?
February 07, 2006 10:33 PM
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