- PowerDraw -

Lifepower · 2002-01-21T11:37:11

Greetings It''s usually hard to find time to post on the forums for me, but due to my great concern of the future of PowerDraw, I decided to ask you, People for help with opinions, ideas or anything you think would be helpful. I''m actually disappointed by PowerDraw performance (which also refers a lot to DirectXGraphics). At the moment PowerDraw has excellent effect rendering routines which are flexible and pretty fast. Besides that, PowerDraw has still major disadvantages / drawbacks, which should be solved (and that''s where I need your help): 1) "Normal" rendering is rather slow (at least it''s much faster with DirectDraw), for example if you want to draw a single image on the screen without any effect (for background, menus, etc). This can be tolerated though, since in modern games you''ll more commonly use images with effects (alpha-channels, light effects, etc), besides you have a freedom of defining 4-point coordinates for every image. 2) My biggest complain to DirectXGraphics is that any DXG application FAIL TO START on a machine without 3D accelerator. I''ve seen some machines like P2 333Mhz with Intel video card of 2Mb which supports nice DirectDraw hardware acceleration - some applications could still run on this machine with minimal quality settings, but DXG refuses to start, ''cuz there''s no hardware D3D. This is major drawback I see so far, even after the first one (1). I don''t see any possibility to fix it =( 3) Graphics primitives are VERY SLOW (Line, FrameRect, PutPixel, even QuadPixel), even when they''re done in hardware. I see two solutions - making software routines again, for DXG; or precaching all line / pixel calls into a single call (which will be basically X times faster, where X is the number of calls cached), although this is not flexible method. This drawback doesn''t concern me much, but what do you think is better? 4) I''ve noticed that on different machines the graphics of PowerDraw is different (sometimes different from what''s supposed to be), what''s actually hardware-dependence. And sometimes it cannot be "fixed" (or pre-determined). My question is, what do you suggest, should I go back to DirectDraw (directx 7) and Direct3D7 or should I stay with DirectXGraphics (and then how would I solve the problems listed above)? And finally, what do you think about the library? Is it successful / useless project? I''ve donated this library for public (completely free for any kind of project) so it is your power to choose its destiny With all the respect Lifepower

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Started by Lifepower December 10, 2001 07:01 PM

30 comments, last by Lifepower 22 years, 2 months ago

Lifepower

136

Author

January 20, 2002 06:27 PM

Official PowerDraw site (partially finished though).

Sorry for the delay... There's a small update for PowerDraw to version 2.22.

EDIT: There'll be no updates during next week or two since I'm working on Software Emulation (based on DDraw7 and using MMX / SIMD for good perfomance) library for PowerDraw.

Edited by - Lifepower on January 20, 2002 7:30:22 PM

snorga

122

January 21, 2002 11:37 AM

Thanks :-)

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