Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Alpha 4.3 new rendering mode & Interview

Working on Alpha 4.3. Yep.

Video & Sound engine config
RS uses Managed DirectX for rendering. It runs fast and is nice, but has the interesting side-effect of crashing the game on some computers... and the audio API  can't render MP3s on some computers...

RS will now include setup program to allow you to choose different rendering or audio engines.



Managed DirectX is the best but less reliable.
GDI+ should work for everyone but is slower, especially on Windows XP as it does all the rendering in software on this OS. At least more people should be able to play the game!
I had the bright idea to abstract rendering into an interface since the beginning of the project so it took me only a few hours to code the GDI+ engine.

Despite sharing the same interface in the game, Managed DirectX and GDI+ renders things slightly differently.
Catch the differences!

GDI+  
Managed DirectX
There's only one choice for Sound, but I'll add at least one more engine for people who have no sound.

Blog Interview
For hardcore fans I did an interview about the game for a blog: read it there. You might learn stuff. Or not.

End of post.

4 comments:

  1. I'm stumped. What are the differences?

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  2. The text is closer together on GDI+ as well as some of the graphics are blurred more.

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  3. Aaron, it seems you are blind.

    Either way, can't you use OpenGL rougedjack? Its just about as good as DirectX ( If not better ) and is cross platform.

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  4. Sure, the thing is to find a good C#/.NET binding that is not intrusive. I'll check Tao etc...

    BTW I just implemented SFML for Sound and it seems to work for people who had no sound.
    So with GDI for video + SFML for audio everyone should be able to play without crash and with sound now.

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