by fzammetti » Jun 19, 2003 @ 1:27am
Thierry, any plans on writing a custom image loader? I'm sure everyone is sick of my saying it by now, since there's about 10 threads in the past two weeks with these words: that's one of the big reasons my current project is GD-based. From what I gather from reading Johan's docs, there is a big memory hit using imgdecmp.dll. I had a huge problem with my Invasion: Trivia game because it required far too much memory, in fact about twice as much as I calculated it should. I could never understand why, but reading the GD docs makes me think this is the reason.
The other big advantage to GD from my point of view is it's use of DirectX on the desktop. Thierry, I understand your feelings about PF being for PocketPC's (and I know the "old school" feeling very well, all this relatively low-level stuff makes me feel like I'm back in the Atari 800/C64 days! I love it! Show me where the $d011 register is on a PocketPC and I'll have FLD running in five minutes!). That being said, I like GD because I can simultaneously release for PocketPC's and desktop PC's. This is something I can't do with PF (not with good performance that is). Do you have any thoughts on making PF use DX instead of GDI? Is it possible you can just write an x86 HAL that uses DX? If not, I'm thinking maybe some sort of add-on module or something along those lines. Although I have no DX coding experience, I'm willing to take a stab at this, if I know I can count on your support and, more importantly, guidance in how to incorporate it.
Truthfully though, the image loader issue is what I would actually consider a problem, the DX thing is just a big bonus, and I could do without it ultimately.
...and so I said to Mr. Gates: "$640 billion should be enough for anyone!"