Whishlist: What do you want from GledPlay?

[Matias]

Hi,

We have just added this post to talk about GledPlay new features.

We want GledPlay to grow every day and that's why we are thinking about great improvements.

Here are some options that we have thought about:

Palm Support
Symbian Support
3D engine
.Net Integration (to develop in VB and C#)


What do you think?

If you have another idea please post it here.

Most probably, from this post, we will decide the next gledplay features.

[Nomad]

Hi!
All that you wrote in this list will certainly make GledPlay more powerful and popular.

Here is one of mine ideas:

I am using GledPlay for nearly week.
And I'm lack of capability to manualy change onNextFrame method on the fly.

For example, if game has several states, it will give possibitity to have different onNextFrame methods for every state and can change it when state is changed to avoid redundant contitional checks.

[Ryumaster]

Hi! Support for reading unicode text files is what I need at the moment, but it will shurely help not only me,but a lot of other people at the futer.
I think 3d engine is great, but it needs a lot of work and attention and it is much better to focus on improving 2d engine for now. Net Integration is good feature, but as I know many people uses C++ for game creating and I think it is better to put efforts somewhere else at a moment. Do not really know about Palm and Symbian support, haven't invistigate how much people enjoy playing games on them yet.
And I agree with Nomand, it is not very hard to avoid lacks of OnNextFrame, but would be good enough to see some new parametrs inplemented.

[Nomad]

I advise you to continue in direction of strengthening PocketPC library, because IMHO there is much what should be done in this field.

And making grafical output faster may be one of the main new feature.

From my experience of first project using GledPlay I can give an example:
- I set number of wanted fps to 100 to see what maximum fps can be.
- Blitting 1 fullscreen picture makes 70 fps.
- But blitting 2 fullscreen pictures (1 with colorkey) and nearly 14 other much smaller images drops fps framerate to 30-40 fps
For mine little projects that is not critical, but generally I think it is quite bad.

Maybe it is GAPI guilt, but there is library PocketHAL which is more productive with blitting graphics. Why don't use it?

[Sergio]

Hi Nomad,
You are right about performance. We've been working for a while in lots of performance optimizations, specially stop depending in GAPI for backbuffer blitting, which is very slow on modern devices. Also, we've got our hands dirty and we've done several blitting optimization programming with ASM for ARM.
We are getting ready to release several of them in next Monday release. Of course, optimization work won't stop, however after Monday I'm sure you are going to see a big performance leap from current version.
Adding optional support for PocketHal as backbuffer is an interesting idea, We'll take that in mind, though there are some terms in PocketHal license which are not 100% clear, and that may prevent us from working with it.

Thank you for your feedback!

Best Regards,
Sergio.

[Kzinti]

PocketHAL's license is extremely clear. What is it that you don't understand?

[Sergio]

Hi Kzinti,

PocketHAL's license is extremely clear, indeed. For end users.

It has only 2 lines:

This software is copyrighted software. Permission to use this software in your own application (game) is hereby granted without fee

That is not related to us. The second one:

Distribution of the PocketHAL library (by itself or as part of another library distribution) is strictly prohibited.

is clear enough about distribution, but it doesn't say anything about linking.
There are software license which are incompatible with ours, even with dynamic linking.

Anyway, we'll review the software, and if we decide to add support for it in GledPlay, will contact the author, Thierry Tremblay (who I believe is you), to be sure that we will not be committing any copyright infringement of his software.

Thank you,
Sergio.

[summer_goth]

I am actually rather happy with GledPlay as it is currently. I also think you can just expand on the current 2D features.

What I would love though is some example projects. Because I know that I am not the best programmer in the world and I love seeing what the proper way of doing things are.

Maybe you guys can take some time off and write a little example game to include with GledPlay. Something very simple, such as hmmm, I don't know, Pacman or something.

Well that's just my little bit. I am very impressed with GledPlay and it has made coding fun again.

Have a wonderful time.

[Nikster]

Mac OSX support a PPC, SP , PC, and Mac solution is very very attractive.

There are a few PPC, SP, PC solutions, and there are a few PC and Mac solution, nothing does all afaik.

[Sergio]

Hi,
As some of you requested, GledPlay now has a built-in mechanism to deal with state handling.
As you know, games usually have lots of states (playing intro video, main menu, pause, playing game, etc) and as a result, developers usually end up coding switch sentences with lots of cases.
We've added to GledPlay the capability of handling this for you. At first glance, it may seem a little complicated, but once you get it, you'll see it will help you a lot to keep your code tidy, fast, and maintainable. Also, if you are working in a developer team, you will appreciate that you can split the project easily, and then integrate the pieces quickly.
We are really happy with the result of the new changes on design, and we will promote this way of development, though the old way is still available if you prefer to maintain the state manually.
I'm hoping to get some feedback from you about how do you feel with this new features.

Best regards,
Sergio.