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Have chosen next libraries for developing PocketPC game


Have chosen next libraries for developing PocketPC game

Postby Nomad » Mar 19, 2007 @ 11:12am

Hi All!

I've looked everywhere I could in the Net and have chosen next libraries for gamev. My first criterion was freeware or donateware type of distribution.

Graphics: PocketHAL
Sound: HekkusSoundSystem
Video: ported libmpeg2 library
Resource file handling: ZIP UTILS by Lucian Wischik from www.codeproject.com

Experienced game developers what can you say about that my choice?
Maybe there are others better options?

Best regards, Nomad.
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Postby summer_goth » Mar 19, 2007 @ 2:36pm

Hi Nomad.

Since the death of GledPlay, I am quite scared of free libraries. GledPlay was great and so was PocketFrog before that. But PocketFrog has not been updated in ages and well we all know what happened with GledPlay.

I am worried that the same will happen with other free libraries.

Hekkus has been doing a great job though. Great library with great support.

I think those are great options and have gone a similar route, except for the graphics library. Here's what I have opted for:

Graphics: GapiDraw. (Looking forward to next release and will most likely buy then)
Sound: Hekkus SoundSystem
Video: ported libmpeg2 library (and for your help with that Nomad, I am so thankful I'll give you a free game once it has been released. That was brilliant).

May you do well in your development process.

Have a great time,
Summer.
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Postby Nomad » Mar 19, 2007 @ 3:16pm

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Postby Dan East » Mar 19, 2007 @ 8:56pm

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Postby summer_goth » Mar 20, 2007 @ 8:11am

Unfortunately I have to agree with Dan. Microsoft have this tendency to change.

Otherwise Nomad I think that the libraries you chose are great for development. Mostly I decided to pay for something like Gapidraw to get stability. I know that they will continue development and it will work on most platforms without any hard work on my side.

Also the whole thing about GledPlay and why I think it died. Well the developers stopped posting on the forum. they do not answer any emails and the last update was end of last year! Plus there haven't been a stable release yet. I'd be very glad if it does make a reappearance but I honestly doubt it.

I was very angry about this, since a lot of hard work came to just about nothing. But they were not obliged to actually offer us anything. Hence the reason why I have become scared of free things.

If I had the money I'd go with Edge immediately. Their support is superior (except for PPL maybe). It's just too expensive right now for me. But Gapidraw looks good and there I hope to find that stability which I've been longing for for quite a long while.

In the end I hope we all manage to release great products.
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Postby Nomad » Mar 20, 2007 @ 9:37am

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Postby Jaybot » Mar 20, 2007 @ 12:46pm

I remember a loooong time ago on the first WinCE devices (before even 2.0) MS said they would support Java into the future. I think that may be what Dan is referring to ;)
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Postby drgoldie » Mar 20, 2007 @ 3:16pm

While I don't think that MS will abandon DirectDraw the problem is actually in the quality of the drivers - which is something that MS has only little influence on.

Take for example DirectShow (a special pain for me). MS requires every vendor of a WM5+ device with a built in camera to provide DirectShow drivers. Yet many device creators tend to only support the minimum (which is one video mode at any quality) to pass the checks. As a result this renders video capture via DirectShow useless on several devices, since some vendors only expose the lowest quality modes.

Same goes for DirectDraw. While I have no experience with this, it is well known that devices made problems with GAPI in the past. I wouldn't expect more from DirectDraw.

If you really just require a method for switching to fullscreen then wrapping PocketHAL, DirectShow or something else is a quite trivial thing and you can always switch to another solution.

About the libraries: We have good experiences with a rip of betaplayer that we once did. It plays back MPEG4 movies (incl. audio) at a good performance. If MPEG2 is enough for you then libmpeg2 is probably fine too.

bye,
Daniel
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Postby Nomad » Mar 20, 2007 @ 7:12pm

Hi, Daniel.

Perfomance of that ported libmpeg2 is quite enough for playing full screen 320x240 video files, but I have not tested VGA-sized video playback on VGA device yet. And think there will be difficulties. Do you test your library on VGA device with VGA-sized file?

And another hard thing to me is to provide synching mechanism with audio. When video plays faster then audio, simple short time stoppage of video gives desired result. But when video decoding is slower then audio, I can't think out solution, because I don't know yet how to skip frames with mpeg2 stream.
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Postby summer_goth » Mar 22, 2007 @ 10:33am

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