Database Users

DirectDraw capability on diamond

I'm writing a set of generic UI controls for the TD and at the moment I'm using C# with lots p/invoke Win32 API calls for gradient fills, alpha blending etc.
It works OK, and I'm spending a fair amount of time optimising for smooth appearance, although the primary goal of these controls is usability.
I haven't played with DirectShow/DirectDraw at all and just wondered what 2D capabilities are available? Is hardware alpha-blending possible? Can you draw and gradient-fill rounded rectangles quickly?
Anyone who's had any experience with this - I'd be very interested in hearing your opinions.
Thanks
Rich

Hmm
I was planning on doing this myself. I believe that D3DM has accelerated blending and gradient fills (I don't know how much of the D3D is supprted in D3DM).
Would you be planning on releasing any code/SDK? It would be nice to have something like to write apps with.

Yep - that was my plan. I used to be very tight with these things, but since spending the last couple of years playing with Linux I've decided that progress is much faster overall if people share stuff.
Can't guarantee that I'll get everything finished, but it's getting there. I've attached a few screenshots, but it's very much in the development stage.
Rich

nice
Looks good!

DosBox

Anyone got a version of dosbox that works on the hd2?

Audio Oblivion said:
Anyone got a version of dosbox that works on the hd2?
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would be possible, not to hard, but we have to make a control scheme for every game apart.
Commander keen, biomenace and c&c on HD2 would be awesome.

Descent 3 using the G sensor would be awesome - lots more potential with dosbox and its like than with console emulators.

xedahh said:
Descent 3 using the G sensor would be awesome - lots more potential with dosbox and its like than with console emulators.
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problem is still that so few good developers are interested in windows mobile...
It would be super...but there's not a big chance we will have a dev that will work on this.
Cant hurt to ask but i doubt they even wanna reply to this thread.

I use dosbox on my pc to run wolfenstein 3d and quake. If your interested in running wolf3d on your HD2 then check THIS out, I havent got it working yet, (not that Ive tried much) but you might, Im not sure if its designed for wvga devices as I can get it running, but it doesnt fill up the whole screen so i keep cliking the manila soft keys
Sorry, went a little off topic there

borgqueenx said:
would be possible, not to hard, but we have to make a control scheme for every game apart.
Commander keen, biomenace and c&c on HD2 would be awesome.
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This sounds good, when we can expect your fingerfriendly version of DosBox ?
Here a Pocket PC port.

AnnaW said:
This sounds good, when we can expect your fingerfriendly version of DosBox ?
Here a Pocket PC port.
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i'd be happy to make control schemes, but someone with photoshop skills should fill the buttons i will make in MS paint
First we need that port to support multitouch screens and cotrol schemes.
If that port works and is not fake, then it would be a piece of cake for the developer to add this.
I cant code that launguage however, but have enough knowledge if things in coding terms are easy or not.
EDIT:
Wait...can someone try the DOSBox PPC toolbar editor...maby it is for mapping keys to the touchscreen...
But it would still be hard without transparant buttons.
Would be awesome to have a functional dosbox on the HD2. the processor of the device should have enough power to handle all retro games.
if you guys can try commander keen 4 on your HD2 and it works, let me know. i will map the rest of all schemes because im a huge fan of dosbox.
EDIT2:
I do think its for the lower part of the screen for touch controls. someone would have to try the port though.

I do have photoshop and fireworks but don't seem to be able to bring any alpha channels into the tool - I have a test RGBA png file attached in case anyone can figure it out.
Probably more to the point - this PPC port of dosbox does not support wvga, not even sure if it supports vga, maybe we're barking up the wrong tree?

xedahh said:
I do have photoshop and fireworks but don't seem to be able to bring any alpha channels into the tool - I have a test RGBA png file attached in case anyone can figure it out.
Probably more to the point - this PPC port of dosbox does not support wvga, not even sure if it supports vga, maybe we're barking up the wrong tree?
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time to contact the creator i guess. lets hope he's still interested.

who is the lead dev for the dosbox port?
are they still developing?

Audio Oblivion said:
who is the lead dev for the dosbox port?
are they still developing?
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Dont know and i dont know. Pressing the "help me" links gives you a mail adress though. Try to use that.

Well I thought I'd post about my success in getting some dos games running on the Leo. Personally, I'm far more interested in running dos games than console games, so I hope others will join in and share their experiences here also so we can get a bit of momentum going.
First impressions were that it was a bit of a mixed bag. There is not a clear winner in term of dos emulation for the Leo in terms of taking advantage of the screen resolution, cpu and achieving broad game compatibility.
Speaking generally, n0p's port has the most attention on XDA as far as I can see, and perhaps rightly so in terms of the kernel, but I think the praise is overdone where the Leo is concerned as it is a very awkward experience using it on the Leo. Even with the 0.73 version, the lack of WVGA support means that we're stuck with big piece of unused screen realestate and a tiny, horrible keyboard overlay at the bottom that is barely usable. PocketDos has a much better UI in that regard, with the option of using your own pim, although it doesn't run the more sophisticated/demanding games as well as DosBox.
Betrayal at Krondor
I got BAK working, albeit slowly, on N0p's port. The speed is reasonable -- much better than the Symbian DoxBox port I was running on
my E71. Audio in particular is much closer to what it should be. It still judders enough to be annoying instead of easy listening, but it's close enough that I wonder whether smaller memory optimisations or tweaks might make it work properly. The lack of WVGA resolution really hurts in combat though, because hitting the right grid square is pretty hard and makes it a bit of a chore to play. At least when adventuring you can use the stick-to-road button to travel easily about Midkemia. Not sure how to right-click consistently either.
I couldn't get BaK to run on Pocket Dos, although I suspect it might work with different memory settings. From what I recall, it needed a healthy EMS allocation to work back in the day.
Jones in the Fast Lane
With Jones, it's the opposite to BaK. It really struggles on N0p's port but absolutely flies on Pocket Dos. It's actually perfect (although I had sound down so can't comment on audio). The ability to resize the screen and change to landscape makes it a wonderful experience.
N0p's port can run Jones but only barely - the cursor is bugged with the touchscreen so that you can't select anything on the right-hand-side of the screen and it's also nowhere near as fast or smooth as on Pocket Dos. Don't know why it struggles so much as it isn't a very demanding game.
UFO
Given the lack of a WVGAFix for WM6.5, Pocket UFO won't work on the Leo and we're stuck with running UFO on dos. Here, n0p's port is the best. It's fairly playable although, again, surprising slow. Unfortunately Pocket Dos wouldn't load it properly.
Here's a list of games I intend to try in the near future:
Space Quest series
Police Quest series
Heroes Quest series
Dune 2
Syndicate

As far as I can understand there is no properly working dosbox for Leo.
I wish I can play Commander Keen. That's my favorite dos game. I guess we can only hope that someone will port a proper dosbox version to the Leo.

Any updates or so for Dos games to play on the HD2 yet? I know id love this as well. =)

I have been interested in the HD2, but I've been curious about Dos emulation. I don't own any WP devices at the moment.
I realize this thread is a few years old, but are there any updates since this last post?

[DEV(ish)]Minecraft!

Okay, so I got minecraft to work using Backtrack (HERE) in one of the other threads, but it runs poor(<1 FPS).
Basically, what I did was install the dummy video driver for xorg(xserver-xorg-video-dummy, iirc), and use THIS script to launch it. I then attached x11vnc to it.
The default TinyVNC server doesn't support OpenGL, you'll need to use xorg + x11vnc + the dummy
As far as getting minecraft to run, I got the appropriate liblwjgl build from HERE.
I got the appropriate jinput build from HERE
After you run MC for the first time, it'll download everything and crash. Replace the ~/.minecraft/bin/native/ files with the ones in these packages. The packages don't need to be installed, just extracted to get at those files.
You'll also need libmawt, provided by THIS package. That does need to be installed. Mine was broken on install, I didn't care to fix it, but it still worked. It just needs at that one file.
I got the best luck connecting to a network server with the MC process renice'd to -15 or so.
This is what should launch it:
Code:
./Xdummy :2 &
x11vnc -display :2 -noshm &
nice -n -15 java -jar minecraft.jar
Then connect to localhost:5900 for VNC.
As I said, it's unplayable right now. I was hoping someone could help come up with some ideas on getting it to play decently, as it's good for little more than getting on and chatting to people right now.
The only idea I had for boosting it was to find a tegra driver and try to get X to start with that without trying to attach to a VT(Will that dummy file do it?).
Also, the controls for VNC aren't suited for MC, obviously. I was using an external keyboard when I was playing with it.
I'll post a video of it running as soon as I can get a camera. My Iconia is my camera, heh.

Yeah, it runs poor on my HP Touchsmart tm2 with i3, so I doubt this would be any close. It's surprising though, considering the 8-bit graphics in the game itself.
Sent from my A500 using XDA Premium App

well thats 8 bit graphics on top of rendering millions and millions of cubes. from a game design stand point. its really impressive.

gh123man said:
well thats 8 bit graphics on top of rendering millions and millions of cubes. from a game design stand point. its really impressive.
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I'm assuming that was sarcasm...

It really is impressive. Most 3d games contain static rendered floors and walls. Whereas Minecraft requires that each individual block be rendered as a stand-alone manipulative item. It really does require a lot of number crunching and resources.

Yea, MC's large memory usage isn't just inefficient code.

Haha, well you're right from the standpoint of the fact that it's millions of blocks rendered, but if it's going to be that intensive, why use the 8-bit blocks? I love the game, but honestly, it's a little frustrating that it only works on my quad-core desktop. I'm curious to see how much fog will have to be in place for the Xperia Play version out soon.
Sent from my A500 using XDA Premium App

cybermage1 said:
I'm assuming that was sarcasm...
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*facepalm*
The amount of power needed to run something isn't just determined by flashy colours.

Maddmatt said:
*facepalm*
The amount of power needed to run something isn't just determined by flashy colours.
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Right but seriously - a cube at most is three polygons (squares) rendered at any given time. You don't bother to render faces that you can't see due to occlusion. If you store the world in a matrix(s) optimized for calculating what's viewable then OpenGL with hardware acceleration handles all of that very well and very fast.
If you're telling me that the reason Minecraft performance sucks (and yes, I think we all agree it does) is because it's rendering so many cubes, and if that's correct.... then the developer is truly dumb. And rich, but still dumb.
I've done OpenGL and DirectX graphics programming for isometric views before and it's amazing the amount of data that can be rendered very fast on a 486 when done correctly.
The Tegra2 renders somewhere (couldn't find exact specs) near 35 million polygons per second. If Minecraft is generating 35 million polygons for every frame, that would explain the 1 fps and support my opinion.
But I digress from the original topic. It'd be nice if the developer would put out an optimized Android version - just think how many more of us (including me) would buy it yet AGAIN just to be able to play on our tablets and phones. lol.

Rendering isn't the only slow part, it has to calculate what to render, light, etc... for each block.
Each chunk (16x16x128) has 32768 blocks in it, at any one time you may have upwards 500 chunks loaded (checking right now, I have 441 after playing for maybe 20 minutes), that is 16,384,000 blocks. Granted, you're never rendering all of those at once, but just cycling through all of them and reading all of them is incredibly intensive, on both RAM and CPU.
In the MC code(Check MCP for tools to decompile and deobfuscate it), you'll see that he's only checking if another block is on the face, and using that to determine if that face should render or not. My assumption on this is that it's quicker to render a face than it is to check occlusion for it.
Also, beyond that, you'd have to consider other things, such as the overhead for things like the X server, VNC, and the obvious lack of hardware acceleration on the X server.

How-To White-Box a Game (Making of XnO Part II)

No story is complete without its origins. We love to share with you the very first white-box environment of XnO!
XnO began its origins from the name "Ice Breakers", the way the cylindrical blocks were breaking. We had 3 walls couple of boxes from unity asset packages. And began the journey. We wanted to take a simple idea and implement in it all the possible depths.
When we began majority of the games were 2D or side scrollers, that never gave the player full satisfaction of real life interaction with physics of the objects. So we chose a 3D engine, as to why "unity" - the amount of tutorials, community support and ease of start was a key factor in choosing that engine.
To be a team you would need atleast 3 components to begin with - programmer, 2D/3D artist and level designer. Not to say one person can handle more than one aspect. As a team we were all on the same page, we want to make a physics based game with focus on gameplay first.
We followed the following steps:
i) Create first level - We used very basic components - rectangle, sphere, cylinder to create a game play scenario.
ii) Create a flow through of the game - Main Menu, Options and Level Select Screens. Once this was done adding new levels was very easy.
iii) In Game HUD - To enter and exit from any level
iv) Uploaded a web version for our friends/family to play.
Once we had all the pieces then we focussed on exploring all the possible depths and variations in the gameplay that can be achieved to make the game engaging and fun. In our case - target variations, introducing obstacles, power-ups, use of accelerometer to enhance gameplay. Once we had built the key features in, we explored on how to increase difficulty of the levels as the game progressed. At this stage we made some of our models, used some from unity and still used royalty free music.
Once we had good 20 levels working with all the above, we started showing it to people who either played a lot of games or were in gaming. This gave us a good insight on how improve.
As an indie developer it was so much easier for us to do the white-box the way we did because we focussed on Gameplay and Game Design, not so much on the art in the beginning. So when we got the feedback to change, it was so much easier to do it. We were never set in stone.
XnO is our attempt at making a 3D game with as close as possible to real physics without sacrificing the gameplay and memory footprint of the game. XnO is now available on Google Play and Amazon App Store.

[GAME] Awakened Gods: Elementals TD

Let’s us present the debut game Awakened Gods: Elementals TD of a new indie game studio – vARDAmir’s Game Studio!
In the game Awakened Gods: Elementals TD you will have to use your tactical skills to defeat dangerous creatures. If I were you, I wouldn’t expect victory from the very first. The game belong to a famous genre – Tower Defense.
Thanks to this game, you can feel yourself a defender of a huge realm, known as Ardinor and protect human lands, elven forests, dwarves mines and barbarians jungle against the invasion of countless elemental creatures army created by Ancient Gods.
The game Awakened Gods: Elementals TD differs from other games in the same genre with beautiful 3d graphics with high-quality hand-painted textures and plot. In order to select an optimum combination you should take into account that types of attack and armor have different advantages against each other.
You are to complete an exciting campaign of 12 maps in 4 unique sceneries. Unforgettable hand painted locations will catch your eyes. You can see human lands, filled with lush leaves; elven forests with everlasting autumn and giant trees; dwarves gloomy mines and barbarians dense jungles the nature of which hasn’t been touched for hundreds of thousands of years.
Help the races of this wonderful world and forbid Awakened Gods to destroy the crystal of the Universe!
Features:
- Unique type combination of damage and armor!
- Campaign of 12 levels with an interesting story!
- Skirmish mode
- achievements
- 4 different kinds of locations!
- 12 unique enemy types, each with their own abilities!
- 12 various towers with the possibility of leveling up and skill system
- Excellent hand-painted 3d graphics
- Each tower has its own design!
We don’t want to unveil all the secrets of Awakened Gods: Elementals TD. Play and you will find them!
Available in Google Play
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vARDAmirsGameStudio.AwakenedGodsElementalsLite

wvvv
Sent from my HTC Sensation using xda app-developers app

i will return soon with my new project =)
thanks for your support guys (if u did it) =)

Thanks)
Actually not bad game) Thank you!

StarInSky said:
Actually not bad game) Thank you!
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Thank you. Very appreciate it =)

what's up guys? u can check out the FULL FREE version by the link above.

Really a nice game. What could help you:
You should really improve your App-Icon. No offense, but it's really unimpressive and not 'catchy' at all.
That's just my opinion, but check out other app-icons at the store and you will understand what I'm saying.
Greetz : )

Sir_Obvious said:
Really a nice game. What could help you:
You should really improve your App-Icon. No offense, but it's really unimpressive and not 'catchy' at all.
That's just my opinion, but check out other app-icons at the store and you will understand what I'm saying.
Greetz : )
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Thank you very much. I will try to improve it=)

still cant get good icon. anyone can help me with it?

New Icon
Good News! Just made a new icon for the game. What do you think about it?=)

It's better then before, but I think it could be even more better.
It's pretty dark and there is no much contrast. Also the "Free" is not that easy to read and I don't think it's the best font.
I'm not a graphic-guy ether, so I can not give you a lot specific advices but try to add some contrast between the different colors and lighten it all up a little bit.

Sir_Obvious said:
It's better then before, but I think it could be even more better.
It's pretty dark and there is no much contrast. Also the "Free" is not that easy to read and I don't think it's the best font.
I'm not a graphic-guy ether, so I can not give you a lot specific advices but try to add some contrast between the different colors and lighten it all up a little bit.
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Thank you very much. I will try to do something=)