Aboot Gorgon
What is Gorgon?
A 2D graphics library for .NET and SlimDX. Also, it’s proof that I can’t do 3D.
What’s the licensing? What did you do to my soul?
Versions 1.1.x and up of Gorgon are licensed under the MIT license.
Your soul is a lie.
How far along are you? Is it done yet? How about now?
Gorgon is complete, released and in version 1.1.x.
What can it do?
Oh sweet jeebus, what can’t it do? It can slice, dice, puree, and even solve pi to 3,899,122,129,991,211,100 decimal places. It rules. Really, it does. It’s better than Half Life 2 because I say it is.
That said, it:
- Supports pixel/vertex shaders.
- Supports stencil buffers.
- Supports png, jpg, bmp, etc.. image formats.
- Runs pretty swift. I can dump well over 10,000 sprites to the screen and still get a >=30 FPS.
- Supports render targets
- Supports drawing to various surfaces (i.e. lines, points, circles, ellipses, etc…)
- Supports virtual file systems for packed files and folder mounting.
- Has a plug-in architecture, so you can extend it indefinitely.
- Has a nifty keen animation system.
- Fonts! Bitmap fonts. Flexible bitmap fonts even.
- Has support for raw input from input devices. Even has rudimentary joystick support.
- Can render into any type of windows control, e.g. a panel, form, textbox (yes, textbox. No, I don’t know why you’d want that).
- I’m sure there’s more, but I’m too lazy to look it up.
Yeah, it’s pretty metal.
What do I need to make all my dreams come true?
Your dreams mean nothing, and are ultimately futile. Anyway, you’ll require the following:
- The March 2009 SlimDX Developer SDK. (Note: At this time, the end user installer appears to be broken for March 2009, so the SDK must be installed). Gorgon no longer installs SlimDX for you.
- Visual C# 2010 to compile the library. (Note: you can use any .NET 3.5-SP1 enabled language and Visual Studio 2008 to use Gorgon with your applications.)
- .NET 3.5 SP1
- Windows XP or later.
- Microsoft DirectX 9 November 2008 or later (installed by the SlimDX installer)