Tag Archives: SharpDX

Font editor

sitelogoIt’s been a very long time since I’ve made an update here.  I’ve been working steadily on the font editor module for the Gorgon editor and it’s finally nearing completion (the last 99% of 99% of 99% etc…).

I’m quite proud of this thing.  It’s supports a pretty well rounded suite of functionality for designing a bitmap font for use with Gorgon.  Besides the usual standard stuff like font outlines, font faces, styles, etc… it also supports glyph brushes, custom glyphs, glyph advancement and offset editing and custom kerning pair tables.

Here’s a few images:


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Cameras

sitelogoIn the 2.x version of Gorgon I wanted to add cameras.  It was most tedious before when you wanted to translate an entire scene by an arbitrary amount.  So when I started this thing, I created an Orthographic camera object.  The previous version of Gorgon used an Orthographic camera internally and this was never exposed to the user.  But in this case, I exposed the camera so that the user can define their own viewing mechanism.

There’s more info and a video inside…

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Boing!

sitelogoWell, it’s been a while.  I’ve been busy.  You’ve been busy.

Anyway, I actually took some time to test out a piece of functionality for the new version of Gorgon.  This new version of Gorgon will have a graphics API separate from the 2D renderer (the 2D renderer uses the graphics API however).  This is unlike the previous version where the renderer was pretty much all you had access to.  I had a user ask me a long time ago if it were possible to access the underlying renderer to render 3D along with the 2D.  At first, it did not, but I did hack in a way to access SlimDX directly through a plug-in and it was awful.

So, in this version I decided to give the developer access to the full graphics API under the renderer.  This allows the user to switch between 2D graphics and whatever they want.  And here’s the results of my intense labour pain:

Yep, it’s a clone of the old Amiga demo “Boing”.  As you can see, there are 2D elements (the text and the logo) along with the 3D elements (which were all done manually I might add, Gorgon does NOT have a 3D renderer so don’t get too excited).  I’ve decided to include the code as an example program for the new Gorgon.

Rejoice.

Windows 8

So I’m trying out Windows 8 (yes, it’s not released to the public, and yes I have it legally).

Dear God, what a mess this whole Metro/desktop thing is.  Someone over at Microsoft must have split personality disorder or something.  How in hell did they think that was a good idea??

Anyway, the OS does have some really nice improvements and it’s very responsive (except when it’s not… I get random freezes once in a while, apparently it’s something to do with my Intel SSD).  And more importantly, after installing VS2010, and the June 2010 DirectX SDK, the new (and presumably old since I haven’t tried it yet) Gorgon works fine.  What I knew, and was hoping I was wrong, is that they took out the D3DX library for the new DirectX, and as such things broke horribly under Gorgon because SharpDX uses the D3DX libraries to load/save textures.  After installing the June 2010 DXSDK, everything worked again, so there’s that.

I really really really don’t like this metro thing.  It’s just horrible with a mouse/keyboard and while I was ambivalent towards the Start Menu in previous versions, I really miss that I can’t group my applications (and I have a lot) under folders.  This made everything really horrible to organize, especially with how obsessive I am about organization on my machine.

That said, the desktop is real nice.  Love the new task manager, love the new copy/delete dialogs.   I even like the new look they put in (they got rid of Aero, or probably more likely, the glass effect).

Sadly, I now have to figure out how in hell I’m going to make Gorgon work without relying on D3DX (yes, I know, I could keep with developing for the June 2010 SDK, but at some point you know they’re going to drop that).  Apparently I can use WIC (Windows Imaging Component), but it looks pretty convoluted and I need something that’ll give me AnyCPU support.

All in all, the awfulness of Windows 8 outweighs its benefits in my opinion.  Someone really needs to kick Ballmer (I blame him wholeheartedly for this mess) out of that company and install someone with a fucking clue (i.e. we don’t all use/want a tablet, nor do we all want to develop for them).

Anyway, I am not dropping support for Windows 7/Vista from Gorgon.  So don’t ask about it.

That’s all for now.  Gorgon is still being worked on, a little, here and there.  It’ll be ready by 2213.

Dual monitor stuff

So here’s a screenshot of the dual monitor code in action:

It’s not much to look at, but it was a major pain in the ass to get working, and does indeed work.  Basically you create 2 forms, and 2 swap chains and set both swap chains to full screen and then add some special code to handle cases where focus is lost/restored on the primary form.

Gorgon would normally handle focus loss to reset your full screen mode for you when focus is returned (this is due to a bug in WinForms and DXGI).  And that’s all well and good, but this code really doesn’t work well with multiple monitor situations.  So, there’s a flag to tell Gorgon to turn off the automatic mode reset on focus, and that will let you, the user, handle the transition when dealing with multiple monitors.  It’s not an ideal situation, but it works

It’s a bit complicated to set up, but there’ll be an example included with Gorgon on how to use dual monitor setups that’ll guide you through the process.

Look at my balls

So, I’ve been quite busy lately with a new job and such.  And as a consequence I haven’t had any time for Gorgon recently.  But I finally sat down this evening and did a little work (not much mind you, and certainly nothing of note) on Gorgon 2.x.

I’ve uploaded the Ball Demo to the site so people can have a look at it.  I’d appreciate any feedback (please post the feedback to the forums, thank you).

Please note the following before running it:

  1. It’ll probably crash.  It’s in development after all.
  2. You NEED Windows Vista Service Pack 2, or Windows 7 (Windows 8 -might- work, but don’t count on it).
  3. It will run on Direct 3D 9 capable video devices.  However, it requires Direct X 11 be installed on the system (hence the OS requirements).

To run it, just run the BallDemo.exe and pray (oh, and ensure that the zip file isn’t ‘blocked’ by Windows, .NET assemblies hate that shit).  It defaults to windowed mode with a resolution of 1280×800 although you can modify the BallDemo.config file to change to a resolution you like.

Let me know what your performance is like.

Font editor

So the font editor is nearly complete.  Here’s a few screen shots:

So, here’s some more proof that I’ve been working on the next version of Gorgon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFO6ZMdV2-A

As per the description on the youtubes:

An example showing the new version of Gorgon.

Currently this is just a simple sprite test using 1024 multi-textured sprites via shaders on Direct3D 11 hardware. It also shows a new feature that’s being planned (but not promising anything) to use the 3D stuff to allow perspective corrected sprites.

This video also shows depth for the sprites by walking a camera into the sprite cloud.

Currently getting about 1200 FPS with this (the selective multi-texturing really slows shit down).