Feature request SVG

It would be very GREAT to add suppport for SVG graphics, as there are TONES of that under the GPL. in addition, this graphics are realy small in size and fully scalable (as they are vectorized) and very nice looking as they have support for alpha channels. This format was created for Linux and the linux 'loader' is open source.
Ideal for 2D game programming.

Which is a good thing for printed media, but useless for BlitzMAX, which uses bitmap images.

Except it was created by Adobe, for displaying vectorgraphics on webpages. It uses XML, so "loading" isn't much of an issue.

It could be, but only if you could render it to a bitmap of a prespecified size, and then use that.

Why? Flash handles vector graphics very well, and there is nothing stopping BlitzMax from doing the same as it uses OpenGL, so in fact we could have hardware accelerated FlashMax. That's something worth thinking about.

Hey, I was not talking about SWF files, just about SVG, wich is the standar scalable graphics format for most Gnome installations in Linux, and there's a huge amount of icons and designs, free of use and with a very high quality, in this format.

I know you are talking about SVG, I was just making a point about vector graphics.

As if game graphics can't be vector graphics?


You are confusing *one* implementation with the SVG standard itself. Check out http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/History


Again: Vector graphics are a straightforward possiblity on modern 3d hardware. It's all polys and lines.

There are render libs that show svg files in OpenGL allready

Thanks again for your info Peter, you know always everything I'm looking for... :D

fredborg, Sorry for the misunderstanding... my english... you know... hehe, you're right, Flash uses vector graphics in a very propper way and this could be done in BlitzMax, maybe not in VSG directly, if it's too complicated to parse the XML standar, but what about a converter to an parsed intermediate?

Would it be difficult to make one of those libraries work in BlitzMax? I mean, if they are open source, they may be written in GNU C or Cpp (i've only seen some java implementations). Do you know where to find the sources?

No. As in 3D gaming hardware does not have provisions for drawing vector based graphics. So while it would be a good idea for any WildCat/FireGL/Quadro owners out there, everyone with a sensibly priced graphics card, would probably just as soon want to see their games using bitmaps, as that's what their hardware was designed to do well.

And splines and beziers and real-time anti-aliasing (none of that downsampling crap), and yes, modern hardware is capable of it, but unless you have an enterprise class graphical workstation, you're probably better off sticking what your budget hardware was designed to do in the first place, namely pushing bitmapped polygons.

I didn't say it wasn't possible. I said it wasn't feasible on typical hardware. There are also libraries that provide real-time scanline raytracing, and just-in-time radiosity solutions. But I wager it'll be a while before consumer hardware reaces a level where it's a financially viable option.

http://www.w3.org/Amaya/

One big plus to this approach is that it could substantially reduce game download times. You only need to render once and create a bunch of bitmap files when you first run the game.

Not suitable for every game but its not done Flash any harm.