2d Graphics Engine For Bmax?

Ive been really impressed with the way the comunity has been able to produce wrappers for 3d engines for Bmax.
And that little patch thing that appeared last week for DX9 was really clever.

What is missing from Bmax tho is a "2d" engine. I understtand the argument about how Max2d being in 3d means that it can do rotation, and alpha and stuff, and I think that all those things are really usefull, and I use them all the time.

I wonder though is it possible for Bmax to use a wrapper for a 2d engine. (well I assume its possible, just that I dont know how to do it)

I do apprechiate the difference between B+ being faster at 2d graphics and Bmax being a better language. All I want thou is to be able to Paste, Plot, and Point and the other simple stuff.

Ok maybe I should have bought B+ if I only wanted to do retro stuff, but I really like Bmax, (and surly part of Bmax is the ability to have moduals)

Eh? BMAX is 2d.

He means a pixel pushing 2d engine not a 2d in 3d one.

Boiled, no it isnt. max2d uses 3d acceleration for 2d, it is a 3d engine

Edit I mean a pixel pushing 2d engine not a 2d in 3d one.

Thanks Amon ;)

Sure it's possible. I just don't know any. Except for SDL, which I think Noel already did.

Have a look through this thread :

http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=7490

If you can find a 2d engine that's pushing pixels instead of pulling polys, then you might find someone prepared to wrap it or a few of us who have wrapped other libraries might be able to give you enough hints to do it yourself.

But off the top of my head, I can't think of any. Except maybe PureBasic, and the license does not permit distribution of DLL's wrapping PB commands. Wouldn't be hard to write it for your own purposes if you owned PB though.

EDIT: Oh, and I think PopCap's framework might do pure 2d as well, but it's not a pretty thing and it'd be a b*tch to wrap.

I just found My BlitzBasic2D CD with Krylars book. BB2D is still a fine crafted gamedev choice.

Back on topic - Has Mr Cower removed the download for the SDL module? I can't find a working link.

he he,very interesting timing for a topic...

;)

Heh heh! I'm hoping it is, what I'm hoping it is. :)

Graham... if you don't stop tap dancing around and give it to us I'm gonna freak out and hunt you down with an egg beater and a spatula.

may be my eyes, but is that Ion sign looking a bit clearer now?

Steve.

amazing what you can do with a remington fuzzaway!

I don't think it's any clearer... it's still obscure and infuriating. :D

hey, ya love it really ;)

Gimme Da ION! NOW. :D

If people are interested in a 2d 'Pixelpusher' engine for BMAX, you may be interested in the announcement on my web site... ;)

you know... I forgot to even look...

I'm certainly interested in the 3d Ion Engine for BlitzMax - unless the official 3d module comes out first.

Ah ! Cobra coming soon ? :) i can't wait !

I suppose it was good timing in a "oh good I can tell everyone about Ion, and not get told off"., sort of way.

Graham, yep this is exactly the sort of thing I ment. I will have to hold judgement on how good it is, but reading your web page, am I right in thinking that Ion2d is like Max2d, only without hardware acceleration? Or is it BNEt and stuff as well?
If so would you say Ion is to Cobra what Dark GDK (Formaly SDK) is to DBPro?

;)
Nail on head ;)

My doc says I have low Ion levels. I need more Ion. Please share :)

Hmm, so Ion 2D + Ion 3D = ~Blitz3D?

Or does Ion 3D come with a 3D accelerated version of Ion 2D?

I need ImageBuffers - preferably 2D-in-3D capable (ala Max2D except ... with ImageBuffers of some sort ;) )... What do you have for me? =]

The package sounds awesome... and you are awesome for realising you're not going to pry people like me away from Max ;]

Ion3D has accelerated 2D, as well as the standard Ion2D. I'm considering including the accelerated 2d in Ion2D as well (when Ion3D is released).

If you have something akin to ImageBuffers in the accelerated 2D version, I eagerly await its release with credit card in hand.

If you want to expand on what 'exactly' you mean about imagebuffers (ie. what you are trying to achieve) I will probably be able to answer (or at lease include it on the wishlist)

Probably best to do that over at my site (just click the banner), rather than discus it here.

Graham, does Cobra/Ion have DX renderer?

I'm interested and have budget to buy it when it released.

Cobra3D/Ion3D are both OpenGL based.
Cobra2D/Ion2D don't need either.

If I do the 2d in 3d addon for 2d, it will be OpenGL as well (being part of the 3d codebase), but lots of things can be swapped in / out so I 'may' end up with some DX functionality at some point.

If you want to see 2D try the link in my sig. BMAX - 2D !
I do "point" by having a copy of the bitmap screen in a memory bank, this wouldnt work with rotation of course.

@Gav:

Nice game mate ;)

If you mean TUNIX2001 it took me over 10 months to complete, Its around 15,000 lines of code and growing. The emulated console has so many graphics modes and the coders relied on raster timing.

Seems like a lot to get such a simple output, but I can say that its a perfect as emulation can get, I thought That I would do one or three good emulators instead of "MESS" for example (Im not slamming MESS) with tonnes of 80% emulated machines and nearly all are imperfect.

PS. Im working on the worlds first and only VC4000 emulator (picture below) MESS has VC4000 but you cannot get the ROMs anywhere on the net, (I dumped my own) and they dont work in MESS, MESS seems to claim to emulate much more than it really does.

Sorry, much MUCH too lazy to register for forums right now =]


By ImageBuffers I mean the ability to draw an image onto another image, instead of directly onto the backbuffer. What I'm primarily after is the ability to erase parts of an image permanently... You could do this in BlitzBasic/3D/+, but for whatever reason BRL havn't included similar functionality into Max2D... preferably I could do this with the accelerated 2D...

H&K, the demo of the Pure2d Cobra is now available from Graham's site:

http://www.squeakyduck.co.uk/

There is a software render engine on my modules site.

I personally think it's a step backward for polished looking games, but maybe for fun hobby games it's OK.

Maybe Grey - but it does have anti-alias features, alpha transparency etc and will run on anything from Windows95 up!

The 3d module will improve things though - which will also be available for BlitzMax btw.

I'd quite like to see a plain 2D engine for BlitzMax, too, but when trying to download the demo it says "Sorry, your account does not have access to downloads."

Cobra 2D is impressive, I can't find the Mode7 demo I saw before, that Mode7 function is nice....

.

.

Cobra2D can display Chinese/Japanese correctly, don't know if it work with Unicode, if it can load a font, will be pretty good.

*but* it will not do anti-aliasing and transparency at any practical usable speed for a modern game. I coded thoses features in my BlitzPlus game engine for Xmas Bonus and basically they had to be used very sparingly even on a 3.2Ghz PC - and don't say I must have coded them craply ;-) they were very well optimised with the help of knowledgable forum members and lots of experimentation on my part. More and more people are getting good PCs so making your game work on older ones (which was my mission with Xmas Bonus) may be a waste of time, certainly in a year or so it will be.

You have to go through the register process first.

Grey, that was BlitzPlus - not Cobra. You're probably right about using sparingly though.

BrEgOrS, Graham is also developing 2d and 3d engines for BlitzMax - the Ion Engines.

I'm not sure why you'd want to go backwards and start not using hardware acceleration again. If you're looking to deal with software-rendered graphics you're probably thinking 256 color or 16-bit which is obviously way out of date these days. There isn't very much that you'd want to do in software 2D that you can't find a way to do in 3d-accelerated 2D. The only area lacking is reading the backbuffer at a good speed, or writing a high volume of individual pixels. One question remains, did people come up with the effects and uses of the technology based on their vision of what they want to do, or based on what the technology dictated was normal?

What I would recommend is using the graphics hardware to render the perceived graphics and using an off-line main-memory cpu-rendered bitmap `backing store` to handle other needs. e.g. if you need to read pixel-perfect positioning or handle a superbitmap bigger than the screen and keep record of changes to it. You can do that off-line and use certain techniques to represent it on-screen. Making stuff go over the bus is not a good acceptance of the hardware design.

That said I do think Max2D is a little lacking in some simple areas that it should have a full feature set by now - filled or unfilled ovals and rects and triangles and polygons, line width, point, gradient fills, textured poly's, flood fill, etc. Simple simple graphics stuff. These should've been implemented even right from the start with the first release and I'm quite shocked really that these simple things still have not been added. Even though we've moved to true-color rendering as well, I think the idea of palettes and color change functions would be useful as an interface. Maybe people should start making some noise about Max2D lacking basic drawing features. It's all very well all the focus on images and texture maps.

@ BrEgOrS, Graham is very curtious about posting on other ppls sites. If you want the hard sell about Cobra from Graham then go to his site.
The main reason Im interested in it isnt Cobra, it is ION, which is Cobra wrapped for Bmax. (There are plans for both IOn2d and Ion3d) That is, a "True" 2d pixel pipline and a 3d engine.

Wot H&K said - go to his site.

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They're not. Or at least, as always, it's up to the gfx card manufacturers to provide decent OpenGL drivers (as always), which ATI are not doing currently.