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DUGL roadmap (Announce)

posted by FFK Homepage, 15.08.2009, 15:07

> Joystick: not needed. Only few people use joysticks. Only for few
> specializated genres are still popular but generaly are obsoleted by
> mouse
I think you are right. This is low priority missing features.

> Files packaging: In my Freepascal projects I started to use .GRP format
> used in games like Duke3D, Blood, etc. It is extremely simple and
> described on pages of Ken Silverman, author of the Build engine:
> http://advsys.net/ken/build.htm (search "What is .GRP file
> format")
Will see

> Images: as DUGL supports 16 bits modes it also should support some decent
> compressed HiColor (Truecolor) image format. PCXs are problematic, JPEGs
> not good for all purposes, so you should support at least some subformats
> of TIFFs or PNGs.
DUGL is able to load 24bpp BMP files but they are directly converted to 16bpp.
DUGL Plus is also able to load JPEG using libjpeg but also converted to 16bpp.
Will use more open source library with DUGL PLus to add more image format support.

> Supports of transparent and animated GIFs would be cool.
> I would be espetially appreciated if you write a simple tool which
> displays .GIF and interactively let you choose color for transparention.
> And then saves it as a transparent GIF. I painful miss such program in
> DOS.
256 colors paletted GIF ? this is currently the only supported by the DUGL gif loader.

> Fonts: you should definitely support some common bitmap font. The CPI
> files are OK, FNT files too. Much more complicated are vector fonts. At
> least .TTF fonts are extremely complicated. But you could try to add
> support for .CHR fonts from Borland.
CPI and FNT are mostly easy. For TTF i think that i have to use an open source library to be able to import it.

> Sound cards and graphics acceleration: The best solution is to use an
> external modules. I strongly advocate to adapt sound interface from Miles
> sound system because it allows to use lot of existing sound drivers and
> opens a possibility for adding a new drivers. Alternative could be the use
> of sound drivers from Quick view.
> It would be cool if you could add the support of use the VESA AF drivers
> used in allegro via VBEAF.DRV file.
> http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/freebe/
> I looked into loader code in Allegro and it seems to be quite simple.
I think that we don't need much graphic acceleration, as they are fixed,
consume VRAM(slow in modification), reduce DUGL flexibility and the most important is that DUGL is enough fast for most needs. For example on my P4 dual core D925, 3GHz, DUGL Player show some 1200fps with smooth disabled when playing an mpg video. The new transparency functions show a bandwith RAM to RAM of some 400 Millions pixels/sec, ... The only case that will make you feel slow is when you use/try a function that need to read from VRAM. And this is why i dropped on all my new demos any direct VRAM rendering. I render to a RAM Surf, when every thing done, I copy it to VRAM.

I'm not sure about the architecture of all the existing sound driver. But i'm guessing that with some modifications the sound driver format i designed is superior and faster :-D ok internal mixer isn't great and very primitive, but he can be enhanced.
BTW, The sound drivers that seem interesting for me are the "Quick view" sound driver, but i don't see any docs neither library how to use them.

> And it would be cool to modify some existing Allegro game into DUGL. Like
> DOOM which was already mentioned.
Will see ? Any suggestion ?

BTW DUGL website updated :-)

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