AmiDARK Engine - Website is opened !

Hi All,

I've just uploaded the new AmiDARK Engine project website.
It actually contain few things but it may grow from time to time as the project will evolve.

There is a small comparizon between AmiDARK Engine and theGameCreators products : DarkBASIC Professional and DarkGDK.
There is also a small demonstration pack containing 3 demos that were exposed at the Alchimie 2k9 showing you some 2D and 3D features already available in the engine.

I hope you'll enjoy.

Kindest Regards,
AmiDARK
http://www.amidark-engine.com

@freddix

Nice to see things progressing.

Just a few things that I noticed:
- pushing the close button on the window does nothing, but escape does
- I get a crash with the multi view demo, presumably when a particular object moves into view (I do see the X4 box without a problem)
- the helicopter's tyres obviously have one vertex that's off.

Hans

@Hans
- You're right. Escape to quit :p Close button is not activated :p

- Concerning the crash, I don't understand why. It runned well on many Amiga OS 4.1 at the Alchimie with no crash ...

- Concerning the Apache. It's apparently a convertion issue ... The object was multi-limb and was converted to 1 limb object (actual AmiDARK Engine limitations) but when I'll handle limbs I'll do a new convertion and see if this Apache is always buggy :p

Thank you for your report Hans.
Regards,
Freddix / AmiDARK

@freddix

Good to make it public !

Still a question: you have *.c files inside the demopack, but no amidark.a (to make ppls compiling that). Or it's just an example, and amidark.a will be later ?

Related to demos from demopack:

1. hellicopter demo sometime "blinking" by some rectagle area. Not so offten, but visibly. Like somethink not transparently some times (or draw faster that the backgorund, and becouse of it i can see no trasparently part).

2. Resizing of window, looks like trying to do somethink, but does not works as must.

3. can't run more that one demo at time.

4. as Hans's say, close gadget are must :) (but that not so important at moment, easy to add of course).

In other looks very promising. Imho you need add some simply music format for the next demopack (like mp3 maybe?), and demos with some music will be very nice.

ps. These demos not support keyboard keys ? Only "esc" ? (i mean up/down/left/right/resize maybe) ?

ps2. Have no crashes at all. my machine peg2 with latest stuff

@kas1e

3. Yes you can but you have to wait for them to load.

@K-L

Somethink wrong here then .. Becouse first demo i can run in 1 second, second one i wait for 10, and it not runs while i not exit from first one.

@kas1e
1. I also have this problem. I will try with another skybox to see if it happen too (to know if it's object linked or MiniGL linked).

2. Yes Windows resizing is not yet handle. Display will only use the widht/height of default setup. I will add later 2 functions to define how the app will act when resizing (resizing the display area or simply stretching the display.

3. Strange, all run at one on my Sam440EP Flex 800Mhz ... Do you have all updates ? (hyperion OS4.1 updates and MiniGL2.1)

4. Yes, I have only coded escapekey() as exit actually, I have coded the support for the close button but I didn't added it to the DELoop() function to check it. It will be done soonly.

5. Music support is not yet available... It's a set of commands I've planed but not yet developed. Same for sound. Will be available in a future demo release :p

6. As you can see in source code. no keyboard are used in the demo but I've added support for primary keyboard (arrow keys, Functions keys, ctrl, shift, etc ... and raw key support) but it's not used in these demos.

ps2: cool to see it doesn't crash on your peg2 :)

Nota :Quote:
Actually the libamidark.a is not yet included. file amidark.h too.
I will release an alpha demo of the library so anyone will be able to see how it work and how it is easy to create games using AmiDARK Engine. But I have some changes to do to the library itself (protection) to avoid people releasing games/products using it because it's only alpha and it is not intended to be used for development... only evaluation and tests ...
It will probably be the only public release of the library because when it will be more advanced, it will only be available to registered "beta tester" that'll accept NDA... I've not yet announced the "beta tester" request ... probably on beginning 2010 ...

Quote:
Strange ... memory amount ? 512 ? 1Mb ? Video card memory ?

Thank you for your support.

Regards,
Freddix / AmiDARK.

@freddix

Related to "running at the same time", to be clear that we talk about the same, i mean i can't run at the same time 2 amidark demo (which will works in 2 different windowses at the same time). I can run any of them with no problems, and while it works, i can't run second one (well, maybe it will runs, but i w8 10 seconds). If i exit from first demo , then second running demo spawned at that time. It looks like somethink "locks" or "wait" for something ..

I have 1gb of memory and Radeon9250/128 (or 64? not remember 100%, but somethink very popular), and latest MiniGL and all the crap :) But to be sure, we talk about latest MiniGL which are on os4depot, right ?

@kas1e
Do you mean running the same demo twice ?
Or running 2 different demos at the same time ?
Because I can run all 3 demo at the same time with no problem nor big delay like you ...

@freddix
It does not matter: the same demo twice, or different demos. I checked now, they runs, but exactly after 10 seconds. First demo runs just in 1 second, second one in 10 seconds. The same for 3st run (the same 10 seconds).

There is a screenshot. Everythink looks as you planed ? (expectually multicamera demo)

@kas1e
Yes, two demo screens are like they should.
Apparently you use compositing ... are you under 32 bits mode ?
On my Amiga SAM440EP flex, I have disabled Compositing as I get some random crash with it activated and I use 16 bits mode ...
Maybe it's the reason why it takes time to start demo...

@freddix

Here I use a 1440x900 16 bits screen, I own a Radeon 9200 Pro with 128 MB Ram and I can lauch the 3 demos at the same time (it slows down but it works).

@kas1e

I think they start slower because these demos eats 100% of CPU time.

@freddix

This AmiDark engine looks great.

@all :
Thank you for your support.

Actually, if I'm not wrong with my coding, frame rate is highest as possible. That mean that it can eat much CPU usage.
With the future :
DESyncRate( int FramePerSecondMAX );
It will be possible to lower the frame rate and then, eat less CPU usage ;)
But these demos don't use this command.