Speaking of sprite engine

[Brice Manuel]

Would you consider posting a direct link to the demo?

[Patrice Terrier]

Would you consider posting a direct link to the demo?

There are plainty of them on my website and/or the GDImage dedicated forum.

For example try PhotoComposer here:
http://www.zapsolution.com/DW/US/photocomposer.html

You can also try Of The Bay here:
http://www.zapsolution.com/DW/US/ofthebay.html

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[Patrice Terrier]

Carousel

Carousel is one of the most famous GDImage sprite demo written several years ago!

Compare with some other "sprite" demo:

- It doesn't hog the CPU.
- The animation keeps running when you move the window around.
- You can resize the window.
- You can add sprite reflection on the fly.
- You can change the size of a sprite on the fly.
- You can change the alpha channel of a sprite on the fly.
- You can change the z-order of a sprite on the fly.
- You can rotate a sprite on itself at any angle on the fly.
- You can setup the animation speed on the fly.
- You can draw the sprites in "crystal" or "blur" mode on VISTA.
etc.

Looking for the future:
While it works fine on XP, better to try it on VISTA or Windows 7 to see it working full screen in "Blur" or "Crystal" mode.

The GDImage carousel demo is also available in C# managed code and in WinDev p-code. They all work at the same speed, aka: the PowerBASIC low level SDK speed.

Of course if you are just toying, GDImage may be a little pricy, but what if you are serious about graphic programming

PS: And of course... i didn't say anything about the interface

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[Patrice Terrier]

Remember, this sprite engine is 100% software based and does not use any hardware features, so it can't compete with the 3D stuff like in OpenGL.

While GDImage is able to use OpenGL to create real 3D sprites, it is also able to manipulate multi-frame animations to all extent, because "when you can make more, you can make less"

To see what i mean, use the controls located on the right panel to manipulate the main sprite, while the child clones stay unchanged.

The size of the ZIP file () exceeds my personnal quota to this site from 823.9 Kb, thus you will have to download it from there:
http://www.zapsolution.com/preview/Brain3D.zip

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[Wayne Diamond]

So GDImage is basically the same price as Photoshop (which is US$699 for CS4), and over 3 times more expensive than the latest PBWin compiler itself (which is US$199) ...

Hmm.

Patrice, I LOVE your work in the graphics department, it is very enviable and I consider you an absolute top gun in that area - possibly the best Powerbasic developer when it comes to graphics???

But, _wow_ ... I guess you don't want many of us to buy your sprite engine

Regards,
Wayne

[Patrice Terrier]

Wayne,

There is realy a big parity problem between $ and €.

Here Adobe PhotoShop CS4 is being sold € 1015 that is $ 1431
then a fair comparison would be between GDImage €450 and CS4 €1015

See the prices there:
http://www.logicielscs4.fr/cms/suite...7-1-adobe-P--S

Also one, is a end user price (CS4), while the other is a programming tool, the size of the market are realy not the same.

I think you in the States have a real problem with the $ declin, time to move to Yuan

More seriously, i wonder how much you guy would charge for one day's work.

PS: You can see my own rating there.

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[Joe Byrne]

So GDImage is basically the same price as Photoshop (which is US$699 for CS4), and over 3 times more expensive than the latest PBWin compiler itself (which is US$199) ...

Hmm.

Patrice, I LOVE your work in the graphics department, it is very enviable and I consider you an absolute top gun in that area - possibly the best Powerbasic developer when it comes to graphics???

But, _wow_ ... I guess you don't want many of us to buy your sprite engine

Regards,
Wayne

Ditto. I can't think of ANYONE who knows more about graphic programing that you Patrice, and I'm SURE your toolbox/software is well worth the cost, bu in reality, there simply isn't anyway I'd be able to justify the cost. Personally, I'll look for other options or forgo the fancy stuff if necessary. This is NOT a complaint, nor a suggestion that you do anything different. I'm just pointing out that even though I buy almost all 3rd party products for PB, there are some of us who simply aren't going to shell out $600+ for a graphics package.

[Wayne Diamond]

Wayne,
I think you in the States have a real problem with the $ declin, time to move to Yuan

Actually I'm in Australia ($AUD). I sell my software in fixed US$ prices though as my market is international and seeing as over 80% of my customers are from the US it just makes sense to market in that currency.

This statement of yours has me puzzled ... "There is realy a big parity problem between $ and €" ... at the end of the day the price you pay from your hip pocket is the same.

For example, on the adobe.com Photoshop CS4 website they show the price as US$699, which according to xe.com currency converter is currently €488, so I don't understand why you're claiming "Here Adobe PhotoShop CS4 is being sold € 1015 that is $ 1431". Perhaps you're getting ... ripped off? (Not nice is it?)

[Patrice Terrier]

Joe,

there simply isn't anyway I'd be able to justify the cost

Strange, you paid me to create a logo for you, don't you?

And you can't justify to pay the counterpart of one single day's work, something that would take you years to write, oh! i see you are kidding me

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[Patrice Terrier]

Wayne,

That is a fact PhotoShop CS4 and all the ADOBE products are sold more than three time the US price, here in France by ADOBE itself !!!!

This is the reason why i bought mine in Canada, as they are also speaking french

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[Wayne Diamond]

Joe,
Strange, you paid me to create a logo for you, don't you?

Whatever happened to client privacy?

More seriously, i wonder how much you guy would charge for one day's work.

If Adobe sold Photoshop in respect of how many hours it took their teams of programmers to develop it the cost to us as a customer would be $millions per license.

[Patrice Terrier]

Some more food for thought:

Tarif: from 1.250€ / day (excl. VAT) depending on the engineering skills required, not including travelling expenses.
Participants: max. 3 persons.

This is the rating of PC-Soft (WinDev), for one single day of their programming engineer.

More details there:
http://www.windev.com/ts/assistance.htm

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[Wayne Diamond]

Wayne,
That is a fact PhotoShop CS4 and all the ADOBE products are sold more than three time the US price, here in France by ADOBE itself !!!!
This is the reason why i bought mine in Canada, as they are also speaking french
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So in other words it has nothing to do with $ <> € or any other currency conversion, just that it's more expensive in your native France ... thanks for the clarification.

By the way I thought we were talking about the price of your program, not how much the author of Windev gets paid per day.

Anyway it's your product, you're free to price it at whatever you wish. While I'm floored at the price of the product I'm also equally floored by quality of it; it is a very high quality product and I don't think anybody can question its quality, and I truly wish you all the success with it.

Thats my 2c
Best regards, Wayne

[Patrice Terrier]

In fact the dilema is very simple, if you don't need it, don't buy it.

If you need it, be assured that you will get the best around

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[Joe Byrne]

Joe,


Strange, you paid me to create a logo for you, don't you?

And you can't justify to pay the counterpart of one single day's work, something that would take you years to write, oh! i see you are kidding me

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Yea, I did for 1/4 the price of your software. I'm not saying your application isn't worth it, what I'm saying is that I can't justify the cost just to add such advanced graphics to my programs. I might consider $100 for a tool that does 25% of what your app does mainly because thats about all the graphics I would ever use.

I haven't bought Photoshop either, because its too expensive for what I need, but I did buy Photoshop Elements (~ $100) because it DID do what I had need of most.

BTW, is there any reason you wouldn't do the second logo I asked for? I always wondered if I offended you in some way. Certainly not my intent if I did.

[Patrice Terrier]

Wayne,

How is the transparent color defined? for example in your demo graphic the transparent color is a specific pink, but perhaps i have a sprite that needs to display that color, so can I define a specific transparent color for each sprite?

The magenta color RGB(255,0,255) is kind of "standard" to define a transparent color in pictures that do not have an alpha channel.

The GDImage trial version is provided with several pictures using the magenta for the same purpose.

This was first introduced in WinLIFT to deal with 8-bit bitmap components, to create a region on the fly.

The concept is exactly the same with some GIF animation.

To avoid any potential problem with the use of magenta in GDImage, i remap all RGB(255,0,255) to RGB(255,0,254), just to make sure that this would not cause any confusion with the true magenta color.

However this technic has many limitations as soon as you want to resize a bitmap on the fly, or when dealing with jpeg pictures.

But fortunatly there is a solution to this problem.

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[Wayne Diamond]

Patrice thankyou for that insight, good info there, but I'm still just a little foggy about the magenta color -- is it a Windows standard (as in the gdi32.dll functions themselves specifically target that color as transparent)? Or can you specify which color you want to make transparent?

btw I like your trick of converting RGB(255,0,255) to RGB(255,0,254) - simple, effective, fast and easy to accomplish at inline assembly-level, and with minimal (virtually zero) affect on the viewers perception. Is that the usual route? (can you tell I haven't done much gfx coding?)

[Patrice Terrier]

is it a Windows standard (as in the gdi32.dll functions themselves specifically target that color as transparent)?

No it is not a Windows standard, but a very common convention that is recognized by several graphic toolkits and even some programming languages.

Another convention, is to use the pixel color located at coordinate 0,0.

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[Patrice Terrier]

Back to the competition

Here is another one, for the fun: IceWalk

And you know what, with GDImage you could even give the illusion that they are realy walking, by slowly strectching the background, like in the WinScape demo.

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[Patrice Terrier]

While the original pinguin, is a GIF animation, it has been converted with the GDImage GIF2PNG.exe utility, then the resulting multi-frame bitmap has been edited with PhotoShop to remove the bottom shadow and better antialias the outline.

As you can imagine this takes more time, than just cuting/pasting my work.

The clone feature is a very unique GDImage feature that was introduced several years ago, i am amazed to see that my work is a huge source of inspiration for some people.

Anyway better to use the original than a clone years behind

In GDImage a sprite can be anything shown on a Windows screen, it can be 3D based, or pure software animation, and GDImage animation do not hog the CPU resource just for the purpose of showing a high FPS that couldn't be used in real life cooperative applications.

I could also make a EZ-Sprite only version if there was a real demand for it.
What about one sold $49.99, or a freeware version (don't be fooled, i am just teasing of course)

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