Right, So, lets say the avg name space is 10Hx50W pixels and you got 300 users on one map, thats a rect 3000x15000 right?

Nope ... if you want to hold all of the names on a single bitmap, it would be 3000 x 50.

Or, if you go 5-names-wide, then it would be 600x250.

-Bryk

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www.mwgames.com ... Dicey Curves, Space Mission, Jump Gate, Gem Raider, DareBase, Castle Danger, Keeps & Moats Chess

Oh duh, complete brain fart on the math. LOL.

On the FPS note, I'm starting to get worried. I've added 4 windows, 1 chat window, the quickslot and the playerbar (mp/hp) and with all those open, I'm getting close to 99/100FPS. It seems to be taking about 40FPS per item I add.

What happens when the gui is eatting 60FPS and no content at all, like characters, monsters, spell effects, weather and all the animation. Should I be worried yet? I don't know if this is a issue yet, or if this is just the limits of what vb6 and DX7 can do, I would like to finish first and then upgrade that when I have a good understanding of game dev.

I've posted some screenies the GUI so far, I still have quite a few more GUI elements to add including the finished windows and all the child controls.

Open:
http://img256.imageshack.us/img256/3157/open.jpg

Closed:
http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/8267/closexyp.jpg

My Current Logic for loading and handling the graphic data is.

Define the Surface object, load the graphic into the surface object, pull from the surface object the graphic I want, draw that where I want on the buffer, and then update the primary screen.

Is there anything else I'm missing? Also, none of my graphics are powers of 2 in size, so most surfaces are setup like 400x600 or 200x50, etc. Does that make a difference?

Like I said earlier, you really should stop judging performance off FPS, it's not accurate.

Grab a profiler or make a utility, and time sections of code and figure out what your slowest procedure is. You can't optimize by guessing

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GMan
Black Ninja Games
Imagine ASCII art here!

I think I'll add a quick sprite animation function that can draw say 200 64x64 objects and see how the Gui handles up.

Ok, so I added the simple sprite placement and with 60 frames of animation. I didn't placement all that great, but I just wanted to test it with 300 objects. I was surprised when it ran at the current FPS with all windows open.

http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/654/300render.jpg

I thought I would post a screenie of the current GUI to date. I've finished most of the graphic design on the GUI with just the windows and various other areas not completed. The Playerbar (hp/mp/level/class) and the Menubar (player stats, equipment, items, skills/spells, options, menu) are both fully functional. The quickslot is functional in the show and hide and the related key assoication, but not the drag n drop of items to it yet.

The character object is that little square showing off transparency, the map is well, from zelda and is only for testing purposes, it is scaled up to match the scale at which I require. The map you're seeing is 2048x2048 pixels in size and is fully loaded with smooth transitioning.

The FPS is acceptible thus far, again, just showing the capibilities of VB6 and DX7. I am disappointed that DX7 does not include alpha-blend and that reason alone will be the edge to upgrade to DX8 or 9. I do know of the dll for DX7 to add alpha-blend functionality, but I do not like depending on someone elses code and in the future I will most likely wont be able to include such a item.

http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/4655/newqck.jpg

After going thru the process of adding GUI elements, I've started thinking about 2 windows that will make use of alot of child controls. The dreaded Menu Window and Options Window.

The options window is the one I'm really dreading to tackle as far as writing the entire GUI aspect of this window along with all the controls. This pushed me to look into the FlipToGDISurface function. I played around with this function and was able to create an function that allowed me to switch between the game engine and into a fullscreen model window, with full access to all the window controls I wanted.

The problem that I have now is, well, I stop rendering and hide the game window in order to successfully show my GDI window, I keep the same resolution also. But, users can now alt+tab from this GDI window into their windows desktop, but, once they return via alt+tab, the game window is active, not the GDI window, which requires more code to keep track of the entire process.

Although it seems easy, it really feels disconnected and unreliable at worst, which can happen from time to time. I believe I will ditch this method and go back to creating the GUI element classes in render instead. I also tested the GDI window example that comes with the Directx7 SDK (its in C++), once ported to VB, it functioned ok, but requires handling DCs and flipping to the GDI to grab bitmap data, converting it over and displaying onto the directx surface.

That method was just buggy too.

Ah, Jas, I had fixed the mouse dragging feature (where if you drag to fast, you lose the window) with the ptinrect function, but now that I've changed all the code over to class and directx, it detaches and I can't figure out how to lock the cursor to the original click point. I will play around with it later, but if you got an idea, I'm open to anything.

Ok, How do you all handle your keypresses. I'm running mine in a loop and assigning a delay speed for keypresses. Is there a better way to limit or delay keypresses ? Like, say for textbox entry, so that if you press "A" it doesn't loop 1000 times.

for key presses, this is what i do: (its in VB)

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The path to hell is paved with clever code.

Is this keyboard input event driven or queried in the game loop?




I don't know enough about what you've done to give advice, but I don't think the solution it's any different: Whether you're using an array to define rectangles, or you're building rectangle classes, you'll need to maintain (use) an array (list) for zorder sorting.

I personally find classes to cause more headaches than they cure. I prefer lower level data structures. But that's just me

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I ain't pushing no moon buttons.

Yes, I'm doing exactly what you suggested and its very clean and fully functional, the problem is when I grab the window and shake the mouse really fast, if its near the edge the window drops off the drag. I haven't revisited this as I moved on to adding the child object stuffs, but I don't want to forget about it.

I have 2 keyboard events I'm running right now (polling the dinput for all ingame functions) and the forms keydown event for testing. The forms keydown event automaticly has the keypress delay/repeat? (based on my windows settings). I want to add this to the polling dinput event class.

Hmm, how would you assign a speed to that? I believe I'm going to have to add a timerclass that counts ms's passed.

Press attack button (attack takes place), delay until next attack allowed or if press attack and hold, follow thru with double attack, delay, double attack, delay, etc...

or Press spell key, but spell is a charging spell (think of zelda - a link to the past, when you can charge up your sword and do a spin attack), but if you press the key back to back without holding, you get the above attack.

I think that's accomplished by using some type of timer function.

you mean you want a timer for each key, since it was depressed?

I would use a single timer and calculate delta-time with it. WindowsAPI provides it's own getticks function, so you could use that.

There's various ways to do this.

You could create an array keytimers(255) to remember the time state of each key.

• You could set an entry negative to mean key is up.
• You could set an entry to zero to represent the key going down.
• For keys which are down (keytimer()>=0) you add delta-time to that keytimer.
• If a key goes up, you set keytimer() = negative, to deactivate it.
• To retrigger a key timer, you set keytimer() = 0, which you could use for simulating key-repeat.

That would work with a key querying system, or an event based system, but is probably not the best way for either.

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I ain't pushing no moon buttons.

I use both the windows API gettick and the Directx gettick for my timebased stuff, I think you're right about the timers.


Now, anytime I want to add a delay to a key, I just assign a timer to it. There is more I'm missing but this is what I was thinking.[/code]

I thought I would give another update shot.

http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/9646/s ... tscopy.jpg

yes, that's coming along nicely

I'm sure I've seen that tile-set before somewhere.. Is it a public-domain one?

Also if you don't mind me saying, from an appearance point of view, the tile-set looks too low contrast compared to the GUI. I think it would look better if you increase the contrast of the terrain a little.

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I ain't pushing no moon buttons.

I think it's from RPGMaker. But the GUI looks good.

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GMan
Black Ninja Games
Imagine ASCII art here!

http://blogdematt.kouryu.info/article-3 ... mages.html

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I ain't pushing no moon buttons.