Messages

121

General chat / Re: The most interesting thing I saw today

« on: October 23, 2012 »

Haha, code poems, submission seems to be closed already but I thought it was an interesting idea. Couldn't find any examples unfortunatly except for some funny comments.

code-poems

Here's mine

Code: [Select]

roses = red;
violets = blue;
while(roses != violets)
   print("I love you!");


Hahaha, great stuff Kirl

122

General coding questions / Re: [ogl] Omitting Black Pixels

« on: October 17, 2012 »

Clyde, what zawran suggests should do the trick. You could use a PNG or manually process the pixel data in memory and set the alpha for the black pixels to 0. If you're working with 32bit buffers, you should have alpha channel available to play with. Shaders would make this pretty easy to do, but you mentioned before you've not used them in Freebasic yet.

OpenGL Stencil Buffers may also do the trick, it's worth having a read up on them. I'll try and put together a freebasic example using shaders for blur and a few other bits in the near future. I'm tied up for the next couple of weeks but should have time after that.

123

General chat / Re: Let me introduce myself

« on: October 17, 2012 »

Welcome Parasight

124

C / C++ /C# / Re: Fonts in 64k intros

« on: October 14, 2012 »

Sadly thats the case, its a bitmap font. D:
I am also looking for the same thing you are looking for (ways to do decent font rendering/kerning).

If you're not worried about size, this is worth checking out: BMFont.

125

C / C++ /C# / Re: Fonts in 64k intros

« on: October 14, 2012 »

This:
http://nehe.gamedev.net/tutorial/outline_fonts/15004/
(wglUseFontOutlines)

But i guess this is what you mentioned with the "using existing system fonts (TTF such as Arial etc).", i only didn't understood why do you think this is limited...

That requires that the font is already installed on the target machine, so you're pretty limited in what fonts you can use (arial, helvetica etc). If you wanted to use a font that's not included in a standard Windows install, you'd need to carry it with you exe, which is gonna eat up a lot of space (and likely bump the intro size over 64k).

126

C / C++ /C# / Re: Fonts in 64k intros

« on: October 14, 2012 »

In my craptro, I use a custom font which loads from memory.

The handle given to CreateFont is like this:

HANDLE m_fonthandle = AddFontMemResourceEx(
         fontdata,          // font resource
         fontdata_len,          // number of bytes in font resource
         NULL,             // Reserved. Must be 0.
         &nFonts         // number of fonts installed
         );

where  *fontdata is a pointer and fontdata_len is the length in bytes of the resource. Then on end you do RemoveFontMemResourceEx().

In my most recent prod I am working on for a demoparty, I just use a bitmap for the raster font.

I assume this is a bitmap font Mudlord? I'm aiming more for vector based fonts that are nice and small. Looks like extracting and optimising font outlines from TTF is the way to go at the moment. Still haven't had time to look into it properly yet, but will post my findings here when I do. Thanks.

127

General chat / Re: The Welcoming Committee

« on: October 14, 2012 »

Welcome Kyxa, tnk2k.

Hey Mudlord

128

General chat / Re: The most interesting thing I saw today

« on: October 10, 2012 »

Fantastic!

129

General coding questions / Re: Looking for guidelines

« on: October 08, 2012 »

Language wise, it sounds like your best jump off point is C and OpenGL.
I'm a C/C++ developer, but really unless forced by a GUI framework or whatever, i'll always drop back to C most of the time.

Properly set up OpenGL used for 3D will give you the access to hardware acceleration that you won't get any other way.

As for what effects to actually do, read some history of the demoscene (the book Freax is fantastic, as is the documentary Moleman) look at youtube videos of old and classic intros and demo's and see what effects grab your attention and have a go at replicating those.

Good call!

"Moleman 2 - Demoscene Documentary"

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRkZcTg1JWU" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRkZcTg1JWU</a>

130

General coding questions / Re: PS3 Demo coding.

« on: October 07, 2012 »

I have recently started getting interested in PS3 development, and I was curious as if demo coders out there have embraced this platform at all. It is a seemingly perfect environment to code for, lots of power, potential and some unique quirks.

Anyone had/seen any experience with this platform?

I did a lot of coding on the PS2 a few years back, but never any on the PS3. I'm not sure what development tools are available on the PS3. On PS2 there was the ps2dev project, which basically consisted of a set of homebrew libraries to enable native development without using the official Sony development libraries. This was the preferred approach for a lot of people as you could hit the hardware directly (without going through linux) and you didn't put yourself in an illegal gray area by using official libs. A number of people did use the official dev tools for making PS2 cracktros and trainers though. I'm not sure if there's a ps3dev project with homebrew libraries, but I seem to recall people were working on this quite a few years back.

I'd be interested to know what you do find out. I can't see myself getting a PS3 for dev anytime soon, but it would be very interesting to hear how things are nowadays. Good luck!

131

Projects / Re: Another Space Cracktro...

« on: October 07, 2012 »

Nice old-school vibe C3ltic, well done! Love the music from BlackSheep too

Thanks for the greet

oh, and nice making ESC quit instead of Q now. On my system, the bottom row of pixels for the DBF logo at the top seems to be missing. There's no line at the bottom of the D or the B, no big deal though.

132

General coding questions / Re: Looking for guidelines

« on: October 04, 2012 »

Hi hildegard

As Kirl says, there are no really right or wrong platforms when it comes to demos. Your Java experience and OpenGL investigations should stand you in good stead, whatever language or platform you decide to use. Demo coding in C# is perfectly feasible and can produce some great results. Since you have some experience with Java, that may be a good place to start as the syntax in C# is quite similar to Java, and it's a nice (and fairly forgiving) language to use in my humble opinion. This demo which came first in the demo compo at Evoke 2011 was written in C# (using DirectX) for example. OpenGL in C# is certainly possible too. Perhaps have a look at the OpenTK framework for that.

If you'd rather use linux, that's also possible. I don't personally have any experience in this area, but there are quite a few demos out there made with linux. Some of the ones on that list may include source code too, to help get you started. There are also some OpenGL samples for linux here too. The Windows demoscene certainly seems to be the major one these days though.

This DBF forum also runs demo competitions now and again, which are a great way to get started. This is what got me back into coding demos again after a 10 year break, and they are great fun to enter. There's a list of previous competition entries here, and a number of them have source-code included. My entry for the Image Processing challenge was actually done in C# (using the OpenTK library I mentioned earlier), so you may want to check out the source for that. It's not actually a demo per se, but does use OpenGL.

So, do what you want, with whatever you want on a platform of your choice. The main thing is to have some fun and make something you like and enjoy looking at (hopefully). We're a friendly bunch here, so please shoot questions and we'll do our best to help

Good luck and have fun!

raizor

ps. a coffee machine demo would be pretty cool!

133

General chat / Re: What are you working on at the moment?

« on: October 04, 2012 »

http://blog.soulwire.co.uk/laboratory/flash/perlin-noise-flow-field <- Thanx to Raizor for posting! 

Would love to see you come up with rbz!

rbz this may be of use too: http://prideout.net/blog/?p=63

134

General coding questions / Re: My First Raspberry Pi Thing

« on: October 04, 2012 »

I missed this before Jim, thanks for posting. I was trying to find a nice method of compiling/running stuff while developing, and this sounds like a good way to go. Will give it a try when I get some time

K++

135

General chat / Re: The Welcoming Committee

« on: October 04, 2012 »

Hi Kyxa and tnk2k, welcome to DBF

136

C / C++ /C# / Re: Fonts in 64k intros

« on: September 30, 2012 »

@Blacksheep8Bit, thanks. I'm trying to avoid any bitmaps at all at the moment if possible, so I think some kind of vectorized font is the way to go. Not sure how small I'll be able to get things, will keep you posted

@Hellfire, note dropped

137

C / C++ /C# / Fonts in 64k intros

« on: September 30, 2012 »

I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts or suggestions for handling fonts in 64k intros?

The normal approaches seem to be either a 1 bit bitmap font (black & white) or using existing system fonts (TTF such as Arial etc). Both of these methods seem quite limited to me, so I'm wondering if there are alternatives. I guess the SDF font stuff Hellfire posted about a little while ago would be excluded on size grounds as it needs a fairly large PNG to represent distance fields. My only other thought would be to write something to process existing vector based fonts and somehow recreate these in code using a minimal number of points and some curves (bezier or whatever). I can see this last technique being quite difficult to implement, so I wonder if anyone else has an other insights?

Cheers,

raizor

138

Projects / Re: OLD SCHOOL WILL NEVER DIE

« on: September 30, 2012 »

Really nice one mate! True oldsch00l!

Thanks for the greet.

Pressing Q to quit an intro somehow feels a bit uncommon though

Another vote for ESC to quit from me

139

Projects / Re: Pompey Pirates Menu 1 v2

« on: September 30, 2012 »

Very nice and very polished KrazyK. I love the bootup and floppy disk sounds K++

140

Projects / Re: OLD SCHOOL WILL NEVER DIE

« on: September 28, 2012 »

Nice one C3lt1c K++