[Halloween]: Creeps by taj

[taj]

Thanks Jim.

Apologies that I didnt include it in the archive but its quite large. Most gamers/sceners will already have it so I took the decision not to include it as I used a DLL from 12 months ago. Sorry for the inconvenience CK.

Chris

[combatking0]

It looks like I'm a victim of circumcise - I mean, circumstance, as my computer at home lacks an internet connection (and so, access to updates), and my manager chooses which updates to apply to the network over here, and he hasn't done this one yet.

I'll go over his head, just for this workstation...

The installation worked, but now I just get a black screen - looks like my graphics hardware isn't up to it

I'll try a different work station.

[Paul]

That's a shame - the stuff in your screengrab just displays black on Vista, the first FX is the cube with the spider texture

Yeah, the rest is great though, Ill have a go on teh other machine when its turned on

Edit:
Ran it on a xp machine and it looks awsome, really awsome no lag o anything, just great

[Jim]

Got it on the work XP machine and the desktop stuff looks really cool - wonder what bit of the code makes Vista barf?

Jim

[taj]

Got it on the work XP machine and the desktop stuff looks really cool - wonder what bit of the code makes Vista barf?

Jim

V.good question. However you've seen my windows programming...so you know,  could be anything. However, I am using a clearly dirty trick which _may_ work differently under vista due to its extra abstraction layer for compositing. Essentially I open a window, fullscreen, and immediately read the front buffer of the window. Now under XP this gets the pixels from the screen. This is odd really but must be something to do with the OS identifying one area of memory as the screen and enabling writes directly to it for speed. Under vista I'm guessing that the "front buffer" is actually another logical area of memory for each application which is then composited at some performance cost. Hence the reason you get black.

To be honest I was amazed it worked at all nuder any OS but I tried and it did (like much of my size coding). Do you know any safe way to grab the "desktop" Jim?

Alternatively my pfd/dmsettings happen to work for XP but arent "legal" enough for Vista. I'm happy to give you code Jim and for you to tinker - I'm no windows programmer as you know.

Chris



 

[Paul]

The getdesktop on the blitzbasic site works on win 2k and xp i think, but on vista i get quite alot of black.
http://www.blitzbasic.com/codearcs/codearcs.php?code=654

[Jim]

Yeah, use GetDC(NULL) to get the desktop DC, and then create a compatible DC and BITMAP from that, then BitBlt the desktop DC into your own DC and finally use GetDIBits to get the pixels.

Jim

[Tetra]

Nice work chris, really like it. Nice idea indeed and I loved the face coming out of the desktop!

 

[taj]

Thanks tetra,

I think it might be worth exploring this a bit more adding lighting and shadows to make it really feel like something coming out of the desktop. After thats cracked (and vista fixed), it would be possible to run an entire demo, capture to texture and display in this way each frame.

Chris

[Jim]

I've posted some sample code to grab the desktop reliably under XP and Vista
http://dbfinteractive.com/index.php?topic=2565.msg36293#msg36293

Jim

[taj]

I'll update my code after the voting is done (to be fair to everyone). Thanks Jim. Already "karma++ed" you. Very useful snip of code that.

Chris

[ninogenio]

hey chris did you ever get round to fixing this up mate,

no presure though id really like to view it in its entirity

[taj]

hey chris did you ever get round to fixing this up mate,

no presure though id really like to view it in its entirity

Sorry not yet, but I will nino...got absorbed by the raytracer for a while.

[ninogenio]

take your time mate i look forward to it in anticipation!