Small FastLIB fix FastLIB gets a quick fix... sorry I haven't been able to make any updates in a while, today I'm only posting a small bugfix in the fastfiles unit - there was a typo in the savejpgstream function. I'll have a bigger better update real soon. the fastlib.zip file has been updated with the new fastfiles unit. [ Michael Wilson | 9/14/2001 12:21:11 PM ]

SDL Game Development Contest Dominique Louis forwarded this information on the DelphiGames mailing list... No Starch Press, publishers of PROGRAMMING LINUX GAMES, is pleased to announce an SDL GAME DEVELOPMENT CONTEST, open to entries from game developers worldwide. Create a complete SDL-based computer game under 1 megabyte, and send it to games@nostarch.com by DECEMBER 1, 2001 and you could win the entire Loki Software game library, books from No Starch Press, a subscription to Linux Journal magazine, and more! Contest details: www.nostarch.com/?games Questions: games@nostarch.com Sponsored by No Starch Press, www.nostarch.com: Publishers of PROGRAMMING LINUX GAMES Loki Software, Inc. www.lokisoftware.com: Ports best-selling PC games to Linux Linux Journal www.linuxjournal.com: The leading Linux magazine SDL is available from www.libsdl.org and a Delphi/Kylix import unit is available from the Downloads page at DelphiGamer. Of course, the contest entries should be compiled with Kylix in order to run on the Linux test machine. You can get a free version of Kylix here. [ Steve Williams | 9/14/2001 04:31:07 AM ]

Forums back online The GameDev forums are now back online after the temporary closure. [ Steve Williams | 9/13/2001 06:23:54 PM ]

GameDev and turbo forums closed In light of recent world events and out of respect for those involved, we are temporarily shutting down the GameDev.net forums. They will be back up in the near future. [ Michael Wilson | 9/13/2001 10:12:26 AM ]

FMOD 3.40 Brett Paterson of Firelight Multimedia has stayed up way past his bedtime packaging the latest distribution of FMOD, the free-for-freeware (and cheap for other-ware) commercial-quality music and sound effects system. Version 3.40 contains many new features including DirectX Audio DMO support for effects such as flanging, echo and reverb, a spectrum analyser and faster Ogg Vorbis routines. The site has not been officially updated with the release yet, but he left this message and link to the download on the FMOD forums... its zipped up and ready now and ive even done the html for the news and new features table with all the platforms etc.. ill be releasing it within hours but its 3am now and im tired, so ill leave it until the morning.. (i still have to compile all 4 win CE platform dlls and prepare that dist) well... if you really want it its actually sitting on the server ... you can get it from here Along with the usual fare of Visual C++ files, it includes a Delphi import unit, a C++ Builder import library and some Delphi samples including a new testbed application written by yours truly. As mentioned above, a beta of the Windows CE version is also being released very shortly. Update: The FMOD site has been updated now, so you can read about all the new features. [ Steve Williams | 9/12/2001 11:48:24 PM ]

Frustum culling The Delphi Graphics page, now called JEDI Graphix, has a new sample on frustum culling by Lord Trancos. Frustum culling is the process of removing 3D objects that are outside the current view, or frustum. This avoids having to render the object when it is not visible. Remember that the quickest polygon is the one that you don't draw. [ Steve Williams | 9/12/2001 06:39:03 PM ]

Playing with your GeForce Tom Nuydens of Delphi3D has been busy playing around with his GeForce... If you have a GeForce and you'd like to experiment with register combiners, texture shaders or vertex programs, there's a fair chance that you've come across NVIDIA's NVparse utility. NVparse is a little script interpreter that you can use to configure all the above features with very little effort. NVIDIA ships NVparse as a .LIB file for C++, as part of their OpenGL SDK. Unfortunately, this is pretty much useless for Delphi developers. Well not anymore, because I've recompiled NVparse as a DLL. I have, of course, also created an import unit for the DLL, so you can now use NVparse in your Delphi apps. Download the files now, and start putting that GeForce to work! [ Steve Williams | 9/12/2001 06:30:40 PM ]

DelphiX isometric game tutorial Borland Community has posted the next installment of a tutorial series on making an isometric game using DelphiX. This article goes through tile animation and converting between screen and world coordinates. It contains links to the code and graphics from the previous tutorial, but I cannot find a link to the previous tutorial itself. The next installment promises placing props and moving units. [ Steve Williams | 9/12/2001 06:24:01 PM ]

Useful Kylix websites Borland Community has posted a article with a list of several useful Kylix websites. I have added the article to the Kylix links page as well. [ Steve Williams | 9/12/2001 06:08:59 PM ]

GLScene updates GLScene has been updated with an addition to the user's gallery of Newtonian Gravity and a new CVS snapshot (1991KB). The snapshot is the current development version and therefore not fully tested, so it will most likely contain bugs. Recent additions to the source include rendering to a texture and new Particle FX classes. [ Steve Williams | 9/11/2001 09:00:52 PM ]

Simulating point lights DelphiGL has been updated with a demo that... ...demonstrates how to simulate point lights using attenuation maps, register combiners, and vertex programs. Attenuation maps simply store light intensity and attenuation over a distance, into a texture which is then used to calculate the amount of lighting a pixel receives. For more information on this subject, please check out Ronald Frazier's excellent per-pixel lighting article. This demo uses vertex programs to calculate the attenuation map texture coordinates instead of doing them on the CPU, the vertex program is quite small so the demo runs quite fast even on a GeForce2, even with multiple lights (done by rendering the object once for each light and blending the results together). This demo will draw four differently colored lights rotating around the torus. You can change the radius of each light and turn each one off or on. [ Steve Williams | 9/11/2001 08:52:24 PM ]

Recent events The events in the United States have shaken not only that country, but the rest of the world. Even here in Australia, everyone is shocked by these attacks. Britain and Australia have pledged their support for the US. The effects of these events will be felt for a very long time around the world. [ Steve Williams | 9/11/2001 08:40:32 PM ]

Hijacked Planes Destroy Twin Towers, Burn Pentagon There's not much to say, the entire US nation is at a standstill... NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, three hijacked planes slammed into the Pentagon and New York's landmark World Trade Center on Tuesday, demolishing the two 110-story towers that symbolize U.S. financial might. The attacks brought normal life across the United States to a standstill, turning the major cities of the nation into eerie ghost towns. All financial markets were closed, millions of workers sent home early, all flights around the nation were canceled and all airports shut in an unprecedented move. Key landmarks like the White House, the fire-damaged Pentagon, the Sears Tower in Chicago, the CIA building in Washington and the Walt Disney theme parks on both coasts were ordered evacuated and closed until further notice. [ Michael Wilson | 9/11/2001 04:22:38 PM ]

Windows-compatible OS? PetrOS is a 32-bit OS being developed by Trumpet Software, creators of that old stalwart Trumpet Winsock from Windows 3.1 days, that is aimed at being fully binary compatible with Win32. This means that you will be able to take most of your existing Win32 applications and use them immediately on this new OS. Another feature is the minimal system requirements. In these days where hundreds of megabytes of RAM and gigabytes of hard drive space are becoming common, the minimum requirements for PetrOS are a 486DX processor, 2MB system RAM (4MB recommended) and 2MB hard drive space. It can also be booted from a floppy disk. Why am I mentioning it here? In this interview on OSNews.com with Peter Tattam, the lead architect, it mentions that not only is the OS itself being written with an in-house Object Pascal compiler, but that Borland command-line tools are already fully functional, including the Delphi 3.0 compiler, and that some Delphi HTTP controls may form the basis for the system's web browser. [ Steve Williams | 9/10/2001 06:29:09 PM ]

Audio Tools Library 1.2 The Audio Tools Library is a cool pack that includes lots of classes for working with audio files. Version 1.2 includes... TMonkey - for manipulating with Monkey's Audio file information TMPEGaudio - for manipulating with MPEG audio file information TID3v2 - for extracting information from ID3v2 tags TOggVorbis - for extracting information from Ogg Vorbis file header TTwinVQ - for extracting information from TwinVQ file header TMPEGplus - for manipulating with MPEGplus file information TWAVFile - for extracting information from WAV file header TID3v1 - for manipulating with ID3v1 tags [ Michael Wilson | 9/10/2001 12:48:52 PM ]

NURBS Sulaco, Jan Horn's new-look site, has a new addition in the form of a NURBS demo. Besides being an acronym for Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines, what are they? Nurbs provide general and powerful descriptions of curves and surfaces and they can automatically handle adaptive subdivision that tessellates the domain into smaller triangles in regions of high curvature. The demo allows you to easily manipulate the control points and see the effects. [ Steve Williams | 9/9/2001 07:44:27 PM ]

Projective texturing Tom Nuydens of Delphi3D has showed once again he is on the bleeding edge by releasing a demo of projective texturing... I posted a new projective texturing demo. Projective texturing is a great technique for creating dynamic lighting effects. It works very well for simulating spotlights, but it can also be used to do things like slide projectors. The best thing is that it can be done with no CPU intervention at all, because all the work is done using TexGen and the texture matrix. You can download the demo here. [ Steve Williams | 9/9/2001 07:25:45 PM ]

Pumpy Emmanuel ICART of Momor Productions has a new freeware game called Pumpy... I've just finished my latest freeware game: Pumpy, an Halloween-styled 3D sokoban remake. The game includes 30 levels, OpenGL, Direct3D & software-only rendering modes, and a level builder. You can download it from eicart.free.fr/pumpy. This game was built using Delphi 4 Standard edition. I've used the JEDI headers for DX & OpenGL implementations. [ Michael Wilson | 9/7/2001 04:52:33 PM ]