Sorry your browser is not supported!

You are using an outdated browser that does not support modern web technologies, in order to use this site please update to a new browser.

Browsers supported include Chrome, FireFox, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer 10+ or Microsoft Edge.

Dark GDK / LightEngine BIG v0.4 Released!

Author
Message
kBessa
17
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 8th Nov 2006
Location: Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil
Posted: 6th Jun 2007 01:50 Edited at: 24th Jun 2007 05:55
Hello everyone!

I'm here to announce another release (and probably the biggest one by now) of LightEngine.

Version 0.4 marks a milestone to LightEngine, as it is now possible to convert virtually any DBPro/DGDK game to it (provided it does not use any kind of plugin, of course). This was supposed to be just a new release with converted samples, but it evolved to be the BIG release I was expecting only to version 0.5, but it came earlier to support people developing games 100% object oriented. With this release, I think my primary goal was achieved: LightEngine might be used to create commercial games. Also, it includes 14 projects (7 VB.NET and 7 C#) for original DGDK.NET samples converted to LightEngine. I hope it is useful.

From now on, I won't be focusing on adding new commands. I know there might be commands on DGDK.NET that are not available on DBPro, as I have included, maybe, 5 of them. But if they are not on DBPro, they might not be THAT important (some of them real obscure with no explanation at all), but if you need some of them to be included, I ask you to give me feedback with a list of them, as I will be making "service releases" between major releases, like "v0.4.1, v0.4.2, etc.", just to add things I might have missed or correcting some bugs.

Before somebody ask this... No, I am not being lazy telling I won't be urgently adding new commands, I just really think LightEngine is useable by now and I need to focus on other things, like more samples (so people know how to do something with it), XML documentation (believe it or not, there are more than 1500 classes/methods/properties to be documented. That's a h**l lot of work) and possibly some optimizations.

Not only that, I need new functionalities to make it a full featured "engine", with plugin like LightEmReL and LightUI (still on early stages). One decision that I made was to integrate any plugins into LightEngine, so people won't have to distribute like a hundred DLLs. LightEmReL was already integrated, as stated on the readme. Of course, that will depend on the plugin, what it does, it functionalities, etc.

Ok, if you forgot (or are new to LightEngine), you can get the latest version at the official website:

NEW VERSION: HERE!

Sorry for being too long, I just wanna make things crystal clear. LightEngine is probably the biggest project I've been into. It just got to the mark of 10000 lines of code (my biggest commercial projects have just a little more than 5000), all this hand-coded (no program helping the conversion), nothing more than the help I had from MudBug to get started and tips from APEXnow. I'll be always grateful to both of you.

Feedback is always appreciated also. I hope to get some this time =)


Happy coding!

Thiago Bessa
Mudbug
17
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 2nd Nov 2006
Location: Rome, GA USA
Posted: 6th Jun 2007 05:38
Kudos to you, KBessa. Glad to see you are continuing with such vigour! Keep up the good work.

-MudBug
James Bondo
17
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 12th Nov 2006
Location: Denmark
Posted: 6th Jun 2007 12:13
Yes, kudos to you.

I noticed that you left some SVN settings in some folders. I dont think that was intended.
Namely: LightEngine_0_4_0\Converted Samples\CSharp\leWinFormsCS\Properties\

Cheers.

Using Dark GDK.NET
tindex
17
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 24th Oct 2006
Location:
Posted: 9th Jun 2007 08:43
Very good, thanks.
tindex
17
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 24th Oct 2006
Location:
Posted: 9th Jun 2007 09:30
To me, dgdk.net looks clearer and easier to read now:

kBessa
17
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 8th Nov 2006
Location: Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil
Posted: 9th Jun 2007 18:14
Thanks everyone =)

@MudBug: I'm glad to see you again in the forums. Welcome back my friend.

@James Bondo: I didn't notice that. I stopped using the SVN about a couple of months ago and thought I deleted all .SVN folders, but I forgot this one

@tindex: Glad you liked it. That's the purpose of using LightEngine, to make things easier to write and clearer to understand.

I still hope to get more feedback in the future. New things may come with v0.5

Best regards,
Thiago
Niels Henriksen
19
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 27th Sep 2004
Location: Behind you breathing heavely
Posted: 12th Jun 2007 18:30
uhm... I love DarkE..... LightEngine...

I just need to get startet with my game

Niels Henriksen
Working on a (MMO)RPG right now in DarkEngine
http://www.tigernet.dk - Send SMS to mobile online (will come in english soon)
tindex
17
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 24th Oct 2006
Location:
Posted: 14th Jun 2007 04:28
Hi guys,
For this:

LightBox field = new LightBox(w, h, d);
field.Position(x, y, z);
field.Color(LightBasic2D.RGBColor(r, g, b)); <=== ?????

VS Compiler nag me about my color definition above.
Any comment?
kBessa
17
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 8th Nov 2006
Location: Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil
Posted: 14th Jun 2007 06:37
@tindex:
Actually, Color is a property in LightEngine, you should use it like this:

field.Color = Color.Black;
field.Color = Color.FromArgb(r,g,b);

This was done this way to be equal to other .NET components, or as MudBug used to say: "to make it more .NETfied"

Thiago

<a href="http://www.lightorb.net/" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.lightorb.net/OrbBanner.jpg"></a>
tindex
17
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 24th Oct 2006
Location:
Posted: 14th Jun 2007 07:24
Hi KBessa,

I still get error and the error makes sense as it says 'Color' doesn't exist in this context. Color.Black or the other looks like coming from nowhere.

Also, I have problem with: LightCamera.ColorBackdrop(LightBasic2D.RGBColor(0, 0, 0)) or
LightCamera.BackdropColor(..), both of them are methods. How should I do these?

I have finished converting one of my projects and except above problem, everything was smooth. I had my own method of DarkBasic image id increment and behind the scene handling which I happily removed it from my project and will do on the other projects that I have. LightEngine is a bless, and makes dgdk.net projects being logically managed easier. Although we have wrapper over wrapper and so on, but I see performance is better than DB Pro.

Nevertheless, I can't figure out those color issues.
James Bondo
17
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 12th Nov 2006
Location: Denmark
Posted: 14th Jun 2007 09:50
you need to add
using System.Drawing; (or whatever the name is)
If VS doesn't recognize the using statement, you need to add it to your Reference list in your solution explorer.

Using Dark GDK.NET
tindex
17
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 24th Oct 2006
Location:
Posted: 14th Jun 2007 16:33
Oh, that is what he meant by making it 'NETfied'. Thanks James. KBessa has simplified some of the APIs also. I like that. Some say wrapper shouldn't do that, I think it is OK, why not if it is documented.
tindex
17
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 24th Oct 2006
Location:
Posted: 14th Jun 2007 22:23
In my project, shadow appears but is not like the original CDarkGDK. I think shadow doesn't work properly with LightEngine. I made a simple and well working shadow situation with DB Pro, and then the same with LightEngine. With LightEngine, shadow didn't appear.
tindex
17
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 24th Oct 2006
Location:
Posted: 14th Jun 2007 22:42
Also, neither of the converted examples work. They fails on initialization, to say they don't have proper authenticator.
kBessa
17
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 8th Nov 2006
Location: Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil
Posted: 14th Jun 2007 23:34
@tindex: Could you send me this shadow sample you've made? I'll have to analize it and know what's going wrong.
About the examples, all of them are working fine here. Did you change the path of the media?

Anybody else had the same problem?

Best regards,
Thiago

<a href="http://www.lightorb.net/" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.lightorb.net/OrbBanner.jpg"></a>
tindex
17
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 24th Oct 2006
Location:
Posted: 15th Jun 2007 07:47
Here is my DBPro Example:



And my LightEngine 'equivalent':

kBessa
17
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 8th Nov 2006
Location: Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil
Posted: 15th Jun 2007 08:18
Hello tindex,

Unfortunately I can't test this right now, as my laptop does not support the SetShadowShadingOn method, but are you sure this isn't broken even on DGDK.NET? Because what this method does in LightEngine is just a call to "oDB3D.SetShadowShadingOn(this.Id)",
There's no strange thing being done inside, is just a wrapper to the original method that automaticaly passes the Id as a parameter).

Test it like this: oDB3D.SetShadowShadingOn(cube.Id);
If does not work either, then DarkGDK's SetShadowShadingOn is broken.
tindex
17
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 24th Oct 2006
Location:
Posted: 15th Jun 2007 15:16
100% sure. I tried it this morning. There is no difference between DBPro and original DGDK version. I am not saying the later one is stable, I am just saying in case of shadow, it works very well.

kBessa
17
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 8th Nov 2006
Location: Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil
Posted: 15th Jun 2007 17:31
I got this one. Here's the thing:

When you make a new LightLight, it starts at ID 1. So I changed your DGDK.NET sample to this:



Then hit F5 and things won't work either, so the thing is SetShadowShadingOn works only with the first light (ID 0). I don't know whether this is normal or a DarkGDK bug.

And yes, you cannot access it through LightEngine right now, but now that I know it, I will add this to the next release (just like I did with LightCamera and LightAdditionalCamera, expect something like it: LightLight and LightAdditionalLight).

tindex, what I'd like to ask you is to use oDBLight methods for controlling Light ID 0 for now, it works as you expect. Here's your modified LightEngine code:



I hope it is not asking too much, I just want some more things done before the next release, but you can be sure this one will be included in it, ok? And thanks for the feedback, highly appreciated

Best regards,
Thiago
tindex
17
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 24th Oct 2006
Location:
Posted: 15th Jun 2007 19:03
OK, I will do that way. Thanks

Login to post a reply

Server time is: 2024-04-28 08:11:20
Your offset time is: 2024-04-28 08:11:20