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DarkBASIC Professional Discussion / cross-hardware compilation

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adr
23
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Joined: 21st May 2003
Location: Job Centre
Posted: 9th Jun 2003 13:32
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I developed most of my game on my laptop. It's a P3-900 with some built in crappy GFX card. I needed to do some drawing, and mspaint just wouldn't cut it. So I fired up my desktop machine - a P4-2Ghz with an old Geforce 2 Pro.

Using the executable built on the laptop on the desktop, the graphics looked a little weird. The shading on my carefully crafted player object (a sphere) was flickery.

After recompiling, some of my mathematical code didn't work - it'd seem the p4 does floating point to greater accuracy. Oddly enough, this confused my code and needed a bit of extra work.

Surely this means there's going to be some problems depending on which machine you run my lil' game. Has anyone else noticed wierd cross-hardware compilation problems, or better yet, how to solve them?
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MrTAToad
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Joined: 26th Aug 2002
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Posted: 9th Jun 2003 14:57
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There's nothing much you can do, except test (and get people to test) on different machines. Many things will affect the result - Graphics cards, processor (differences between Intel and AMD), even sound cards.

For example, Nero doesn't work on one of my machines (crashes the whole machine), but it works fine on the other two...

Some you can get around by making sure everyone uses (for example) 1024x768 or 800x600 32-bit graphics mode, full screen window, others you can use higher precision floats, and yet others you cant do much about.

Good news everyone! I really am THAT good...
http://www.nickk.nildram.co.uk/ for great plug-ins - oh my, yes!
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adr
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Posted: 9th Jun 2003 15:14
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Incompatability isn't anything new to me, but what I've experienced looks like the compiler builds for the current machine. I would've thought that the finished product would adapt to the target machine - isn't that what a HAL's for?

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IanM
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Posted: 9th Jun 2003 15:54
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I don't think that's actually the case. I have an AMD K62 machine, a PIII and an Athlon, and all the machines build exactly the same executable from the same source files.
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Shadow Robert
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Joined: 22nd Sep 2002
Location: Hertfordshire, England
Posted: 10th Jun 2003 02:40
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Quote: "Incompatability isn't anything new to me, but what I've experienced looks like the compiler builds for the current machine. "


i do have a feeling your right... because i've notice more and more recently that my machine will run basically all DBP exe's apart from those which won't run on any other machine due to either media or bug problems (in code not exe) - however an exe i produce on my machine won't nessasarily run on Win9x OS machines.
However due to lack of OS's to actually test this better it is just a notice i've seen from my beta testers.

Now although the HAL will achieve 100% DirectX compatibility crossplatform, the exe itself doesn't need to actually conform to this and might be being built to the specification of the base system.
IE if you you build it on a WinXP machine it'll be a WinNT 5.1 Executable - but if you built it on a Win98 machine it'd be a Win9x 4.4 Executeable.
probably not much difference, but enough to actually make it incompatible on perhaps WinXP system w/o SP1 or WinME systems.

could be wrong but its just something i have noticed.

Within the Epic battle of the fates the Shadow and the Angel will meet. With it will harbinger the very fight of good vs evil!
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adr
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Posted: 10th Jun 2003 15:58
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The OSes were XP Home and XP Pro - so I wouldn't think that could be the problem...

When I get home tonight I'll post some screenshots if I remember ..

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Shadow Robert
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Posted: 10th Jun 2003 17:29
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it could be... especially if you don't have the Service Packs installed or even different Service Packs... 1.0 is incompatible with 1.1 which was only recently released.

Within the Epic battle of the fates the Shadow and the Angel will meet. With it will harbinger the very fight of good vs evil!
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