Nowadays, any decent GUI API should support BMP, PNG, JPEG, and a host of other image formats. There really ought to be no need for BMP conversion; just pull the image file for the game cover (locally or from a server), see what type of image it is, then create the proper GUI object/widget to display it.
New GUI idea (with box art)
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08-20-2012, 12:59 PM
K. That is true. I once had to write a game for school using this rather limited IDE/API combo called Greenfoot (from the developers of BlueJ), and it supported both, although BMP's tend to be faster because of the simpler format. I guess a simple GUI wouldn't be quite as demanding as a game though .
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Fwiw, I make small games all the time, and I work with SDL a lot. On modern computers, the difference between loading a PNG, JPG or BMP is pretty negligible. In fact, it's not even an issue on any of the embedded systems I've ported to. It would only (theoretically) make a noticeable difference during the initial loading. Once the API has the image data in memory, it's pretty much good to go. Trust me, loading images (locally anyway) is fairly quick business for the most part.
08-20-2012, 01:33 PM
Not on a horribly optimized API it isn't... It would continuously get memory errors and crap (for example, after erasing the screen using the API's erase function the pictures would still be in memory, so everything would be continuously loaded all of the time). Although of course what your saying is completely logical for a logically written API. I used PNGs most of the time though so I could have more transparency effects (and since all of my images were made using paint.net it was easy to do).
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(08-20-2012, 01:11 PM)Shonumi Wrote: Fwiw, I make small games all the time, and I work with SDL a lot. On modern computers, the difference between loading a PNG, JPG or BMP is pretty negligible. In fact, it's not even an issue on any of the embedded systems I've ported to. It would only (theoretically) make a noticeable difference during the initial loading. Once the API has the image data in memory, it's pretty much good to go. Trust me, loading images (locally anyway) is fairly quick business for the most part. It would actually be faster on most current embedded systems... Flash reading speed sucks so much you'd get better loading times with compressed files. 08-20-2012, 02:04 PM
(08-20-2012, 01:53 PM)delroth Wrote: It would actually be faster on most current embedded systems... Flash reading speed sucks so much you'd get better loading times with compressed files. "It" being PNG/JPG loading vs BMP loading or just image loading on embedded systems vs non-embedded systems? Sorry, it's a bit late over here for me :p Been up all day playing The Last Story you see. 08-20-2012, 02:04 PM
ANYWAY, back on topic: who wants to work on this project? It currently has nothing in it and there is still a lot to discuss between different developers on what libraries to use and such. wxWidgets, like Dolphin currently uses? Should we use QT like the branch ExtremeDude2 posted about? What should the thing even be called?
This will be much easier if we can get the whole thing set up and running.
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(08-20-2012, 02:04 PM)Shonumi Wrote:(08-20-2012, 01:53 PM)delroth Wrote: It would actually be faster on most current embedded systems... Flash reading speed sucks so much you'd get better loading times with compressed files. PNG/JPG loading vs BMP loading. 08-20-2012, 02:30 PM
Ah, okay, that's what I thought. I'm a bit addled with sleep atm I'm sure there's a speed difference, but whether it's noticeable is another thing (something I feel like testing soon with SDL_image).
As for what API you should use Axxer, remember that they're just tools. Use the one that you feel is right for the job. Look at the coding style, the features, and etc of wxWidgets and Qt, then decide based on which one better meets your needs. Personally, I've only used FLTK extensively, bits of Qt here and there, but it might be easier to just use what Dolphin itself uses. 08-20-2012, 02:52 PM
I only post here about what libraries to use because Garteal asked if anyone else wanted to work on the project, so I figured that I would let whoever else was gonna work on the project decide since I'm not all that familiar with anything yet anyway.
I'll just use wxWidgets because Dolphin uses that and I know it works well enough.
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