This is a big deal for anyone who is developing games that rely on text, such as games with ASCII graphics.įirstly, Allegro’s text rendering seems to struggle with rendering text that isn’t a factor of two, or below a font size of eight. The real seller for me is that SFML’s text rendering has a much superior output, but also support for wide literal characters. While neither have XInput Gamepad support directly, the SFML community have had no problems showing how easy it is to make an XInput wrapper for SFML. However, SFML does have shader support with little to no issues installing either the latest source code or direct download from their stable release. Like Allegro, SFML is a set of C++ libraries that can be used to develop games for PC, Mac and Linux with experimental Android and iOS ports. Also Xbox 360 controllers are recognised as DirectInput devices, which does have some limitations, specifically with the analogue trigger buttons. It wasn’t worth it, and if it was a struggle for me to get it to work, then it would be worse for me to help get the game running for other people. My attempts to get the unstable builds to work have been less than futile, and even when I finally got a functional build of the unstable release, I was met with a lack of certain libraries to run shaders (namely libpng1_6.dll). While shaders are a feature of Allegro 5’s unstable builds, there is the issue of stability and compatibility. Specifically shader support for effects, and gamepad support beyond DirectInput. The last stable build of Allegro was back in January, yet it lacks certain features that you’d find in other C++, C# and even Haxe frameworks. ![]() Allegro 5 has limitations, which makes some of my concepts for Gemstone Keeper less feasible.I could rewrite the code with Allegro 5 with my experience and confidence behind me, but… If I was going to update the current code, I needed a framework that could satisfy the needs of a new system. Now that I have graduated, and have gotten a full time job, I have a bit of flexibility and less pressure for me to make some improvements. The Gem Finder code needed updating, as it was written during a time where I was under pressure to meet a deadline and have something to show, for what was essentially the most important part of my University degree. ![]() However I decided that I would change the underlying framework from Allegro 5 to SFML 2, the thought of changing systems has been in consideration since IRDC 2015, which came about for numerous reasons: Since I started work on my thesis project, GenLevelTools, I have been working in Allegro 5, using my previous experience and the already functional graphics rendering, for both the GenLevelTools and Gem Finder, the simple prototype that is now Gemstone Keeper. ![]() If you have been following me on Twitter, you may have noticed that after game jams, I’ve returned to Gemstone Keeper.
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