Pocket Burning Sand (Open Source)

[neilnapier]

Colin, in BS2 there is the ability to use a forelyer but you are correct that there is no forelayer in BS1 which this is based on.

BS2 has about 100 different functions compared to the 4 in BS1 so that is why I based it on BS1.

Also there is a program called PocketSand that is a sandbox too.

[colin9876]

Ive just taken a look at screenshots of the PocketSand u mentioned. It looks like a version of BurningSand!

So why are we doing this if its already been done?

[neilnapier]

With that you are unable to mod for it. It is limited in what you can do it and the interactions are often unstable. Also there are a group of about 200 casual users of BS that would obviously prfer the GUI of BS to all others.

This is a worthy program to make most definetely.

[colin9876]

Tried pocketsand - the graphics are good - again it uses the SML.dll to do the fast movements. I see what u mean about it being limited tho.
I mixed Salt & water and it didnt disolve the salt.
It just needs a few more things added to it - but it looks like its not been updated for a while.

Anyway as to PocketBS, Im stuck until we work out the function calls of SML.dll - its how all these sand programs are done

[neilnapier]

You mean SDL not SML; anyway I'm not sure either about that. I suppose I could PM Sieben (creator of BS) and ask him if he knows anything of the sort.

[neilnapier]

AH HA!!! I have found this site that has lots of sdl's for PPC!!!!!

Does that work???

EDIT: AH!!! Just checked it again... I searched for ppc but this doesn't have anything to do with pocket pcs!!!! BACK TO THE DRAWIG BOARD!!!

[agraham]

Sorry but I am about to rain on your parade. I am afraid you guys are attributing magic to SDL that does not exist.

Originally Posted by colin9876

U know the BurningSand code is not very long, the dll library does most of it. Look at the micro version of BurningSand on the website its only 10lines long!!

It's MUCH more than ten lines of appallingly tortured C code when unravelled and all that it is using the SDL library for is to get and set pixels on an SDL surface i.e. a bitmap. Any magic that exists in Burning Sand is in the logic of the physics engine and has nothing to do with SDL which is merely used as a conduit to the display.

With B4PPC you are facing a performance problem. The trade off-for the simplicity of B4PPC is the lack of performance and we are talking literally orders of magnitude here. To show you what you are up against I took your tt.sbp and moved the timer and destroy code into a library. Actually I cheated a bit by missing out the "rnd" and just did "py(i)=py(i)+1". This can smoothly handle about 500 points on my PPC but that gives no time left over for the physics calculations! This library uses a .NET standard bitmap and its GetPixel and SetPixel methods which are not very efficient. It could be improved by a factor of at least 10 by going in at a lower level. If you run this on a desktop keep the cursor away from the right side and bottom or you may get a crash - I didn't bother too much with limit checking.

So I am afraid that the bottom line is that to get a viable BS to run under B4PPC you would have to write it in a library - which rather defeats the point of the excercise of writing it in B4PPC!

[neilnapier]

Could you please add that to my proram please (wth blnDRAG and such)

thanks,

[agraham]

Originally Posted by neilnapier

Could you please add that to my proram please (wth blnDRAG and such)

Sorry but this library does nothing that is appropriate to your program. It accepts two arrays of pixels and drops them all down one pixel and draws them on the form background image whenever it is called. Your program (neatly done layout by the way) has no storage for pixel data.

In order to go further you will need a timer loop in which to redraw the data. Some physics logic to determine how each pixel moves. Storage for each pixels' state and any fixed elements and graphics code that understands how to render the stored data. Physics, storage and graphics must be designed together to execute as efficiently as possible on the given platform. As I pointed out you won't manage anything significant in B4PPC code. Just moving out the graphics won't help as the program will still bog down on the physics code with only a few points being capable of being supported in real time.

[neilnapier]

Do you have any idea on what I should do then??? If I learn a new ppc language then I will have to start from scratch, which I really do not want to do... isn't there anyway you could work your system into mine???