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Re: Ticks and VBL

To: REALbasic Games <realbasic-games at lists dot realsoftware dot com>
Subject: Re: Ticks and VBL
From: Nick Lockwood <nick at charcoaldesign dot co dot uk>
Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2005 18:27:08 +0100
Delivered-to: realbasic-games at lists dot realsoftware dot com
References: <BAY103-F39E30A2E6C3BFBD59DB2FAC1C90 at phx dot gbl>
I'm pretty sure OpenGL 1.1 is available on virtually all versions of Windows.

At the very least it's installed by default on Win 95, Win 98 and Win XP.

No more recent versions are available except as 3rd party graphics card drivers, though these are generally available for most cards (Radeon and GForce at the very least). Windows will drop down to software OpenGL rendering if the card doesn't support it, so it should work on all systems, even if not at a very high performance.

I would imagine that SSS doesn't rely on any 1.2 or higher features. As I understand it, it hides the implementation details from you anyway so it's probably not worth worrying about. Just stick to SSS specific functions where possible and let John worry about the underlying implementation. You wouldn't expect to know about what drawing libraries RB is calling behind the scenes, especially since it may change between versions. For all you know, John may choose to implement SSS on Windows using DirectX in future.

Incidentally, I would imagine you will need to wrap your AGL call in a #if target_carbon test because it's not supported on Windows (the A in AGL stands for Apple). I don't know if there is a Windows equivalent, or whether such a call is even necessary on Windows to prevent display tearing.

Nick

On 22 Jul 2005, at 13:05, Ken Gish wrote:

Nick,

I am using a SuperSpriteSurface (not a Canvas). I am still [a little] uneasy about relying on OpenGL (mainly because I don't know anything about it; that will change) but it looks like the support for OpenGL (particularly double-buffering) on the Mac is great.

If anyone out there is using SSS, make sure you use the following lines of code to turn on the VBL sync (it might not be on by default):

Dim short as MemoryBlock
short = new MemoryBlock(4)
short.Long(0)=1
call AGLSetInteger(aglGetCurrentContext(),AGL_SWAP_INTERVAL,short)

John Balestrieri was kind enough to provide me with those four lines (Thanks John! :-)

I believe John is working on a Windows version of SSS. I plan to investigate OpenGL on Windows sometime soon. Does anyone know where I might find information (besides www.opengl.org) about which versions of OpenGL were installed by default for different versions of Windows? The OpenGL web site says "OpenGL v1.1 ships as part of Win32." It might be useful to know some general information about potential problems with specific graphics cards.

Ken


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