Vector

I'm not sure if this has been discussed or even if it's possible - I've been recreating a thrust clone and it's turning out great. I just was hoping, for authenticity, if it was possible to add some sort of vector extension so I can make my ship a vector object. It'd be great if I could do slight zooms on it without distorting the sprite.

I'm thinking there would be many other situations that could call for a basic vector extension, even a draw line. I'm not sure if you could even make a vector sprite object in which nodes can be placed and maybe even manipulated at run-time.

I can make this game without such extension, it's greatly more an idea for something that many users can enjoy.

The runtime uses linear filtering and mipmapping so it can scale high-resolution bitmap textures pretty well - there shouldn't be any roughness to slightly zooming a sprite. The problem is DirectX 9, as far as I am aware, has no support for vector graphics. There is no such thing as a bezier curve in DirectX - you have vertices and textures, and that's pretty much it. I can't think of a way of rendering vector graphics that is anywhere as near as efficient as rendering textures. Either you use tonnes of vertices and bottleneck the CPU/GPU bridge, or you render on the CPU and send the result to the GPU, which negates the benefits of hardware acceleration. Do you really want vector rendering that badly? I think textures suffice for most purposes these days...

No, It's perfectly fine with raster images. It was just more of an idea that I thought you may have overlooked.

I think this is part of the reason Flash games are so demanding on system resources. I love vector graphics, but I don't need them, because I can just make a large resolution image and shrink it down dynamically for the sake of later zooming into it.

cant you force the gfx car to do calculations? im not sure tho, havnt ever seen it done or nor do i know if its possible.

i think there should at least be a polygonobject, graphics cards can easily process polygons (imagine how useless they would be if they couldnt lawl), the object would render polygons based on shape i.d.'ed points,

like lets say you could colour shape,set shape outline colour and thickness, create point and reposition point, for point based actions youd get the choice of shape id then another choice for point #, (so to make a square youd make shape id's of all for points "n" then youd create a point for each point in a square with number 1-4, relatively simple to use.) and then youd have point x and point y controls.

for shape based actions you write in a shape ID then you get parameters like colour, outline, opacity.

a polygon object would be fine, bezier curves arent that important all the time.

we need something like this cause we have a lack of anyway to draw polygons, and instead of trying to package it with a vector plugin which may never come, package a polygon object alone.

and could you guys plz add a fill bucket tool to the canvas object, just have params like fill x pos, fill y pos and fill colour/opacity

Couldn't you use Cairo to render vector graphics?

cairo is slow as dirt. Its implimentation in tests with Mono were that it performed slower than GDI+, which I have a little bit of experience with -- I can tell you that it's way too slow to be using for any serious games processing, especially with large amounts of vector or very large bitmap surfaces.