As long I’m working very much with images at the moment and the internal tools of AROS seems to have some problems with some special BMPs I wrote a little own Image Viewer for me (a little bit with IrfanView in mind)
At the moment I only opens BMP, ICO, JPG, PNM, PNG maybe later will add some more, I remember I had a very nice image library which compiles out of the box on AROS, could be used then for TIFF/TGA and so on as well (maybe even IFF?)
Until now it is no AROS specific things inside, but maybe would be a nice thing to make an example Datatype loader in pascal language. But atm for my needs this is more than enough to fast browse through my images saved in one debugging session
APict 1.0 for i386-aros
Source again available at GitHub
Finally I (at least once) got it. Painted on a TBitmap.Canvas then saved it to file, but there is a big problem with it. It only works on newer AROS, so ABIv0-ot. At my old AROS development installation it always crash. Seems the cybergraphics.library is very buggy ReadPixelArray and WritePixelArray crash. So If I continue this way it will only run on newer AROS, on old it will just crash.
The versionsnumbers differ a lot (41.2 <> 51.2) so, maybe I could make a block for this functions if the version number is lower then 51.
Magorium send me a link to a pacman clone for freepascal which does not work on AROS currently. I tried to find out whats wrong with it. First it was only the offscreen painting problem which I tried to overcome. But then I noticed how bad this program is, when talking about programming style. The whole drawing is done outside the paint events, which leads to a very bad performance on widgets which does not support drawing outside Paint events (like the MUI interface) because for every draw call the whole widget is called to repaint. The whole process is just paint driven so if you computer is slower it become easier to solve because all items move slower.
I changed it to a paint event driven painting and it work, faster but still very slow.
Of course this is still not a good method, a better approach would be to collect the static pieces into an Bitmap and then draw it at once to the screen in Paint event, and then only paint the Ghosts and the Pac Man to the screen.
An eating of Points/pills and so on would lead to change of the TBitmap. But there only one piece is redrawn. Maybe then it would be come much faster.
But there again one would need an offscreen drawing method, which is possible already, but no chance to plot it to screen. I’m still working on the concept for it but seems I still didn’t find a way. Still fighting with keys and mouse events but at least the pacman clone work now.
Still no interrest on freepascal on AROS, seems my programs didn’t help.
Still fighting with LCL drawing and Event calling, especially the Pen setting and loops in Event makes me headache. There are still some problems inside but I cannot figure out what.
For tests I wrote again a little Testgame, this time a Minesweeper clone.
The Source is again available at GitHub.
FPC Mines on AROS
Same as for the last game, I wrote it in Lazarus Linux and tested in AROS, both looks rather the same. From time to time I must recheck at windows also.
Download for AROS
I had to update the Zune LCL to newest SVN-revision because some footprint changed with the newer freepascal version, but then every Zune-LCL program crashed on Exit.
Seems a not initialized variable was the origin of the crash, took me three days to find it.
I wrote a little game as testproject for the lcl implementation (Lazarus Linux). The Source can be compiled without any changes or IFDEFs at Linux, Windows and AROS and all are nicely working.
The source code is uploaded to the fpc-tests repository at GitHub.
Binaries for the different platforms:
Its not really important to get the Buttons with images on to work, but its a good opportunity to test my way of drawing to standard MUI Classes. The drawing was not a real problem but to calculate the position and sizes is really trouble and much work. I’m still not sure if it is working right for every case (size of Glyph, Length of Text, Height of Text, Position of Glyph). But as first implementation it is ok so.
The other thing , a little bit more important, I implemented Scrollbars, rather easy, just the property names are a little bit strange and the LCL Event was not so obvious.
BitBtn and Scrollbars AROS (top) and Linux (bottom)
Dealing with bitmaps and images, bring the TImage to work. The principle I got from my fpGUI implementation again, using cybergraphics.library (for Amiga, MorphOS and so on maybe need an other solution? maybe also P96 or some native, but for AROS its ok). As start the WritePixelArrayAlpha() the problem it does not scale the image, but it supports Alpha channel so transparent parts are possible. But for TImage.Stretch we also need a StretchDraw, there is a ScalePixelArray() to scale images on drawing, it also supports ARGB, but sadly it does not work in my AROS sandbox. In the ABIv0-oT it does work but sadly the background is black and not transparent. I found that ScalePixelArray() draws ARGB data as 0RGB so ignore the Alpha channel. So not really useful. So I implemented an own scaling routine, (of course only nearest neighbour, fastest way 😉 ).
LCL-MUI TImage with stretching
Introduced the Font, loading, size and so on. The system is exactly the same as for Pen and brush, so it was not so difficult and the basic AROS functions I learned already for the fpGUI implementation.
The second thing I started, as written before, is to improve the clipping. So the labels looks more like the program at Linux. The italic, Bold and underline option I can set for AROS fonts but the most fonts just ignore it, some Fonts have an italic mode (e.g. vera sans) but nothing more. Maybe I do something wrong?
As last I implemented the FillRect function, which was trivial again, like the Rectangle function.
Different Fonts, Sizes in LCL-MUI
The Text is not finished, needs some more work, with the clipping. The theory is not so difficult but when how the clipping is removed is my problem at the moment. The font is still wrong but also easy just needs some diligent work… works exactly like Pens and Brushes which I implemented today. I started with Pens and Brush because it is much easier, next step will be font, I guess and then care about the clipping again. To test the Pen and Brush I used a PaintBox with different colors, with transparent brush. It’s not perfect but working.
PaintBox (Left) and LabelTest (Right)
Working on the Drawing routines for LCL MUI/Zune, there is a Page describe a little bit more about how to implement a new Widgetset also how to make a TLabel. It is working more or less, the Label is painted alos repainted on resize window and so on. But it is on the wrong place. In the example the „clicked“ in the lower left window show be somwhat centered above the button. But the coordinates for the Textout always point to 0,0. I guessed it have something to do with the region defined. I tried to implement it but still it looks like this. Needs some more thinking.
Progressbar, Label, Timer in LCL MUI
Because not so much time and mood for the label things I switched to some easier tasks and implemented the TTimer and ProgressBar, both very easy things.
For the Wiki I tried out every single item in the list and wrote down which is working and which is crashing or error message. Then slowly I can remove all this crashes. the Form I used for this experiments is shown on the right side. Of course I removed all the crashing and Widgets with error messages from the view before. Still much to do. 🙂
