On Wed, 8 Dec 2004 14:00:56 -0800, James Hunkins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I don't know if I should say anything (like that ever stops me) but I am somewhat confused by why not to use the PE for all the drawing. On QDT, Marcel's sprite draw implementation is extremely fast and handles all the color conversions to the different systems completely transparently. I actually went back and rewrote much of QDT to take advantage of this. I did keep much of my original icon formatting for memory conservation reasons but have an on-the-fly fast conversion to the new sprite formats, which combined with the fast sprite drawing, is still very much faster than what I had. Still some color palette tuning (only because of the options I want to give) but it looks really nice right now.
If the colour drivers had existed when we started out on QWord, then we might well have used this facility. However, without having tested it this end - I think Phoebus may have done more testing, I am not sure that using the PE for all the drawing would be fast enough on a Super Gold Card for fast games (ok, so QWord is not a fast action game).
If someone would be interested in converting the graphics to be drawn under PE, I would be interested :-)
Yes, as you have made clear in this discussion the early development for QWord was done before new colour drivers. As well as many users not wishing to have the PE.
As a game you need all the users that you can get, so it is quite acceptable to go for as large a slice of the QL market as you can get. Given that it is a small one, anyway.
In addition it is common for games to push the limits of the hardware on all platforms.
The direct benefits are, in addition to very fast drawing on the screen, is that out of the box, it seems to be working on most if not all the systems that meet its hardware requirements.
Note that I am not supporting non SMSQ/E systems with QDT. But, to be honest, for the price of the upgrade, if someone isn't willing to that far I suspect that they won't want to pay for QDT (or any other cool programs) either. There is another side note here is that I also require hi-color. Original plans were to support 4 color but it just didn't look good enough for the time investment. A game is a different thing however on that aspect I would suppose.
Not necessarily - some people do not like SMSQ/e because of the fact that they HAVE to use the pointer environment. Others would like to upgrade but cannot get hold of a Super Gold Card (whenever one does become available, they are soon snapped up).
I find it unfortunate that programmers need to spend so much time and effort trying to support users who choose not to upgrade when they could be shipping what they have and working on other cool stuff instead.
I agree - wonder what the Quanta survey says about the number of people still using black box QLs.....
However, it is also true that the QL game market is extremely limited - there is probably more of a market for QLT, so you can afford to miss out some of the users, whereas we need to open QWord up to as many users as possible, if we are ever to achieve 20 sales (more than that and I would be well pleased) !!
Well ... from the Demo statistics it looks like over 200 copies have been downloaded. So actual sales of 100 to 200 would be likely.
I am not particularly a 'word game' fan. Yet QWord is so good - in function, appearance, and sound - that I will buy it when it is available in completed form.
Meanwhile I am enjoying the Demo. I am regularly getting a score of between 300 to 400 at the first ( easy ) level. It does start to become addictive ... I am finding that I need to 'play' every time I use the computer :-)
Also, just to say that QWord sets the display to high colour for its use, and then resets it back to whatever display was present when it was launched. Which is all very convenient and painless for the user. In other words ( excuse the pun ) it is a very well behaved piece of software.
... and no doubt it will work marvellously with QDT :-)
Looking forward too to more high quality software like this.
-- Malcolm Cadman _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
