On Feb 5, 2007, at 12:37 PM, Joel Uckelman wrote: > Thus spake Thomas Russ: >> >> Random thought: Given the improvement in graphics card capability, I >> wonder a bit about whether using >> only a single map image internally and doing the zooming using >> graphcis transformations might not be more responsive? >> > > That had occurred to me as well. The GPUs on modern graphics cards are > basically overgrown matrix multipliers, and all scaling is is a matrix > operation. The problem is, I don't know how to get at any of the 3D > card > stuff through Java. If you have any suggestions, I'd be happy to look > into them.
I would have expected the acceleration to come about via the implementation of the JVM and thus be relatively transparent to the programmer. What I could find with a little browsing of the Java 2D interface documentation supports this conclusion. (See for example <http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/2d/new_features.html> <http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/guide/2d/spec/j2d-bookTOC.html> ) I don't know if that would be directly useful here, but taking a look at VolatileImage may be worthwhile, since it provides the ability to use hardware acceleration during operations. I haven't actually looked at any of the Vassal drawing code, so I'm not sure to what extent these things have already been done...
