Actually, Allegro's official homepage is http://alleg.sourceforge.net/
Allegro started off on DOS, but there are now fully fledged ports to Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, Irix, Solaris, Darwin), Windows, QNX, BeOS and MacOS X.
One of the differences between Allegro and SDL is that Allegro is a higher level library than SDL, meaning that it takes less code to accomplish certain tasks at the expense of some (but not much) control. Also, there's more to Allegro than SDL (such as data-file managment and a GUI, although the Allegro GUI looks awful, but you can substitute your own GUI). In fact, there's even been talk of porting Allegro over to SDL so that it runs on top of SDL.
Allegro is truly excellent for 2D games. It's built in 3D is somewhat lacking, but there's a tweaked version of OpenGL called AllegroGL available that lets you use some OpenGL functionality within Allegro.
An example of a game written with Allegro is this re-make of "Head over Heels". It's an Isometric 3D game featuring shadow casting, real-time lighting and transparency. Sound, graphics and coding are done by professionals in the gaming industry.
Allegro is a Sourceforge project and the development is very active. Some of the core developpers have jobs in the industry and work on Allegro in their spare time. In fact, an Allegro community has sprung up and can be found on the following website: http://www.allegro.cc. As well as many lively discussions, there's also a vast collection of projects written using Allegro and other members of the community get to rate the projects.
Sometimes to avoid confusion, software has been written to display "Press a Key" instead of "Press any key". This is so that if the user can't find the 'any' key, they press the 'a' key instead.
Now why doesn't software detect to see if the 'a' key was pressed, and if it is always pressed, it should establish that the user has a low IQ. Now, what would a program do knowing this information...?
You think that's bad? Just try figuring out the names of the countries in Polish.
When I was in Poland, I glanced through the window of a travel-agent, and noticed the countries had really weird names. Italy is called "Wlochy", Hungary is called "Wergy", and I have yet to figure out which country "Chorwacja" is. I'm curious as to the etimology of these names. Why are they so radically different from their names in other languages?
Sounds like somebody's been eating too much borscht.
PS. Hungarians are also supposed to have weird country names.
For a real challenge...
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Making Change
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· Score: 1
The only denominations of currency should be prime numbers greater than 50, but there will be many things charged in all numbers from 1-50.
That will give people's brains a workout so they don't decay from lack of use. Or at least it will make handing out change fun.
Re:Intel C++ Compiler 7.1 Rules only on Intel CPUs
on
GCC 3.3 Released
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· Score: 1
I heard a rumour somewhere that if ICC detects an AMD CPU, it either compiles the code to slower code (if it's compiling on an AMD CPU), or it builds EXE's that detect if it's running on an Intel or AMD and if running on an AMD, the EXE runs a bit slower. This was not true for early versions of ICC but at a certain version, they added this detection.
Anyone know anything more about this?
Just a thought, but enabling wirefarme graphics may not be enough to see through walls.
3D engines are designed to cull as many invisible polys as possible (invisible = hidden or obscured by another object). So if a character is hiding behind a wall, the engine will realise that the polys that make up the wall obscure the entire character. It doesn't have to check that each poly in the character is obscured, just that the bounding sphere/box of the character is obscured. Or if the character is close to a corner, that part of the bounding volume is exposed, then another polygon-culling technique may be applied.
If the programmer of the 3D engine is lazy and is only relying on z-buffer rendering to obscure hidden objects, then all the polys are being sent to the renderer, so enabling wireframe will let you see the hidden ones.
Try Allegro. It is a 'Giftware' cross platform gaming library. It is mostly for 2D graphics but it has a few 3D functions and there are many 3D add-on packages. The library has been around for a while, is in active development an even has a lively community.
To quote the blurb from the site:
Allegro is a game programming library for C/C++ developers distributed freely, supporting the following platforms: DOS, Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, Irix, Solaris), Windows, QNX, and BeOS (MacOS port is in alpha stage). It provides many functions for graphics, sounds, player input (keyboard, mouse and joystick) and timers. It also provides fixed and floating point mathematical functions, 3d functions, file management functions, compressed datafile and a GUI.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Allegro's official homepage is http://alleg.sourceforge.net/ Allegro started off on DOS, but there are now fully fledged ports to Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, Irix, Solaris, Darwin), Windows, QNX, BeOS and MacOS X. One of the differences between Allegro and SDL is that Allegro is a higher level library than SDL, meaning that it takes less code to accomplish certain tasks at the expense of some (but not much) control. Also, there's more to Allegro than SDL (such as data-file managment and a GUI, although the Allegro GUI looks awful, but you can substitute your own GUI). In fact, there's even been talk of porting Allegro over to SDL so that it runs on top of SDL. Allegro is truly excellent for 2D games. It's built in 3D is somewhat lacking, but there's a tweaked version of OpenGL called AllegroGL available that lets you use some OpenGL functionality within Allegro. An example of a game written with Allegro is this re-make of "Head over Heels". It's an Isometric 3D game featuring shadow casting, real-time lighting and transparency. Sound, graphics and coding are done by professionals in the gaming industry. Allegro is a Sourceforge project and the development is very active. Some of the core developpers have jobs in the industry and work on Allegro in their spare time. In fact, an Allegro community has sprung up and can be found on the following website: http://www.allegro.cc. As well as many lively discussions, there's also a vast collection of projects written using Allegro and other members of the community get to rate the projects.
Arctic ice shelf splits
Sometimes to avoid confusion, software has been written to display "Press a Key" instead of "Press any key". This is so that if the user can't find the 'any' key, they press the 'a' key instead. Now why doesn't software detect to see if the 'a' key was pressed, and if it is always pressed, it should establish that the user has a low IQ. Now, what would a program do knowing this information...?
You think that's bad? Just try figuring out the names of the countries in Polish.
When I was in Poland, I glanced through the window of a travel-agent, and noticed the countries had really weird names. Italy is called "Wlochy", Hungary is called "Wergy", and I have yet to figure out which country "Chorwacja" is. I'm curious as to the etimology of these names. Why are they so radically different from their names in other languages?
Sounds like somebody's been eating too much borscht.
PS. Hungarians are also supposed to have weird country names.
The only denominations of currency should be prime numbers greater than 50, but there will be many things charged in all numbers from 1-50. That will give people's brains a workout so they don't decay from lack of use. Or at least it will make handing out change fun.
I heard a rumour somewhere that if ICC detects an AMD CPU, it either compiles the code to slower code (if it's compiling on an AMD CPU), or it builds EXE's that detect if it's running on an Intel or AMD and if running on an AMD, the EXE runs a bit slower. This was not true for early versions of ICC but at a certain version, they added this detection. Anyone know anything more about this?
58 moons? There must be one hell of a lot of werewolves on Jupiter for sure!
Just a thought, but enabling wirefarme graphics may not be enough to see through walls.
3D engines are designed to cull as many invisible polys as possible (invisible = hidden or obscured by another object). So if a character is hiding behind a wall, the engine will realise that the polys that make up the wall obscure the entire character. It doesn't have to check that each poly in the character is obscured, just that the bounding sphere/box of the character is obscured. Or if the character is close to a corner, that part of the bounding volume is exposed, then another polygon-culling technique may be applied.
If the programmer of the 3D engine is lazy and is only relying on z-buffer rendering to obscure hidden objects, then all the polys are being sent to the renderer, so enabling wireframe will let you see the hidden ones.