Sneak peek on Elysion Frameworks

Posted by Johannes Stein on Apr 7, 2009 in Development, Libraries, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows | 2 comments

What are the Elysion Frameworks? It’s a cross-platform wrapper based on SDL (and OpenGL) I’ve been working on since Summer 2005. When I began I felt there was a need for a 2D library where pictures could be sorted via Z coordinates, nice particle effects,  lightmaps and what not. I even created a nice little empty sourceforge site for it a few years ago where you can download a really old version.

What changed now? First of all, besides the name change, Elysion Frameworks is splitted in three branches:

• ElysionLegacy: Based on pure SDL with no OpenGL hardware acceleration the purpose of ElysionLegacy is to make a prototype or a small not very feature-rich application/game with the possibility of converting it later to ElysionKronos  without changing a single line of code (Progress: Pascal port: ~ 80%; C++ port: ~ 33%)
• ElysionKronos: Much more sophisticated than ElysionLegacy and uses OpenGL featuring lightmaps, Z sorting, camera management, particle effects and all the good stuff. (Progress: ~ 20%)
• ElysionMobile: Specially designed version for mobile devices such as GP2X. (Progress: ~ 2%)

Click on the flash movie to play it. As you can see, the frame rate dropped from Five-hundred-something to about 270 when I recorded the screencast. I never had this much frames under a Linux system, so I the performance issues are gone now.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

And here is the code for the application shown in the flash video above (Object Pascal) to demonstrate how easy using Elysion Framworks is:

program image; // The name of this program

uses
 // You need ElysionLegacy, well, that's kinda obvious, right?
 ElysionLegacy,
 // You need SysUtils for the IntToStr function
 SysUtils;

const
 WIDTH = 640;
 HEIGHT = 480;
 BPP = 32;
 FULLSCREEN = false;

var
 Surface: TelSurface; // You have to declare a surface
 Sprite: TelSprite; // The sprite we want to display

 XPos: Integer = -1;
 YPos: Integer = -1;

begin
 Surface := TelSurface.Create; // This surface must be created
 Sprite := TelSprite.Create; // Logically, we also need to create a sprite object
 // if we want to display an image on the screen

 // Initializing the windows with a width of 640 pixels,
 // a height of 480 pixels and 16 bits per pixel.
 // "False" is set not to turn into fullscreen mode.
 Surface.Initialize(WIDTH, HEIGHT, BPP, FULLSCREEN);

 // Assign our image to the surface
 Sprite.Assign(Surface);

 // Load the image
 Sprite.LoadFromFile('../../media/mech.bmp');

 // Set transparency for the image
 // Using the option by selecting one pixel from the image
 // Another option is to define the color manuelly
 Sprite.SetTransparency(makeP2D(0, 0));

 Sprite.SetPosition(makeP2D((WIDTH - Sprite.GetWidth) div 2, (HEIGHT - Sprite.GetHeight) div 2));

 // Setting the game loop
 while Surface.Run do
 begin
 Surface.BeginScene;

 // Press ESC to close the application
 if Surface.KeyDown[K_ESCAPE] then Surface.Quit;

 if Sprite.GetPosition.X >= (WIDTH - Sprite.GetWidth) then XPos := -1;
 if Sprite.GetPosition.X <= 0 then XPos := 1;

 if Sprite.GetPosition.Y >= (HEIGHT - Sprite.GetHeight) then YPos := -1;
 if Sprite.GetPosition.Y <= 0 then YPos := 1;

 // Moving around the image
 // As you can see, it's really simple
 Sprite.Move(makeP2D(XPos, YPos));

 // Draw the image
 Sprite.Draw;

 // Set the caption and display frames per second
 Surface.SetCaption('Elysion Framework Application | FPS: '+IntToStr(Surface.GetFPS));

 Surface.EndScene;
 end;

 // Free the sprite (allright, that sounds like a bad punch line)
 Sprite.Free;
 Surface.Finalize; // Finally, finalize the surface
end.