Sorry if I didn't answer, but I have been (and am) quite busy as I have to prepare a couple of university projects (one of which being a thesis), so my spare time is suffering! I hope to look into it very soon, though  

Wow, downloaded and going to test it tomorrow...    I am sorry for this hard work I am causing, I hope many will take advantage of these features!

Thanks for everything... maybe I noticed a performance increase when disabling filtering because I'm using a small texture stretched on a relatively large plane (it's the "wood" texture from the bounce example)...

After a few tests, there is one minor thing I could improve with the sidebar. As I told earlier, it covers a quarter of the screen, and this brings a "convergence" problem : perspective converges at the middle point of the frame buffer, which is not the center of the playing area, but a bit on its left. I don't know if I'm clear enough, it's about like if you were watching the scene with a patch partially covering your left eye (which is what is actually happening). So, when zooming in/out, the camera will zoom to a different point than the player is expecting, because the player will naturally believe the "gaming area" is his real FOV. I think that playing with matrix coefficients might help with it, am I wrong?

Bye
GP

Quote from: "EgonOlsen"Two things i've forgotten to mention:

1.) Don't use textures with a height other than a power of 2 when doing OpenGL (not for blitting either). OpenGL doesn't support this and jPCT has to do a conversion run on every texture. This is very slow, because it's just a naively implemented better-than-an-exception-method. In addition, the converted textures are not very pretty...

I had read about it... no problem, all the icons/stuff will be kept in a single texture of legal size.

Quote from: "EgonOlsen"
2.) I'll try to speed up texture upload performance a little bit for 0.89. The problem is, that i can't do much about it because most of the time is wasted inside OpenGL and the video card's driver, not in jPCT. I already tried some things and got a 50% increase (but we are talking about 2fps compared to 3fps after the optimization)....anyway, i'll add it to the next release.

That's great! In fact, most 3D games actually need to display 2D stuff one way or another, whether it's a cockpit, a sidebar, or a weapon list for first person shooters, so this is quite important in my opinion. As to performance, I haven't tried hardware rendering yet, mainly because I'm working on a PowerMac and LWJGL doesn't support it yet. However the machine can run it decently at 800x600 with 200x600 texture blitting (which had no visible effect on performance when added), even if I disabled texel filtering. The machine is quite high-end (667 MHz RISC) and there are only about 600 triangles in the world, but it's encouraging for the OpenGL software renderer (i.e. it's playable, nearly 15 fps unless zooming out a lot, 8-10 fps in that case). I'll try the hardware rendering later, on another Win laptop, but the development (at least my part of it) takes place here. We might also decide to support lower resolutions for the sake of software rendering...

It works great! It's already displaying the unit's name on it. Thanks, since miniatures are boxes, they are pretty confusing when seen from above; putting their name as a bitmap on them makes everything much cleaner.

Now my friends and I just have to actually make the game...   I'll let you know as the thing progresses.

GP

Thanks! I already downloaded it and I'll try it tomorrow. Hehe, I'll post a screenshot as soon as possible.

GP

Well, let's say I have a unit of 20 warriors. In my game they will just be 20 boxes with textures on their front and back faces on 20 bases (just like old tabletop games like D&D, but I'm getting off-topic). I want the player to be able, holding Shift or Caps Lock, for example, to display information over the units, under the form of 2D icons (I could do it with 3D objects hovering on the unit, but they wouldn't be well visible from every angle), for example an icon if the unit is fleeing.

So what I need is a method like : public Point get2DPosition(Camera c, 3DObject targetObject), (with -1 or something representing offscreen positions), for determining object center in the scene. Alternatively, any point in the world could be fine... I'm moving objects with only "rotate" and "translate" and not by "setOrigin", does that mean I can treat object- and world-coordinates as the same thing?

Ah, I was forgetting! A simple, non-vital thing this time   I'm implementing the sidebar blitting it from texture. It covers a quarter of the screen, wasting quite a lot of processing time... I remember that in OpenGL you can specify a subset of the frame buffer for rendering (i.e. a smaller rectangle), this way one can display a static image without performance loss. Is that possible to specify, at least in the OpenGL hardware renderer?

Thanks   I think these are quite handy features for many 3d games!

GP

Thanks for the reply  So I have to apply a texture effect whenever the user selects a new unit, I guess this is acceptable.

One more question : how do I calculate the 2D screen position of a 3D point/polygon in the worldspace? I think I have seen methods that do the opposite, i.e. that take a 2D point and return the picked polygon. If such a method does not exist, I think I'll have to do the math myself using tan's and sin's... would you have any suggestions?

Thanks again,
GP

Hello. I'm a student and a game progammer, I am currently planning to make a 3D online tabletop wargame simulation. I recently found jPCT and I must say it's really impressive, it's an API you can effectively use from day 1.

I have a few questions about 2D blitting. In the game, one has to display 2D info on a unit (status icons, unit name, morale/energy bars), as well as the classical sidebar a la Warcraft. Reading the documentation, I see that there are two ways to do that : with a Texture, and with an array (which is not advised for performance). Problem is, while the status icons can be just loaded from file and used, other elements can change. How do I display things like a status bar or text? The Texture class only has constructors for loading them from a file, not for modifying them on the fly (unless I write the new image to disk!). Is the slow method the only one? I remember that passing ints to OpenGL was painfully slow when I tried it... Isn't it a way to get, for example, an Image from the Texture and have an update(Image i) to change the texture after altering the Image?

I don't know if I was clear enough... this is my first real 3D project!
Thank you for your attention

GP