Walls!

[Greven]

What about making the walls work correctly, without slowing the simulation down! This could be very cool!

[PurpleYouko]

We are working on it.

Eventually walls will be a layer in the env grid. They should also be customizable so you can make them look like bricks, bits of popcorn or a coral reef. You takes yer pick.

In the mean time it is a bit of a back burner issue since we won't be using the robots array to make walls at all in the long term.

[Greven]

Sounds good to me. But I like to make a wall purely out of alcohol? Is that possibly? and also a wall of ... no seriosly a wall of radiation, so when bots get near it, the bots DNA might suffer or maybe the mutations rate go temporarily up? or something like it!!!???  :bigginangel:  :bigginangel:

[PurpleYouko]

"All things will be possible with the fabled e-grid"

With user definable levels and graphics you should be able to literally paint a picture with e-grid components.

I am seriously considering attempting to use DirectX components to speed up graphics for this. Bloody hard to understand the stuff though  :(

[Greven]

That sounds good! But I have never poked around with DirectX, so I can not help you!  <_<

[Numsgil]

I'd recommend OpenGL over DirectX just because DirectX is object oriented, and openGL is procedural.  And guess what VB is ;)

[PurpleYouko]

Right but DirectX is quicker for creating background bitmaps then displaying them. I wasn't planning to use it for the bots.

[Botsareus]

I dont know about vb , what I do know is that you can use openGL in vb.

[PurpleYouko]

I haven't really looked into openGL. I will check it out before going too much further.

[Numsgil]

They all end up doing the same thing.  I'm just not sure how DirectX and VB work together since they use entirely idfferent paradigms.

[PurpleYouko]

DirectX sets up the graphics card as an object then sends commands directly to it just as if it was an integral VB object like
application.something-or-other
or
rob(t).mem(.Ties(k).nrg)

All you have to do in order to use DirectX in VB is to go to "Project->References" then scroll down the list to "DirectX 8 for Visual Basic Type Library"

The concept is very simple but it takes a lot of messing about to get anywhere. The beauty of it is that graphics functions don't drain processing power from the main processor speed. Thay are all done directly on the graphics card.

[Numsgil]

The one thing I've noticed between OpenGL and DirectX is that it generally takes less code to get something up and running in OpenGL than DirectX.

And there's those nice NeHe tutorials on OpenGL (most of which have a VB port ready.)

[PurpleYouko]

Ever seen any benchmark speed tests between the 2 systems?

[Numsgil]

As near as I can tell they're both about equivelant.

One runs faster on some systems, one runs faster on others.  Generally speaking they're about equivelant.

[PurpleYouko]

From what I have just been reading they appear pretty similar except for the coding.
From what I can tell from reading a few articles, OpenGL is more like C in its format while DX is more like VB.
As I am not a great fan of the style of C and greatly prefer to program in VB, I think DX is probably better for me but for you I expect the opposite is true as you are very familiar with C.

I am really pretty new to both but DX looks easier from my persective.