To Mark or anyone from Blitz Support
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/To Mark or anyone from Blitz Support
| ||
| Please, clarify something about the new "SystemProperty" commands. Not a tutorial, just a few words about what could the handles be used for? Thanks! Paolo. |
| ||
| AppHWND =SystemProperty("AppHWND ") A HWND is a pointer to a memory locations used by windows to represent a drawing surface. Various windows API calls (and other API calls) require a HWND to operate. So you could tell windows or other apps to use your screen to draw stuff to. I *think* you can also use it to tell windows to attach windows / gadgets to, but my memory fails me on that one. What would be really neat is if you could tell Blitz to draw to a specified HWND, as the most common example of this is screensavers. When windows runs a screensaver in preview mode, it passes the HWND as a param, which you are supposed to draw to. Actually maybe the other properties (below) would give access to setting the hwnd? AppHINSTANCE=SystemProperty("AppHINSTANCE") A HINSTANCE is a kind of unique ID for your app as it is known by Windows. Again, various windows API calls make use of this. The only ones I recall are for killing / monitoring an application. This could be useful if for example you have one app controlling a Blitz3D app, and you wan't to monitor when it's finished. Direct3D7=SystemProperty("Direct3D7") Direct3DDevice7=SystemProperty("Direct3DDevice7") DirectDraw7=SystemProperty("DirectDraw7") DirectInput7=SystemProperty("DirectInput7") I don't know much about these, but there's now at least one example *here*. I believe that they are all pointers to structures used by the DirectX 7 API. In that post there's also a link to the DirectX 7 SDK which should define all the APIs. What this means is that instead of having to wait for mark to write code to support feature XYZ of DirectX 7, you can hit the API yourself. Hope that helps! I may have got some terminology wrong, but that, I believe, is the gist of it! |
| ||
| Many thanks Mark! So, this DX7 thing, seems to have a good future :) cheers! Paolo. |
   |