Can't find old "Tom Speed" DLLs?
Community Forums/General Help/Can't find old "Tom Speed" DLLs?
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| Does anyone still have the old TomSpeed DLLs downloaded in a zip file with their DECLs files? Thank you! Sincerely, ~GF |
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| I have no idea whether this is what you're looking for, but try this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wmjb27sz4vd4mo5/DX7libs.rar?dl=0 Don't ask me what any of it does. (while we're going through the archives, some other free libs that might have linkrotted over the years: BCF3 / BlitzUI / Escape3D / Escape UI / NGUI / VordermanODE / the OpenDNA demos / RottNet / VirtualGL) |
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| By curiosity, why do you need this ? (i was looking for this dll a few months ago but i don't remember why...) I think that similar functions are also in the dll with the devil shadow system... |
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| Because I'm trying to perfectly pixelate my 2D texture applied to an invisible quad so I can bring a 2D character into the 3D world. Problem is, when the camera gets too close to the character, the sprite blurs... I've already tried ClearTextureFilters() And TextureFilter() and THAT didn't work. I tried FastExt. THAT didn't work... Thanks, Remi! |
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| I'm trying to perfectly pixelate my 2D texture applied to an invisible quad Ok, this is what i was searching too, see : http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=103591 #7 |
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| These files are all offline :'( http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=103591 |
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| i have added a new link to download the files. |
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| OMG! IT WORKS! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! =D |
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| @Remi, these files are offline again :( I need the tomspeed DLLs. |
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| So you have downloaded them and then deleted them ? ... I will add a new link on the other post. |
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| I will download them too, just in case.. ;-) BTW: www.mediafire.com keeps files up much longer. Dunno how long, but files I posted this time last year are still downloadable. |
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| Lovely. Can someone please post them up here? I need them VERY badly. :/ Thanks! |
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| Anyone? :( |
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| The functions you want are provided by the archive linked in post #2. There are like a dozen different versions of the library jumbled into that so you might need to test which one works best, but they're definitely there (at least, the ones named in the thread you linked are there). DX7test/dx7test.dll provides SetTextureStageState(). Be warned that this probably isn't going to work reliably. DX7 has a lot of features that simply never worked across all installations (e.g. the famous antialiasing), which is one reason Blitz3D didn't expose all of them. Some became more reliable in later years, hence FastExt becoming viable - but we got to the point where nobody cared about DX7 before we got to the point where hardware could reliably implement the features, and thus it remains "permanently unfinished". If you really want reliable use of features that don't exist in stock Blitz3D, you should really consider using something else powered by a newer API. That technology is ancient/dead/broken/unfixable. (NB it's not so much the age, as the fact nobody cares about it. OpenGL 1 is older but still works better) |
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| Said Yasha Dx7 : That technology is ancient/dead/broken/unfixable Sorry G.F., .. but that horse is unfortunately dead.  |
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| dead, perhaps.. But I got what I want. |
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| It has been dead for years if we listen to some people on these forums but Blitz3d programs still run well on a recent tablet with Windows 8.1... (if you have a mouse connected) (even the disable bilinear filtering trick) |
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| But I got what I want. And really, that's the most important thing. |
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| Imho people who went from Blitz3d to Max mostly say it's a far superior platform and that's why they split, which may be true, but what they tend to forget that Blitz3d is a very appealing platform for rapid development and relatively easy to grasp if you are a beginner. Only drawbacks to most of us are the DX7 restrictions and that it takes a lot of work around/fiddling to get something neat out of it that suites our increased needs, but same has to be said for Max as it doesn't come with 3d out of the box, which does not appeal to beginners(hence the name BASIC: Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) :-). BlitzMax feels a bit more low-level to me, while Unity is either run or standstill; all done for you or fully low-level if you want more control. Blitz3d is bit more in between for me. Once caught by the Blitz3d virus, it's kinda hard to let go, as it is just such friendly language and has a special feel about it. Sure it could use a facelift and enhancements, so that's hopefully something Ploppy can accomplish(he did get pretty far already). |
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| It's been at least a couple of years already but I'll probably consider myself a beginner for a long time to come. Maybe true of most middle-ware, Blitz3D offers so many outstanding samples/examples/demos/documentation of what it can do, plus the info/code on this board. I've collected everything I've come across (being so late to the product) and I still haven't gone through it all yet... http://198.65.10.229/DID/Temp/B3D_Stuff_1.png http://198.65.10.229/DID/Temp/B3D_Stuff_2.png I'm the typical male who refuses to ask for directions, always trying to find my own answers. There's so much B3D info out there/here that it's usually easy to find what I need, or at least get a good idea where to start. |
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| Only drawbacks to most of us are the DX7 restrictions and that it takes a lot of work around/fiddling to get something neat out of it that suites our increased needs Very vague statement... Really, which noticeable graphic effects can you have in Unity3d that you can't have with Blitz3d ? - bump mapping - per pixel lighting (but you can have vertex lighting on subdivided surfaces or texel lighting) - per pixel shadows (but you can have vertex shadows or texels shadows or stencil shadows (DSS) or shadow mapping (FastExt, SSS)) - you can have reflections of some surfaces (with spheremapping, with cubemapping) - you can have glow of some surfaces (with a small render of the glowing surfaces in fullbright and the normal surfaces in black (no lighting), and blur the resulting image, and put the texture on a rectangle mesh of the size of the screen and blend it with the scene with normal lighting) - you can have depth of field - you can have hdr (with fastext, see the demos by Yue) What else do you need ? The others effects will probably not be noticed by the players anyway... The others real advantages of Unity3d are the possibility to export to several os, the possibility to use touch controls, and probably a better compatibility with future computers and future os... |
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| As an example of blitz3ds limitations (not a problem 15 years ago....but today it is) is the ability to load resources and perform long network operations in a separate thread....single threaded systems are good for a lot of things but if you want the ability to upload data to a website at the same time as displaying a 3d world (and im not talking little udp packets) its extremely difficult with a language like blitz. Also..regarding threading....something you can do in a mulrltithreaded environment is process images much much faster. A few months back I was writing pixel manipulation routines and happened to compare blitz with a multithreaded app I wrote which could make use of the four plus cores on my machine.. dedicate a core to each independent colir channel and its so much faster. Forgivr the typos im on my phone. |
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| Yea.. Ploppy's doing a GREAT job with hardwired / hybrid already! =D |
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| The others effects will probably not be noticed by the players anyway I can't speak for Unity (not being a user), but you do yourself a great disservice if you only think in terms of "rendering+effects". Shaders are not "effects"; they are many times more powerful than the entire traditional rendering pipeline combined (don't know if you took a look at RWWTT from the other thread, but it demonstrates that fact rather well, being a completely meshless 3D system). Shaders are rendering - it's all of that stuff with meshes and transforms and so on that comes before them which is completely optional and of limited importance. Meshes are the non-fundamental "effect"; shaders are the underlying foundation of graphics programming. It's hard to give an example of "what you can do" when the answer is "literally anything". You can render gas fields, directly draw simulated liquids, directly draw worlds made out of voxels, work with characters made entirely out of curved surfaces instead of messing up your art by converting it to a triangle representation, project your scene through a universe made entirely out of ceramic tiles, draw destructible solid materials with depth (flesh over muscle and bone, plaster over brick and steel), etc. It is of course OK not to need or use any of this power. Besides, meshes aren't going anywhere any time soon (all the art pipelines are already built around them, and they're an efficient all-round way to represent static objects). But to dismiss modern rendering and generalized computation techniques as "effects" is to completely miss the entire technological field; be aware of the real relationship and what you're choosing to throw away. Working purely with the fixed-function pipeline in the 21st century is an intentional artistic choice, like a painter choosing to work in biro ink, not the default mode of operation. |
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| You are correct Yasha, i have not tried to understand shaders yet because i find it complex enough to create a 3d game similar to those of the saturn/ps1/n64/dreamcast/ps2/xbox era Working purely with the fixed-function pipeline in the 21st century is an intentional artistic choice, like a painter choosing to work in biro ink, not the default mode of operation. I take note and i will investigate about how to use shaders in the future, but i doubt that it will magically help me to make good games. |
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| You're wrong, Remi. Shaders are a WONDERFUL way to achieve AAA quality graphics, some-what easily. |
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| Maybe, but a good game is not only about nice graphics. |
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| Was playing around with a shader this morning before work that I wrote..... Here is an example of something that is very inefficient to do in a fixed function pipeline but which is dead easy with a shader (even on a mobile); Splitting a mesh along an arbitrary plane - ie cutting it clean in two with a knife along an arbitrary plane.....  In blitz3d (as far as I can tell) your main method of doing this would be to loop through all the vertices on the CPU, perform calculations, then rebuild the mesh into two separate meshes (addvertex/add triangle) and so on..... With a pixel shader you can simply supply the position and normal of the plane you wish to cut along, perform a dot product to check which side of the plane you are on and choose how you wish to render the pixels on one side or the other..... |
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| to loop through all the vertices on the CPU, perform calculations, then rebuild the mesh into two separate meshes (addvertex/add triangle) Yes i would do it this way or maybe have prebuilt cut parts in memory and show the appropriate ones when needed. With a pixel shader you can simply supply the position and normal of the plane you wish to cut along, perform a dot product to check which side of the plane you are on and choose how you wish to render the pixels on one side or the other..... Interesting way indeed, thanks for the explanation. |
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