markweber wrote

Has free pascal such a power for Computer Graphics applications?

It can even make OSes, what's so hard to build a CG apps?

markweber wrote

Is it really possible? Hard to believe.

Well, you've seen it. So, it's possible.

A guy says he makes this -> http://picturetopeople.blogspot.com using free pascal WITH NO LIBRARIES.

Has free pascal such a power for Computer Graphics applications?

Is it really possible? Hard to believe.

A guy says he makes this -> http://picturetopeople.blogspot.com using free pascal WITH NO LIBRARIES.

So what? Have you seen this:
http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=12
It's also made using FPC.

What do you think those libraries is made from? Pure magic?

Has free pascal such a power for Computer Graphics applications?

What power? CG is all about mathematics. What else power do you need?

Is it really possible? Hard to believe.

Everything is possible. There's no accident. *kungfu panda style* :-D

You may make anything using FPC, of course, as long as it's a software. You don't think that FPC is only able to make a "hello world" program, do you? :-P

-Bee-

Why ?
fpImage has very complete image support. The rest are just add-ons.

Michael.

It sure is possible!! :-) FPC is not limited to just business type applications. Computer Graphics is nothing more that mathematical formulas working with pixel data.

Here are a few more examples of what was done with Object Pascal alone and Free Pascal compiler:

http://aggpas.org/
It's a complete Object Pascal implementation of Agg, the Anti-Grain Geometry library originally written in C++. Agg-Pas doesn't use any external libraries, all Object Pascal code compilable with Free Pascal.

http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=5
Then there is the GIMP or Photoshop clone - called Pixel32. It runs on something like 7 platforms, supports 32bit and 64bit OS's, and even sports Universal Binary for Mac OS X support.

Free Pascal itself comes with a fpImage (part of the Free Component Library - FCL), which seems to be quite complete in graphics features
- though I haven't used it myself.

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

I'm not geek or nerd, so be patient.

I have thought graphics software needed to deal with video card and so, and needed to make very powerful calculations. If you say it's a software as any other, so that's right.

You say pascal can make low level code, so ok.
You say pascal can make any math calculations, so ok.

You have showed other good stuffs there. If all of this was made with free pascal, so I believe.

I suppose you have seen the link I showed. Can I make a sofware like that, without to be a Computer Graphics super nerd, just using this fpImage?

And don't make me feel like a stupid. :P

You can, with FPC, make any kind of software imaginable. It even supports inline assembly, if you worry about speed.

On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 8:39 AM, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:

Michael, you are time travelling a bit. Current time here is 8:32 AM. I sometimes receive replies you posted before I get the original message. Weird. I guess the mailing list caches the messages somewhat before they are passed to everybody else, and then does it ordered by time.

The following should sort out your time: :-)
sudo ntpdate -u ntp.ubuntulinux.org

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

No one wants to make you feel like that.

Yes, you can make that kind of stuff with FPC and fpImage. But fpImage does not have e.g. morphing routines, so if you want that, you'll have to write the morph routines yourself. fpImage provides basic image handling, and some simple image filtering and transformation routines.

Michael.

markweber wrote

I have thought graphics software needed to deal with video card and so, and needed to make very powerful calculations. If you say it's a software as any other, so that's right.

CAD type programs take video card hardware into account to speed up the calculations considerabley. The GPU is very powerful and fast, when it comes to graphic calculations. But in the end, those calculations could also be done with your normal CPU and software - although somewhat slower.

I suppose you have seen the link I showed. Can I make a sofware like that, without to be a Computer Graphics super nerd, just using this fpImage?

Yes, but some more advanced features you would need to implement yourself. Agg-Pas has many of those advanced calculations implemented, so you can always take a recommend you run some of the Agg-Pas demos, they are very impressive! Most graphics functions rely heavily on advanced maths & formulas, so it takes somebody special to actually understand the underlying formulas. Those things are normally to advanced for me to understand. :-)

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

As well as games. I'm using FPC & fpImage in my multimedia/game engine, and it works perfectly - PNGs, JPEGs, BMPs, TGAs - you name it, fpImage works flowlessly. One thing that could be improvemed in fpImage is it's internal format - it would be really helpful if one could choose between bytes and words (maybe even Longwords/Qwords ?), as well as order of components (RGBA vs BGRA). Several defines (plus lot of changes) should do the job.

The time on my PC is synchronized every day ?

Michael.

Maybe this is the cause:

markweber wrote

I suppose you have seen the link I showed. Can I make a sofware like that, without to be a Computer Graphics super nerd, just using this fpImage?

Food for thought...
Even if you had libraries(built in or otherwise) that did all the "magic" you will still need to create the GUI (Lazarus the FPC GUI should help), you will still need to learn the libraries and figure what parts you need/want to use.

In othe words... yes you can do a program like that yourself, but don't think it will be drag and drop and puff you have an app.

If you are serious about doing an app like the one you gave a link for I suggest you start doing some simple apps with Lazarus. If that proves more than you want to deal with, then that will limit how much time you spend on this trial.

Thank you, guys.

I preferred a lot the second wave of answers. You are master developers, but many people are not, so you need to be patient as you were this time.

You have given me useful advices.

I have talked about this with other people too. I believe to make a complex graphics software is really hard, using libraries or not. Probably it's the reason there is so few softwares like that (the CG complex ones), free or not. We can see tons of toy CG programs, but the monsters are few.

Anyway, I got free pascal is a tool for skilled nerds. Looks nice to know such a killer stuff.

I guess a tool that can make everything should not be easy, right?

I have heard C++ is the best tool for nerds (whatever it can mean). Will you crash me if I ask why should I prefer free pascal than C++ ? Remember I'm beggining where you are a master.

I have heard C++ is the best tool for nerds (whatever it can mean). Will you crash me if I ask why should I prefer free pascal than C++ ?

C++ is the best tool for nerds.
Object Pascal is the best tool for professional software developers.

I leave it to the others to get into the details :-)

C++:
- debugging = nightmare (no further explanation needed)
- separate compilation = less structured (both namespaces and header files? what for?), slow (uncompiled header needs to be parsed in EVERY compilation)
- syntax = still strive for C's stupidness (everywhere declaration, sometimes forces you to use volatile on variables, difficult to find constants, variables, types, etc.)

Object Pascal:
- debugging = as simple as running the program (both fpc's embedded line number debugger and heap profiler rocks!!)
- separate compilation = very structured (unit can't be nested, improves readability), fast (compiled header)
- syntax = very clean (you can find easily where constants, variables, types, etc. are)

Hmm... there should be much more, but I don't want to write it all.

In our previous episode, markweber said:

I have heard C++ is the best tool for nerds (whatever it can mean). Will you crash me if I ask why should I prefer free pascal than C++ ? Remember I'm beggining where you are a master.

C++ is dangerously complex. And I think the previous waves have made clear that the complexity is the problem of the project already.

Don't shop languages as the silver bullet to solve the problem, you always be disappointed if you go that way.

Personally I would start to make some choices, and start focussing the project. What is absolutely necessary (properties that set the program from its competitors), and what is only a nice to have?

Then focus on getting the necessities working first, before you start messing with designing your own widget sets (no offense Pavel)

Free pascal can be used by beginners and professional developers.

Pascal was designed as a language to teach programming. So it must be simple to understand. You can make extremely simple programs with Free Pascal. Much easier than in C(++) or Java or even C#.

Commercial companies have added features to the Pascal language which make it a powerful language as well: Easier and more powerful string handling, and powerful Object orientied features, the ability to insert assembler straight in your Pascal code. That makes it an attractive tool for any professional.

Free Pascal comes with a lot of standard libraries that can be used as basic building blocks for almost any task you may have.

And I assume that all this is why most of use use FPC.

And oh yes, it's free software. Also not unimportant... :-)

Michael.