Congratulations =D

OMG NEW POLL

EDIT: Sorry, I just felt it was worth noting.

Hey Matthew! Thanks for the binaries...

Can you please remove include/physfs.h in the binaries? It's not required.

It would be great if the documentation was available as a separate download package:

HTML/man files are in source.

Link to Tomasu's PDF file: http://www.strangesoft.net/allegro/docs/refman.pdf

P.S.: Is the CHM thing worth committing?

I found it easy to create a CHM file. All we need is to add a .hhp file and make changes to autosuggest.js. Changes are here: http://guilt.bafsoft.net/downloads/dist/Windows/Allegro5/refman/

CHM file is here: http://guilt.bafsoft.net/downloads/dist/Windows/Allegro5/allegro-5.0.0-refman.chm

Missed the timing :-) I've included your link too!

Gratz to everyone involved! Great work!

I went with flirty. It's a tough competition between flirty and thankful.

Neat to see this finally released, even though I haven't really been doing much programming lately... or it would be more apt to say, I haven't really been doing much Allegro programming lately.

Maybe now that this is out I'll have to take a look. Kudos to everyone who was involved in making it happen!

I tried porting my game to A5 but it didn't go so well. Originally the game was written using A4 and eventually I ported it to SDL 1.2. Both libraries don't mind using temporary memory bitmaps as buffers which eventually get blit'd to the screen and accordingly I do this a number of times in the game.

My graphics drivers are fairly old so I don't have FBO support and from what I understand any drawing to a texture other than the screen is painfully slow. I attempted to remove as many of the intermediate buffers as possible but doing that requires making a sub-bitmap of the screen so I am forced to know the position the bitmap will be drawn to at the time of creation. In a couple of places I don't know the position till much after the creation time so this is a hard change to make.

Probably when I upgrade ubuntu to the next version, 11.04, I will try again. Also here are a few notes I took during the porting. If these things are still broken the next time I get around to using A5 I may fix them myself.

• sub bitmap destruction is confusing in the docs
  The docs don't explicitly say sub bitmaps should be destroyed.

  
  

• packing/unpacking functions for rgb formats would be nice
  I still use packed colors (16 bit) so I copied the 16-bit makecol and getr/g/b functions from a4 to deal with them in a5. I think these could be provided as an addon.

  
  

• keyboard repeat state
  There is no way to modify the key repeat state

  
  

• al_create_display implicitly sets the target bitmap
  It's debatable whether this is a good idea. The docs do say this occurs but I didn't read them carefully the first time and was confused about how the screen ultimately was set as the target.

I think that's handled by the OS this time rather than Allegro IIRC.

I would lean towards having a function that is more explicit about doing two things at once, something like al_create_display_and_set_target().

You can buy the Allegro manual?

It should be available by tomorrow.

They are actually pretty good quality if you are into killing trees.

Haha.