Just when you thought the world was safe from OpenLayer a new version strikes in!

Download 1.81, Update 1.8 -> 1.81 and Web page

• Added support for Bitmap blending effects (Thanks to Krzysztof Kluczek for the idea of the system)

• New blending effect: Tinted blitting (Thanks to Krzysztof Kluczek for the idea)

• Automated the loading and destruction of global Bitmaps and TextRenderers (No more "you have to wait until the screen is set up and then you can load them")

• Ability to enable automated garbage collecting for dynamically allocated Bitmaps and TextRenderers

• Screen has been renamed to Transforms to avoid naming collisions (Thanks to imaxcs for pointing out)

• New Transforms -effect: SetColorChannels - sets the strength of the output color channels

• Fixed the color conversion issue which disabled the alpha channel with other color depths than 32 (Thanks to Jeremy Vight for pointing out)

• Finally an offline version of the manual is included!

• Fixed the anti-aliasing setup functions (Thanks to NyanKoneko for pointing out in her article)

• Code has been separated to class-specific header and source files to increase maintainability (and readability)

• Several other minor fixes and tweaks (Thanks to many of you for testing!)

If you're using Screen in your code and used to it, #define OL_USE_SCREEN_ALIAS before including OpenLayer.hpp to use the name Screen instead of Transforms

This time I've tested it so well that I'd be surprised if any problems are found (by which I mean it's the "Find the problems" play again )

The webpage doesn't load because Fladimir shuts down his server at night. But he already has a sourceforge mirror that was announced in the 1.7 thread: https:/sourceforge.net/projects/openlayer/

Wooot 1.8 is out! Cheers, Flad!

[EDIT]
Found a couple of problems

glyph.h and loadpng.h aren't included. (might be a problem for people who didn't install an earlier version of OpenLayer which did include these headers)

There seems to be a problem with either the Rgba class or with the TextRenderer:
This should produce a red font but it is indeed quite pink:
TextRenderer bigtxt("gfx/Arial.ttf", 30, 30, Rgba(255, 0, 0, 255));
Green and blue aren't looking their best, either

Yeah, I'm having similar troubles, Mark. (see my edit)

Perhaps Fladimir was in "Drunken Mode" when he was working on that part of his lib

Any chance of backporting some of that functionality in AllegroGL? It would be a great time-saver as well for the new Allegro API OpenGL driver, I think.

Yes sir! Shell into your account there at (shell.sourceforge.net) , there is lots of stuffs.
For more info go to your project page, into the admin portion, then to the link Shell/DB/Web.

Hehe, I actually have one I tested every function and also the final release package that they worked but it was just bad luck that white text worked even if every other text color didn't and I happened to try only white color You won't guess how much of my development time goes to testing... even if I've tried to code everything, even with the expense of performance, such that it works. And won't fail. Ever.

But hey, I needed only one fix revision this time! That's a lot better than with any previous version! I bet that's because now I've been organizing the project a lot better, I have all kinds of UML dependancy diagrams and whatnot.

That's great! If I manage to mirror the site to Retrospec's host I bet I can do that just as easily with SourceForge, and there it's all free bandwidth!

Awesome. check out the screenshot of my latest OpenLayer project.

- in the docs, the example code for PolygonGradient says PolygonOutline
- I would like (please very much) a texture shaping/stretching within the polygon routine. if you look at the attachment, you can see the heart meatre, which I would normally blit like so:

player_class player;
BITMAP health_bar;

float health_bar_width = (player.health/player.max_health) * health_bar->w;

masked_blit(health_bar, buffer, 0, 0, 20, 20, health_bar_width, health_bar->h);

my proposal for an OpenLayer solution is to have a function that changes the points of the clamped texture. That way it would also be possible to do some nifty texture stretching and maintain a clipped edge.

ClipBlit(float des_x, des_y, tex_x1, tex_y1, tex_x2, tex_y2, rendermode, flipped)

ClipBlitTransformed(float des_x1, des_y1, des_x2, des_y2, tex_x1, tex_y1, tex_x2, tex_y2, rendermode, flipped)

the other interfaces would be the same like ClipBlitRotate, ClipBlitTransformed...

haha, true.. ok, so like..

Bitmap picture;
picture.ClampTexture(float x1, float y1, float x2, float y2); // adjustes all the blits and stuff
picture.ResetTexture(); // resets to the right corners

yea... that does make me mumble a little bit I hate to ask you to do more work, but I would prefer the functions like ClipBlit. I can do whatever though. as long as I get my heart meater.

Nice work Fladimir, I must say. I might whip up something with OpenLayer later
I haven't played with it yet, just took a few glances to the code.
Some remarks:

I think that

GfxRend:: PolygonOutline()

is missing

glLineWidth( lineWidth )

- line there. Also, that very same line isn't needed in

GfxRend::RectOutline()

.

You're using GL_QUADS quite a lot. IIRC the triangle strip is a bit faster (on some cards, maybe?). So it might be worth converting those to GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP and doing some benchmarking. That's quite a lot of work and might not even be worth it. Actually, I might try that myself. I will keep you informed should I find some time to benchmark them.

As for the demo game, you might want to change the ball and the paddle color. Now they're both quite grey which makes them hard to spot from the background (especially the ball). That's an opportunity to use the tinting feature!

Anyways, looking good, keep it up!

EDIT: Oh, the fonts show up in black on this old K6-2 machine of mine. Geforce 2 MX and WinXP. Also the Game over text doesn't seem to be properly centered vertically (don't know if this is intentional or not). On my new PC all worked fine, though I think it was 1.7x version I tested there. I will try this on that new PC as soon as I get home. Screenshot attached.

Gar... a bit frustrated.

• All of my pictures have a white background again where they should be transparent. The wierd thing is, after I display some text from my GUI functions, the transparent stuff works and the white goes away. The worst part is, I can't fix this by putting set_color_conversion(COLORCONV_KEEP_TRANS); in the startup function anymore. Can you simply remove your color conversion settings and just let the programmer specify the color conversion mode? Here is the text display code:

• I still have to call Settings::SetOrthographicProjection(); after all text printing functions.

  
  

• What happended to the BlitTransformed arguments for x,y,pivotX,pivotY? My sprites seem to draw as if the x,y is at the upper-left position, when it used to be in the center of the sprite (hence the pivotX and pivotY were in the center), code:

  if(d_visible&&graphics.current_image()!=__apsl_blank)
    graphics.current_image()->BlitTransformed(d_x,d_y,get_width(),get_height(),get_width()/2,get_height()/2,d_rotation/57.2957795131,d_factor,d_flip);

I can't seem to get it to act like it did in previous versions.

[ EDIT ] I just tried compiling and running my main OpenLayer project, and not only does everything draw not at the pivot, it crashes now after the main menu... not sure why, all I know is that it didn't before.

Nope, the Blenders::Set(( ALPHA_BLENDER )); doesn't do the trick. Thanks for trying to help tho.