Re: [GD-General] Scaling GUI graphics

[Thatcher U. <tu...@tu...>]

On Aug 20, 2002 at 08:53 -0500, Corrinne Yu wrote:
> 
> We do all our front-end / HUD stuff in Flash, although our scripting
> support is limited to Flash 4, and there's a couple of rendering things
> we
> don't do, either for performance, or 'bang for buck' issues. IIRC some
> of
> our game logic was in it for a while (I certainly recall having to read
> state changes back out of the flash interface class).
> 
> We're doing this for authoring reasons, rather than re-sizing issues
> though. Closest we get to resolution changes are supporting 4:3 / 16:9
> and
> PAL / NTSC.
> 
> -- This sounds kind of interesting. Do you read the raw Flash 4 file
> output and implement the entire Flash 4 API?

I'm also interested in details...

> -- Is Flash 4 a text or binary file format? I apologize for being a
> Flash neophyte. Do you parse the text or the binary, and where does one
> find a script and API reference to Flash 4 (if one has never used it
> before)?

see http://www.openswf.org -- swf is a packed binary format, actually
very clever IMO.  There's some GPL code, and apparently you may be
able to license code from Macromedia.  I keep threatening to write a
public domain SWF library, but it's mostly vapor at the moment.

> -- It really depends how thick the API is whether it may be too heavy
> weight in our case to implement as a GUI displayer.

The shape display is oriented around curved outlines, and definitely
has the look of something that wants to use an antialiased scanline
renderer.  But it definitely seems possible to do an OpenGL or D3D
implementation.

-- 
Thatcher Ulrich
http://tulrich.com