Re: Tools

[Pierre Phaneuf <pp@ludusdesign.com>]

Erik wrote:

> Yeah, I see. I guess I feel that bmp was a bad choice :) I see "wav" and
> "bmp" in the documentation and I think it's a windows wannabe type thing
> *shrug* but everything else indicates a high quality peice of work :/ I
> guess I'm biased :)

The thing is that SDL is portable to Win32 and others, where WAV and BMP
are the well-established formats for sound and image. Since many tools
on many platforms will manipulate those Windowish files and that Windows
doesn't have much in the matter of manipulating Targa files or Sun's AU
files, they are good all-around choices for demonstration loaders.

Remember that those two loaders are *demos*.

> > Yes, knowing assembler is important, and even with todays compilers,
> > sometimes you have to use assembler. For example, we have a sound mixer
> > for Quadra (no threads, no sound server process, doesn't skip or lag!)
> > that adds the samples together and then uses if's and whatever to
> > properly clip it. This is a good case that could be replaced with
> > assembler. I think MMX has such a bounded add, and if not, I could
> > simply do an add and a jump on carry to replace the if's, that would be
> > much more efficient (considering this is kind of an "audio alpha
> > blending blitter", moving a few megs per second of data)... Turned out
> > okay without it (Quadra is a simple game), but maybe it would help my
> > 486 if I did it.
> 
> I don't think you should learn assembly to use it occasionally... I really
> doubt there's a serious need. I think asm is important to learn so you
> understand why x++ is better than x=x+1 (unless the compiler optimizes that
> for you...). And stuff like loops... having an idea of how that gets handled
> by the machine lets you make your programs more friendly to the machine.
> (but we still need skilled asm hackers to glue together the compilers so
> they use mmx and 3dnow and superdoopermegahyperglobalultra4324252
> instructions... :)

Well, of course, for the new instructions, there is no choice, but
assembler has its occasional uses, like for color conversion, alpha
blitters or sound mixing.

-- 
Pierre Phaneuf
Ludus Design, http://ludusdesign.com/
"First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you. Then you win." -- Gandhi