A few questions

[QuietBloke]

I wont put these down as bugs because as a new user I may have just missed something somewhere but Ive had PPL for a few days now and Ive found time to try and play around with it and it look great but... I am having a few problems.
First let me say I am using a XDA Exec Windows Mobile with a VGA screen and built in keyboard. With the keyboard out the screen automatically rotates 90 degrees ( screen width 640, height : 480 )

1. When I run any of the graphics demos on the machine itself I get a white border along two sides of the screen... I cant seem to make it go away. Is this a glitch in windows because it is running a 320x240 display on a VGA screen ? Its nto a biggie but would make any game look a bit unprofessional.

2. Some Dialogs seem to be designed just for the tall screen orientation. So.. for example in forms designer if you display the information for a form the dialog the bottom part is not visible so I cant press the OK or cancel buttons. Is there any chance of an alternate version of the editor designed for people who have the screen rotated 90 degrees ?

3. ShowFPS. Not a bug just a question... I cant seem to find an explanation of what the thee numbers mean.

4. This next one seems to be a debug message that has been left in. On the PocketPC in PPL when you hit the tools tab two message dialogs popup with the message num=2 and num=3.

5. I use a utility called ForceHires to mke apps use the full VGA display. When I use it on PPL everything looks fine but when I go into the options dialog to change the font size the dialog seems all squashed. All the fields seem to be shrunk so for example you cannot see the numeric value in the font size field. Is there an official way to make the PPL run in hires mode ?

Despite these minor newbie niggles I still think this is a great product. And at the speed the updates seem to be coming things can only get better :).

[kornalius]

Hi QuietBloke,

Thank you for your interest in PPL.

1. PPL runs in QVGA mode by default in landscape mode in your case 320 x 240. To enable VGA mode, please visit our tutorials section.

2. This is the way they have been designed. It will be though for us to rewrite the dialogs at this time. We will look into it for a later version.

3. The first number is the FPS (Frames per second drawn), second one is the PPS (Process cycle per second) which means, the number of time the GameAPI can call the GameProc function per second and finally the delta value representing an adjustment value if the PPS cannot be low enough sprites movement will automatically adjust to this delta value so that your game is running at a constant speed even on slow machines.

4. This has been fixed. It was a debug code Brad forgot to take out.

5. Not at this moment. The GameAPI will run fine. We are not using Hi DPI mode in the form builder. So in VGA Hi DPI it doesn't look right (squashed). We are looking into it for version 1.1 maybe 1.2.

Our goal is that everyone is happy with PPL. We are putting twice as much effort to ensure PPL is a top quality product.

[QuietBloke]

thanx for the quick reply.. do you ever sleep !? lol

Ill take a look at the tutorials to find out what I need to do to enable VGA mode.
The FPS display now makes sense.. thanx !

As for VGA support in dialogs... just thought Id mention it for future developments.. once you get the important stuff out of the way. :)

But.. there is still the problem I get when I run the demos. They all run in QVGA mode which I have no problem with. In fact my first apps will probably use this mode too... but when I run them on my machine I get a white line on two edges of the screen. Is this a bug somewhere in Windows when it is running low-res apps ?.. or is it something you guys could fix ?... As I said .. the programs run fine but its annoying having this white border on the display.


Thanx
John

[kornalius]

Have you tried running in normal mode not landscape?

[QuietBloke]

yeap... even in landscape I get the same thing.

[QuietBloke]

If its any help here is a screenshot of the StarField2 demo running. As you can see the top and left sides of the display have a white border. Im thinking its a GAPI error... I did a quick search and Microsofts site suggested that GAPI is being phased out and replaced by DirectDraw. Maybe on my machine they didnt quite implement it correctly ?
Im just guessing here.. its all new to me but I find it odd that I seem to be the only person having this problem.

[br]../../e107_files/public/1162372727_121_FT1174_pplscreenprob_.png[br]

[kornalius]

Sorry I am at lost because the GameAPI window is supposed to be moved to the top left (0, 0) of your screen. It looks like it is either your device or the PocketHAL engine we are using for graphic display.

[QuietBloke]

OK.. well.. it seems like Im the only one getting this so its looking a lot like it is my device and is probably not worth you spending time on it. Ill try some other things to see if I can pinpoint what exactly is causing the error.

As another quick question: As you can see the demo is running at quite a slow framerate.. is that about the right speed when running on a PPC ?.. or does it seem slow ?

[QuietBloke]

You all thought this thread was dead eh ?..
Well Im back.. I was trawling around trying to find out a bit more and I stumbled across this Mobile Demo http://pocketmatrix.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=22835.
Which is actually quite impressive.
It uses PocketHAL and when I run it on my machine it does not have the border issue and it seems to run just as fast as on my old machine.. so... it seems PocketHAL is capable of running correctly on my machine and fast.

[EDIT].. I just ran the demo again and on the initial load screen it does indeed have the border but once the demo starts it is gone... hmmmm.
Im sorry about going on about this as it seems I am the only one who is having this problem and Im sure you have far more pressing issues to work on... but I thought you might want to know that the problem does not seem to lie within PocketHAL ( unless the demo is using a different/newer version ).

Cheers
John ( Quietbloke )

[Heinz]

Regarding the speed: I have a 400MHz PPc but only with a 320x240 resolution and there the Starfield2 demo has a frame rate of 67-69 frames/sec. However there was already another thread which mentioned exactly the same problem in VGA mode with approximately the same frame rate you have - so this seems to be a VGA problem (although somewhere I have read that the Axim 51v might be an exception).

greetings,
Heinz

[QuietBloke]

I thought it was something to do with my VGA machine.. but that demo I mentioned above uses PocketHAL just like PPL does and yet run just as fast on my VGA machine in 320x240 mode as it does on a standard machine. I just posted it to let kornalius know that the speed problem does not seem to be due to my hardware or to PocketHAL.

Of course it's not a big issue in the grand scheme of things but when things quieten down maybe they could find time to figure out exactly why VGA machines seem to have this problem as over time these machines will start to become more common.

[Heinz]

Did I understand your last comment correctly, that if you switch your machine in 320x240 mode it is still slower then an ordinary 320x240 machine (I always thought the VGA devices were only in VGA mode slower)?
I actually wanted to buy a VGA device too, but in that case it is worth waiting.

Heinz

[QuietBloke]

I havent tried many apps on it but the ones I have tried all seem to run just fine in 320x240.. apart from PPL.
I am a bit disapointed in the VGA on the whole though. Its a small screen but my eyesight is still pretty good so I would have liked the option to run everything in VGA mode so I can fit much more information on the screen... but it doesnt seem to be an option. The toolbars at the top and bottom of the screen are just made bigger and all the apps just seem to use bigger fonts so you end up with most things looking exactly the same only a bit sharper.

[kornalius]

Send your code that uses PocketHAL, I need to see what I am doing wrong then.