[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] first impressions and some reports

[From: Tapani Paelli]

ext Gustavo Barbieri wrote:

>>
>>I know... I'll try a quick pygame app to test if side scrolling is
>>doable at all. It it passes the test I'll write something on wiki so
>>people can know how to do.
>>   Expect something by the end of the night.
>>    
>>

It's doable but if you want things like collision detection, physics, 
sound, player input reading you don't propably want to do it fullscreen 
in 770 with 800x480x16  (~700kb) screen. Blitting whole screen is a 
heavy operation even on the desktop side if you are doing much more at 
the same time (using software only).
For faster performance you should use c/c++ with SDL and access 
screen-surface pixels directly doing operations for the screen pointer. 
Then you blit the modified rectangles from the surface and want propably 
take care of overlapping sprites.


>I use dirty rectangles to just update areas that need to be repainted.
>If this doesn't work, hardly any scroll side game will work.
>  
>

I have a non-optimized shootemup scroller running on device and it's 
playable. If you really want to blit the whole screen I recommend you to 
have a gameui on sides and limit the visible game viewport size smaller 
than fullscreen. And I really really encourage you to visit 
http://www.libsdl.org, download some examples and read tutorials like 
http://cone3d.gamedev.net/cgi-bin/index.pl?page=tutorials/gfxsdl/index.

// Tapani