Few days ago I tried C++ Builder 2010 and was pleasantly surprised. It worked! I tried just the library core for now (ImagingTypes, Imaging, ImagingFormats, Pascal only file handlers, etc.) and it works without problems. I’m not sure which C++ Builder version is required for successful compile though. Versions 6 and 2006 stopped with internal error, 2010 worked, and there are 2 other versions between.

Anyway, I’ll try to check out most of the library until the 2010 trial expires for me. Hmm, I’m wondering how many people use C++ Builder for C++ development – I’ve never did something serious in it, basically just to get object files usable by Delphi – so I have no idea if it’s ok.

PS: Another C++ Builder related news – patch for OpenJpeg library to get it compiling in BCB is posted here.

So what can you expect in the next version of PasJpeg2000 library?
Higher GCC optimization levels should make it a lot faster when using Free Pascal (particularly in Mac OS X where O0 was used). Irreversible DWT transformation produces smaller lossy files than current PasJpeg2000 version and with optional MCT (multicomponent transform – basically RGB>YCbCr) you get even smaller ones. There’s now also a patch that enables OpenJpeg to get palettes from JP2 files so indexed JPEG 2000 images could be supported too. And finally, there are some bug fixes (wrong reconstruction of subsampled files, …).

It does in fact. SHR treats its first operand as unsigned value even though it is a variable of signed type whereas >> takes the sign bit into account. In the function I converted the operand for right shift was often negative and Delphi’s SHR just ignored the value of the sign bit.

A Bit of Code

int a, b1, b2;
a = -512;
b1 = a >> 1;
b2 = a / 2;

After running this C code both b1 and b2 have a value of -256.

var A, B1, B2: Integer;
A := -512;
B1 := A shr 1;
B2 := A div 2;

This Delphi code however yields different result: B2 is -256 as expected but B1 has a value of 2147483392.

A Bit of Assembler

Assembler output of C code:

Unit1.cpp.22: b1 = a >> 1;
mov eax,[ebp-$0c]
sar eax,1
mov [ebp-$10],eax
Unit1.cpp.23: b2 = a / 2;
mov edx,[ebp-$0c]
sar edx,1
jns $00401bb9
adc edx,$00
mov [ebp-$14],edx

Assembler output of Delphi code:

Unit1.pas.371: B1 := A shr 1;
mov eax,[ebp-$0c]
shr eax,1
mov [ebp-$1c],eax
Unit1.pas.373: B2 := A div 2;
mov eax,[ebp-$0c]
sar eax,1
jns $00565315
adc eax,$00
mov [ebp-$20],eax

As you can see, asm output of C and Delphi divisions is identical. What differs is asm for shift right operator. Delphi uses shr instruction whereas C uses sar instruction. The difference: shr does logical shift and sar does arithmetic one.

The SHR instruction clears the most significant bit (see Figure 6-7 in the Intel Architecture Software Developer’s Manual, Volume 1); the SAR instruction sets or clears the most significant bit to correspond to the sign (most significant bit) of the original value in the destination operand.

Quoted from: http://faydoc.tripod.com/cpu/shr.htm

More info and downloads at Imaging’s homepage.

I checked out Clootie graphics pages but no luck there. Unfortunately, it’s not so active anymore. After that I thought DX11 for Pascal wouldn’t appear in like several months at least. Surprise, I found it about 5 minutes later. John Bladen published his DX11 translation on DirectX for Delphi blog. Thanks John!

Now all that remains is buying a DX11 GPU. New Radeons should be released sometime during this week and I’m thinking of getting 5850 model in a few months. Rumours are that NVidia’s DX11 cards won’t be out before 2010, so probably no big price drops for 5800 Radeons are to be expected until then.

My pile of old graphic cards will get bigger once again. I don’t buy new CPU/motherboard/RAM too often (now it’s Core2 from 2007 and before that AthlonXP in 2002) and I usually manage to sell the old ones or put them on server duty somewhere. However, since GPU performance as well as requirements on it rise much more faster than that of CPU, I ended up with like 5 cards in last 8 years. I managed to sell Radeon 9000 and GeForce 6600 but I still have Riva TNT2 and Radeon X1950 in my closet somewhere (and S3 Trio!). Hopefully, I’ll find a buyer for my 1GB 4850 soon.

Lately, I’ve had bad luck buying some new stuff just before major price drop. Hopefully, this won’t happen with 5850. Not that I want it to remain expensive – just want to buy it after the drop, not  a little while before it.

Mainly for testing purposes during implementation of these new methods, I want to create extension for Imaging that compares two images (original and one reconstructed from compressed original) and measures PSNR and some other quality metrics.

I’m also thinking of implementing DXT5 based format using YCoCg colorspace and PVRTC (texture compression currently used in iPhone).

Few links if you’re interested:

• Brief DXTC overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Texture_Compression
• More technical details: http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/EXT/texture_compression_s3tc.txt
• YCoCg-DXT related: http://developer.nvidia.com/object/real-time-ycocg-dxt-compression.html

Here’s some quick comparison of DXT compressors (click the image to see full size). Value in brackets is MSE (mean square error) – lesser number means compressed image is more similar to original.

There were a lot of attempts at remakes of Daggerfall but all failed so far. However, a new promising one appeared recently and it’s progressing at warp speed since then (one month from wrongly textured entrance of Privateer’s Hold dungeon to rendering city blocks). Check out development blog and downloads at the homepage of DaggerXL. You need original Daggerfall data files to run the demo – no problem now when you can get it free.

Daggerfall Workshop was recently reopened as well. It’s a home of tools that let you explore Daggerfall’s game assets (textures, models, maps, music, etc.). There’s also a new exploring tool in development that looks really good, with very interesting blog posts about various Dagger’s file formats, rendering techniques, and so on.

I did my small share of dabbling in Daggerfall’s file formats too. Image and texture loaders in Object Pascal are part of ElderImagery extension of Imaging library and I’ve got BSA archive handler somewhere too. I’m now thinking of adding SKY format (backdrop images used in game for skies and far away mountains) loader, just for fun I guess.

When writing about Daggerfall, one cannot forget mentioning its music which was really excellent. Much more atmospheric and fitting than the music in recent Elder Scrolls games (there was also a lot more tracks). Check out Robert Hood’s arrangements of Eric Heberling’s original music tracks.

There’s header translation working with both Delphi and FPC and original C library precompiled to object files (Delphi) and static libraries (FPC for Win32, Linux x86/x64, and Mac OS X).

I’ve written simple TBitmap descendant that loads and saves JPEG 2000 images. It’s only for Delphi now – can’t do LCL version with just few IFDEFS, there are lot more changes between VCL and LCL TBitmaps. I plan to write separate LCL version for one of upcoming releases (using TFPCustomImageWriter and TFPCustomImageReader classes).

You can get JPEG 2000 for Pascal library at it’s project page.

Now I’m gonna extend PNG saver to allow saving multi images to simple APNG files, much like MNG saving works now. There’s really not a good unified way how to pass some more information to image file savers in current library design – that’s one of TODOs for new Imaging architecture.

There is already PNG-like chunk based format for animations called MNG (already supported by Imaging – at least the basic features). However, MNG is quite complex format and its support among browsers and image viewers/editors is lacking. Code library supporting all MNG features is huge.

APNG on the other hand is just an extension of PNG and its implementation is not so complex. I’m going to load only the raw frames from files at first and see what will have to be done to support animating the frames next. Canvas class will have to be used here for alpha blending subsequent frames to previous ones. I’ll add option to turn the animating on/off just like it is available for animated GIF files.

More info about APNG: http://www.animatedpng.com and https://wiki.mozilla.org/APNG_Specification.

Current theme is just temporary, I’ll look for something more to my liking later (going away for a week in few hours) and probably do some modifications. I’ve tried quite a few themes already but there was always some glitch (no header margins, wrong image alignment, etc.).

First difference you may notice (compared to Pascal) is case sensitiveness of Modula-2, for instance all reserved words are upper cased. You don’t have to write so many begin-end statements though. Another C-like trait is importance of header files (definition modules) order during compiling – just change it a little bit in a large project and whole thing breaks down.

More info about Modula-2 if you’re interested: http://www.modula2.org/.

After not so straightforward installation of Mac OS X in VMWare I fixed the issue just by changing number “24” to “32” in the code (TRawImage.Description.Depth field, LCL raw image to TBitmap conversion). Apparently, Carbon created bitmap with 6 bits per color channel. Now I just need to check if 24->32 change doesn’t break anything when using other LCL widget sets (I’m sure there was a reason for 24bits since I vaguely remember 32bits were there few years ago) – so maybe conditional compilation will be needed here.

Another issue I noticed is that LCL Imager demo couldn’t load default image (Tigers.jpg) that is displayed when it is started without parameters. Demo uses relative path to the image but (from Demos/Bin to Demos/Data directory). Mac OS X application LCLImager.app is placed in Demos/Bin directory by Lazarus but it is not a simple single file. It’s a directory itself and actual demo executable is located somewhere inside. I’ve not really decided on solution yet. Maybe embed the image in the executable as resource?

See the difference?

I decided to remove Kylix support (CLX graphic classes, project files, build scripts, core library still compiles). It’s not working properly on many (all?) current Linux distros (so I can’t test) and it was abandoned by Borland/Codegear quite some time ago. It was nice to have DCC compiler in Linux and it also made Borland to make Delphi RTL crossplatform. There are rumors about crosscompiling features in upcoming Delphi releases (in 2010?)  so maybe we’ll see DCC in Linux again.

Instead of Kylix project files there are new ones for Delphi 2009. Imaging itself didn’t require many fixes to compile and work with Delphi 2009,  most of them were related to text-based file format loaders (XMP, PNM) and external libraries (JpegLib, ZLib).

More info and downloads at Imaging’s homepage.

I’m planning revamping this whole site. Maybe creating some sort of simple CMS myself or just some better way to handle the projects. I don’t enjoy coding in PHP but there’s not much choice.

Imaging 0.24.2 patch will hopefully be released soon (waiting for Lazarus 0.9.24 since there is LCL change that breaks Imaging’s LCL support for older Lazaruses). More about new Imaging can be found at its homepage. I also plan to release OpenJPEG (JPEG 2000 library) for Pascal independent on Imaging for those who just want JPEG 2000 for their programs.

I will (have to) start working on my Master’s thesis in very near future so you may expect some demos soon (terrain rendering stuff again).

• New image file format support: GIF (native), TIFF (libtiff), PSD (native).
• New image data format: BTC (block truncation coding).
• File format compatibility fixes (for BMP, JPEG, and DDS)
  and platform/compiler support fixes (Win64, UNIX, FPC, …).
• Bug fixes and some enhancements (buffered file IO, …).

Visit Vampyre Imaging Library Homepage for more news and downloads or Imaging Forum.

Find more at Earth Under Fire page.

Check it out here:
Domains Of Chaos Page

UFO: Extraterrestrials homepage:
http://www.ufo-extraterrestrials.com.
UFO at Gamers Gate (digital download for EU and rest of the globe except North America): Gamers Gate UFO page.
UFO at Matrix Games (digital download for North America): Matrix Games UFO page.

Boxed version will be available in few weeks.
Now working on first patch…

Vampyre Imaging Library Homepage with news and downloads.
Imaging Forum with more news.

I’m going to release Imaging 0.22 with Extras package in late January or early February. There are only few finishing touches needed but I don’t have much time now (many exams at uni). Later I plan to devote some time to update Earth Under Fire, maybe even create 1.0 version and close it. Next I want to brush up on Python (but with my Delphi module containing Imaging and other stuff) and create simple Chaos remake with multiplayer over the Internet. More info on this later.

There is also a commercial app in Delphi we are starting with a friend. And UFO: Extraterrestrials game is about to be released soon (I hope) so I expect subsequent patches, patches, and maybe even some patches. And I should pick up some theme for my Master’s thesis soon and do some stuff for it. Well, looks like a busy year, [sigh].

And now for something completely different:

This is something you don’t see every day. I met this herd of polar ostriches few days ago. Scary bunch.

File formats in extras will also include JPEG2000. Reason why it won’t be in the core library is this: there is no native Pascal library for loading/saving JPEG2000 images (at least I haven’t found one) so Imaging will link to C library compiled to object files (OpenJPEG most probably). Therefore it won’t work on all platforms supported by Imaging (and thus cannot be included in core library).

There is also PCX loader, there will be PNM (for PBM, PGM, PPM, and PAM) loader/saver, and maybe even GIF support (if there will be enough time to implement it). I have converted my old Daggerfall image/texture loaders to Imaging too and added Redguard and BattleSpire support.

First version of extras package will be released around the end of 2006. New Imaging release will be made too because stuff in extras depends on some changes made in core library since 0.20 release. Current working version of Imaging and extras package is in project’s SubVersion repository.

Visit Vampyre Imaging Library homepage

Main news/changes in 0.20.0:

• New TImagingCanvas class with methods for drawing objects and applying effects was added (although there is not much functionality yet).
• New image data formats based on 16bit half-float (FP16) type has been added and OpenGL and Direct3D extensions can now create textures in these formats too.
• Imaging now compiles and works on 64bit CPUs (Linux on AMD64).
• High level interface classes were extended and updated as well as VCL/CLX/LCL support and low level interface.
• Some old demos were removed, new added, and rest was updated.

You can learn more about Imaging at its homepage.