VBGamer

Sorry guys, there will be no news tonight, im off out VERY shortly, and will only be back in time to crawl into bed =) However have no fear, I have been working furiously on some EXCELLENT new stuff for you guys, and i should be able to post it tomorrow. OK you twisted my arm, here is a sneak peek. Basically it builds onto the sample i released yesterday (about custom image formats). It now supports multiple Colour depths. Now because of VB's loadpicture , only loading up in 24bpp i went native, and now load the images in manually, this way we can capture all the info we need and our custom image can be either 8bpp or 24bpp (and sports a nice alpha channel too =). So i added the ability to load Bitmaps into our custom image format, (which can then be displayed as normal). So i thought, ok lets have the ability to save BMP's too in whatever colour depth we are in. So you can load your custom format from disk, and save it out as a bitmap. Cool huh ?? Well not really you say. So after that was done, i added support for TGA's TIFF's PSD's (photoshop) PCX (8bpp and 24bpp) and the ability to save out to each (except for PSD's at the moment). So now you can load a TGA and save it as a bitmap, or display it first, save it as a PCX, then load it from the PCX, save it as your custom image etc etc =) Remember though this is ALL native VB code, and i've optimised it so that it actually loads images quickly (even RLE compressed Photoshop files =). Im in the middle of adding more image formats, so you can just load them in, and stick them in a picture box, or on a directdraw surface, whatever. Each file format loader/saving is in a seperate module so you can just add support for the image type you want. NO EXTERNAL DLL's/OCX's all native VB code. (I love CopyMemory ! =) Im working on compression at the moment (using one of the standard, non patented LZ algorithms, but it remains to be seen how quick i can get this. (Damn microsoft for not exposing the memcmp function !!! =) Once this is all in place, it makes it so simple to perform effects on the images (such as blur/mosaic/flip/rotate/resample or whatever) and those will follow. Anyway, hopefully i'll have it all working for you tomorrow (it's not for the faint hearted, but if you just want to USE it, not understand the code, then thats fine =) I started it last night (at about 1am) and it's now 4 pm the following day. Hmm wonder how many other formats i can add before tomorrow hehe. Sorry for not being able to update the site tonight (after all your fine comments too). It wont be a common occurance i assure you. Thanks to all who sent me news, it'll be in a big update tomorrow. Thanks Adam