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I am writing a small RPG in the vein of Diablo, and although I haven't encountered any speed issues yet (only 5 days into production...) I figured I would see if there was a better graphics library. So far, I have been using just BLOAD GET and PUT. I don't really want any fancy effects atm, but if there is any library that I can just replace GET with something else and it be faster, that'd be great. So is there such a thing?
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Well if you want something other than the built in GFXlib you could use Allegro, OpenGL or SDL.
gunder
"I have a perfect body, but it's in the trunk and starting to smell."
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but will I notice a significant speed boost? And are they simple to use. I know opengl isn't.
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I'm going to be honest, I've never used any of them. I've heard quite a few of the more experienced coders here say that GFXlib is quite fast so I'm not sure how much of an increase you would see, if at all. If it's just a small project I would suggest that you just stick with what you have. If it starts to slow down you could always find the bottleneck and re-write it.
gunder
"I have a perfect body, but it's in the trunk and starting to smell."
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That would depend on your computer hardware.
There are video cards that have special accelerated mores for Open GL and/or Direct-X if your video card has OpenGL acceleration then yes, you will notice a definite speed boost (and smoothness of animation for that matter). If it's not, yit might even slow your animation down. Likewise for Direct-X accelerated cards.
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ok, sounds good. Freebasic seems fast enough.
yeah, to be honest, gfxlib is amazing. its more than what youll ever need for a 'normal' application. its seriously like a gift from heaven... fb and gfxlib :o the gods love us people...
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The only library that beat gfxlib in the benchmarks is allegro, which was still pretty neck to neck. I'm pretty sure directdraw would be a little faster (gfxlib being a wrapper lib), but freebasic doesn't support objects at present.
THe only practical way to improve the speed is to use a hardware-accelerated driver, like opengl. Or a wrapper library like sdlgl, etc.