Wagenheimer's Game Development Blog

The latest version of Asphyre Engine, now called Asphyre Sphinx, was finally officially released!

This release supersedes all previous Asphyre releases and is under continuous development.

Asphyre Sphinx main features :

2D Graphics Features

• Image transformation including rotation, skew, mirroring and so on.
• Alpha-blending with multiple effects such as add, subtract, multiply, shadow among others.
• Buffered drawing calls deliver extremely high rendering performance in real-time.
• Many different drawing primitives such as rectangles, ellipses, arcs, ribbons and holes.
• Multiple image pixel formats to maximize quality and minimize video memory consumption.
• Images can be loaded from compressed ASDb archives, external files and streams.
• Patterns (small sub-images) can be distributed among different textures to reduce memory footprint.
• Dynamic textures allow fast pixel access for effects such as plasma and destructible terrain.
• Rendering targets allow dazzling visual effects such as motion blur, glows and other effects.
• Proper handling of lost devices, surviving Alt+Tab, Win+L and other rare events.
• Bitmap text drawing with Unicode support, color gradient tags and alignment options.
• Integration with Vampyre Imaging Library for loading many different image formats.

3D Graphics Features

• Easy to use 3D mesh drawing even for inexperienced developers.
• Mesh instancing for improved performance when many small meshes are drawn.
• Illumination models including Phong, Blinn-Phong, Minneart, Cook-Torrance, Oren-Nayer, Isotropic and Anisotropic Ward.
• Optimized 3D pipeline with hidden surface removal and triangle sorting.
• Transparent support for DirectX 7, DirectX 9 and OpenGL providers.
• Billboard rendering for particle effects, explosions and smoke.
• Load meshes from 3D Studio Max using the conversion tool, which can read 3DS and ASE formats.
• Mesh generation code for 3D planes, spheres, round boxes, torus, torus knots and super ellipsoids.

Other Features

• Capture the state of all keyboard keys, read multiple joysticks and mouse displacement.
• Store all images, sounds and other files using LZ77 compression in a single ASDb archive for easier deployment.
• Set password for ASDb archive to encrypt the contents using XTEA 128-bit cipher so nobody else can open your media files.
• Complete set of mathematical types with operator overloading for 2D and 3D vectors and matrices.
• High-precision timer for independent graphics rendering and object movement.

Comments

The Japanese version of my Game Abra Academy that is in final stage of Beta Testing, is about to be released, and is being finalized using Asphyre Sphinx. The conversion was very smooth and easy.