jka@niksula.hut.fi (Jari Petri Karjala) (04/15/91)
We are designing a general purpose library of sprite routines. As a
product of the design we have produced a document which describes a
proposed format for storing sprite data in a disk file and an
application programming interface for basic sprite functions. The
document also describes some of the problems with various sprite
implementations and possible solutions.
The document describes the subject in quite a hardware independent
way, but our emphasis is towards PC environment and thus software
sprites. The actual source code needed to display the sprite, video
mode manipulation etc is NOT included (or even written, yet).
We are now seeking for comments from the Net community. The whole
document is not included in this article, only the table of contents.
If you are interested in the subject, send us mail and we'll send you
the whole document. The next goal of our project will be to actually
implement this sprite library for use with both C and (turbo)pascal in
PC environment. This library would be released as FreeWare package.
Authors:
J.C. Kessels
Philips de Goedelaan 7
5615 PN Eindhoven
The Netherlands
jeroenk@cnps.philips.nl
J.P. Karjala
Veropellontie 11
00780 Helsinki
Finland
jka@niksula.hut.fi
The Table of Contents (3rd level omitted):
1. Sprites: an analysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1. What is a sprite. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2. Displaying a sprite. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.3. Sprite flicker. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.4. Flicker reduction methods. . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.5. Storage of sprites on disk. . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2. Kessels Karjala Knapsack (KKK) proposal. . . . . . . . 15
2.1. Construction of KKK file. . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.2. KKK Application Programmers Interface. . . . . . . 18
3. Sprite LiBrary (SLB) format proposal. . . . . . . . . . 22
3.1. KKK data field definitions. . . . . . . . . . . . 23
3.2. Initialize sprite system. . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
3.3. Create and delete sprites. . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
3.4. Display sprites. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
3.5. Get or Set sprite information. . . . . . . . . . . 43
3.6. Collision detection. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
3.7. Program layout. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Appendix A. The sprite library project. . . . . . . . . . 48
Appendix B. The SPRITE data type. . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Appendix C. Lists. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
1. The list datatype. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
2. Insert item into list. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
3. Drop item from list. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
4. Move item to "here". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
5. Goto top of list. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
6. Goto bottom of list. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
7. Get next item from list. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
8. Get previous item from list. . . . . . . . . . . . 57
9. Count items in list. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57