SpinnerJoy 2

orion elenzil
20030427

SpinnerJoy 2 is the directX 9 - ification of SpinnerJoy 1, which is plain old windows GDI stuff.

Frankly, the previous version is more interesting to me at this point, but i'll probably pluck on with the new one in the hope that something will emerge.

Requirements:

• DirectX 9
  Even if you have dx9 installed, there's a chance this may not run, it's very in-development, but i have hopes, as it's pretty much right out of the dx9 appwizard.
  


• A moderately fast computer
  Actually, this is an assumption. It may run fine on a pII 300 for all i know.
  

Usage:

• Basically, there's a bunch of spinning lines.
  They Spin Faster the further they are from the center.
  SpinnerJoy 1 has a lot more options for controlling the motion of the lines, as well as saving and loading your settings.
  


• Change Device
  Lets you change the rendering device, if that sort of thing appeals to you.
  


• FullScreen
  Takes you to full-screen mode. Press ESC once to return from FS mode.
  


• The two text fields
  are the number of spinners across and down.
  Gotta be at least 2 in each direction. Values over 100 should be entered w/ extreme caution.
  


• Button 1
  Toggles the drawing of lines.
  


• Button 2
  Toggles the drawing of a textured square.
  The square has one vertex per spinner.
  Currently, the position and the texture coordinates of each vertex are being changed according the its corresponding spinner.
  I'm not really as happy with the textured square as i'd hoped, but i plan to keep fooling with it and see if something more visually interesting can be gotten.
  


• Button 3
  Toggles some statistics text.
  


• The ?? Button
  opens this help file.
  


• The o---o Button
  Links the L1 and L2 sliders together, or not.
  


• The W Slider
  Sets the width of each line. The width doesn't re-scale when you change the window size, so when you're going to full-screen, you may want to beef up the width a bit.
  


• The L1 & L2 Sliders
  Control the length of each line.
  L1 is the length of the "head" and L2 the length of the "tail".
  The length of the lines scales appropriately when you change the window size.
  


• The A Slider
  Is the Transparency of the lines.
  


• The S Slider
  Controls the Flow Of Time !
  

Blah Blah

I was surprised & disappointed by the speed of the new ID3DXLine interface for drawing 2D lines.
Even with width 1 and no anti-aliasing, there seemed to be a pretty big speed hit, so my hopes for having really a LOT of lines seems pretty futile. I may re-try it with ordinary 3D lines.

For example, on my 1.1GHz system, the windows GDI version draws 100x100 spinners at about 30Hz, whereas the same number of spinners in DirectX9 runs at only about 15Hz!
I blame society.