Irrlicht.NET CP’s blog

As you might noticed allready I’m much more often visiting the forum then before. That’s because I have acquired a stable unlimited connection recently. So from now, I won’t need to pack the repository and bring it somewhere to upload to the SVN, that cool! Although I have some hard days at the university, there comes session and I have to study so much subjects, and you know, really pisses me off.

Finally, I’ve managed to swap wiki and wordpress, so the main page now points to the blog instead of wiki. I did this rather because wiki was updated too rarely. Now I’ll have one more stimulus to write here and put the light on the wrapper development because this is the main page.

Anyway some problems still exist, for example I don’t know how to change the contents of the left menu in the wiki. I found out that it’s stored in the database but … in the blob. How the hell I’m supposed to edit a binary data by hand? So you’d better not to use it until I didn’t found how to solve this crap.

Recently I downloaded this wonderful game, but after installing of the ATI proprietary fglrx driver, the game refuses to launch. Well, it launches somehow, but hangs on the loading screen. Damn, I don’t know what to do - on the one side I want to use all capabilities of the video card, and on the second - to play this outstanding game. Now I’m stuck with the dilemma - should I remove the driver or the game.

Damn this blows my mind :-/

Yeah, I know we’ve missed all the deadlines with the new release. Please don’t blame us, because I have very difficult period in my university. You see, the upcoming midterm  session leaves me no spare time to develop the wrapper, because I’m in the pre-graduate state.

But! It’s not so bad as you might think. In the next two weeks I’ll have the horrible time, but after them there will be a relaxation, so I’ll be able to continue the developing of the wrapper.

So please be patient, and hold on a bit.

Cheers, Lester .

Today Thoran told me his string conversion method seems working on vista so we can release a second RC of the 0.8.1 version. This will be the last one before 0.8.1. The next will be 0.9 I’m currently working on.

Anyway I tried to compile the lib but there are some errors in the source. I have to look at it at home.

I must admit I have hard days at my high school so the release can be shifted for week or two. But I hope it will be ok.

That’s all for now.

Lester.

I am glad to inform you, that I finally managed to solve the Vista string bug of the Irrlicht.NET CP wrapper (See the posting in the forum)

The problem was based on the fact that .NET marshalling does an implicit freeing of memory allocated in the unmanaged wrapper part and being returned as a function return value. Rewriting the code in Irrlicht.NET lib so this freeing is not done implicitly by the managed code, but by calling a special, newly introduced method for memory freeing in the unmanaged wrapper (freeUMMemory(…)) helped resolving the crashes.

And the new code for memory release in unmanaged memory areas:

The security issue with requirement of admin rights to run the app remains.

The new code needs testing with unicode chars, to see if all works correct.
Furthermore testing on Windows XP and Linux is required, but as I sticked to code examples from the mono project I am quite optimistic for it to work at least under Linux.

Edit: As a further remark I just tested the code on WindowsXP and it worked. So let’s hope lester can get it to work under Linux.

Good night all.
Thoran

Hi there!

I am Thoran and I want to start with a short introdcution:

I am working on the Windows port of Irrlicht.NET CP. I have a background of several programming languages mostly on Windows. These include C++,C VB, VB.NET, C#. I am dedicated to hobby game development which is my motivation for getting Irrlicht.NETCP running as I want to use it to create platform independent game programs.

As lester already mentioned I am currently working on fixing this nasty Vista string bug. What I can say so far is one pitfall in running Irrlicht.NET CP on Vista:

• Use Administrator rights for running your Irrlicht.NET CP application.
  You may ask why? The reason is that you need certain privileges to allow the DLLImport of Irrlicht.NET CP to work. It might be a more safer option to add these special privileges to your group you belong to, however I am not deep enough into Vista to tell you how. So the easy, unsecure approach is to use admin privileges to run your application.

Considering the strings bug, I hope to finally have found the solution, but it still needs testing and keep you updated on the progress.

So long

Thoran

Shit that’s gonna be a bad practice.

Everytime ATI releases a new driver the life becames harder and harder, despite the official  release notes.

Look, the phoronix guys say they managed to bring compiz to life on it, but whatever I tried - nothing helped. It just doesn’t work.

Besides the 3d seems to be very unstable. Applications I’ve launched worked for about 10 minutes and then hung.

I’ll better downgrade to the stable opensource driver.

Today Thoran tried to fix strings conversion from managed to unmanaged code and back.

Here is what he wrote:

I guess it’s working now, despite the unclear synopsis of the windows function. I’m wondering do the ms ppl allways create such functions with sometimes ridiculous syntax?

Ok, I managed to restore the database, but without posts

Here is what I showed before - a working version 0.9 of the wrapper.

Anyway the full support of irrlicht 1.4 is far enough, if I won’t find a way to transfer irrlicht’s templates (such as arrays, lists and so on) into .NET.