NEWS: GameEx 6.02 and BubbleBobble Theme

[Tom Speirs]

8th May, 2006 - New BubbleBobble Theme

BubbleBobble theme available on the downloads page. Special request for Eric's daughter!

Thanks to Oxbow for the original theme. I hope you don't mind.

8th May, 2006 - GameEx 6.02

Hopefully fixes font issue reported by Headkaze

Fixes 3d alpha blended transitions at 32-bit colour

Automatically adds MAME CMD line options for new bezel feature

Fixes V2 theme image centering

[sWampy]

I haven't tried it yet, but does the bezel feature auto skip vertical games you already have artwork/bezels created for? I already have custom ones made for pacman/centiped/galaga/etc that use the orginal artwork as bezels on those games, but it would be nice to have them created for games that I haven't gotten around to making the for.

[headkaze]

Font issue seems fixed on my end

[emphatic]

Wow, superb update! Did the GameEx logo always appear on the left side bezel? If yes, I guess that the dynamic creation never worked for me in the initial release and I had the old ones showing from mame.ini. But now it does! Super! Oh, the smoke from the MAME logo that you have covered with a GameEx logo is showing slightly. Should be taken care of.

The centering of the snaps/mng is just like before, fantastic. Thank you very much for fixing it.

I still have font antialiasing issues. I'm running GameEx in 800x600 on a PC screen with the font DIN (Attached). In case this is a font specific issue, no need for unnecessary troubleshooting.

Emph

DIN.zip

[headkaze]

Yeah I still have anti-aliasing issues, I was talking about the line appearing on the top of some capital letters. The problem is (as far as I can tell) is that GameEx is using blue as the suface background colour for fonts. This means when the font is drawn on the blue background it will introduce blue "jaggies" around the edge. DirectDraw can only colour key, it dosn't support alpha channels so you will never get a perfectly blended edge. The only way around it would be to make the font surface a colour that matches the theme's background or font edge.

[Tom Speirs]

  headkaze said:

Yeah I still have anti-aliasing issues, I was talking about the line appearing on the top of some capital letters. The problem is (as far as I can tell) is that GameEx is using blue as the suface background colour for fonts. This means when the font is drawn on the blue background it will introduce blue "jaggies" around the edge. DirectDraw can only colour key, it dosn't support alpha channels so you will never get a perfectly blended edge. The only way around it would be to make the font surface a colour that matches the theme's background or font edge.

As you say its a DirectDraw limitation. Its actually not really alpha blending at all.

[headkaze]

The little blue pixels around the edge of the text outline is because the DirectDraw Surface the font is being drawn onto is blue. When you draw text onto a DirectDraw Surface it will antialias the edge, but since it dosn't support alpha colour channel - when you colour key the blue background - it leaves blue pixels around the text. I guess you chose blue because the default theme background is blue and it would blend better with it?