I am one of 1600 people.

You wrote the game, assuming you could load huge amounts of graphics !
That would be a problem if you'd use another graphics library, too.
Instead, try loading images from disk while the game runs, and discard them when they're not used anymore. I think that will solve most of your problems.

Thats exactly it. When the engine was concieved the game was origonally a tile based engine. We've had tests of up to a thousand independantly rotated and scaled moderately sized images running at 40 fps. But they were referencing the same image.

Our character animation is the worst part. we have at least 300 images per character for 8 directions that can be displayed at any instant so they must be in video memory. Multiply that by 7 or 8 characters and we are screwed.

Allright, here's the rundown-

Death 999:
Here is how SPECTRE works and then why it failed-
**Sprite is basically an array of Quads binded to a seperate texture. Offset is an integer that can be set which tells which indice in the quad array to draw. If you want to have animation you change the offset and no slow-down from blitting occurs. Sprite also has its own transform matrix, a ZDrawOrder variable, and other handy flags.
**SpritePipe is just an ArrayList of Sprites to be drawn. it also has a transform matrix and and other handy flags. A SpritePipe is like a layer for Sprites.
**RenderLine(GL/SW) can create a window to draw on as easily as SDL. It has a List of SpritePipes. it applys the tranform and flags of the SpritePipe, then draws each Sprite according to ZDrawOrder with it's transform and flags.

The functionality was that you could load you menu in one SpritePipe, game sprites in another SpritePipe. and you could remove a single Sprite, or a whole SpritePipe, by setting a flag(like to add or remove the menue, or have a sprite remove itself when it dies). or rotate the entire screen or everything in a SpritePipe with one transform... Unfortunately our data structures work in a way that it is very difficult to move one sprite to another SpritePipe. Also this structure would have been fine for a java SC2 clone because of the small demand for large images. But our Map's alone can take up to 10 MB in memory, And then the amount of memory for a single character with up to 300 images loaded into memory times however many characters there are on the screen. Our engine crashes from an out of memory error when loading our larger sized maps(20 megs uncompressed b/c of animation). Add to that bugs that appeared depending on what machine you were on and problems with making the same veiwing area despite screen resolution and you get an engine that would be really good if we had a smaller game and had the time to re-code it.

BioSlayer:
Although I'm definately not going to use C#, I feel you on irrlicht as I have dabbled in it in the past. If I were to do anything truly 3D, it would be in irrlicht.

Novus:
Thanks thanks for the camparison on both engines. SDL seems to be the way to go now because of the vorbis support. One thing that I did for SPECTRE was SoundFile.java, which plays OGG, WAV, and MIDI  very easily. You just pass in the name of the file and then use the play, pause, stop, and restart methods and even put sounds to be played in a FIFO queue which is something that I think is nifty.

Deus_Siddis:
Thanks for the suggestion of Clan. I tried to look at the documentation and I couldn't follow it very easily so that rules it out in my mind.

Zeep-Eeep & Culture20:
Thanks for the heads-up on the OSes and dependancies.

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Ok, so heres where I'm at now I've thought about it and it seems that I might just turn project aqua into a 3D game entirely and use Irrlicht for the graphics, and SDL for input and sound. The game world will still be an isometric 2D feel though hopefully to simplify camera and movement. I am not looking to re-write SPECTRE in C/C++, that would only take up more time unless anyone had any suggestions on a better/more flexible engine organization.

Thank you all for you time and please let me know how you would go about this, or have other suggestions.

I'm curious to what clan is so if you could elaborate that would be great! JOGL is what we used to make our own graphics engine and it is essentially OpenGL in Java.

Hello again.
For the past year I have been working with friends (including Halleck) on Project Aqua, an RPG game written in Java. We decided to write our own LGPL'd graphics engine called "SPECTRE" which uses OpenGL (via JOGL) to render everything.

Unfortunately most of our time is spent coding and debugging our graphics abstraction layer. The increased complexity of the game and the graphics requirements have grown so much that we are forced to keep working on our graphics engine and not the game. We are also running into some major limitations with the Java VM.

So I say "Screw it all!" I think we will get better results with C, especially since we can take advantage of all the free C libraries that are avaliable (whose functionality we've had to recreate from scratch with SPECTRE.)

We were looking into game/graphics libraries and found two that we think would encompass what SPECTRE was trying to accomplish, and more. We would like a cross-platform solution that can handle 2D graphics and input with relative ease.

One of our programmers reccomended Allegro, which looks like it will meet our needs. Halleck said that SDL was a better choice, but that there were experts on both libraries here that could help us decide.

Thanks for any information you can provide.

as the minipillow whooshes toward me at high speed and as it approaches at near soeed of  light, and because of it's theoretical powers it refracts space and projects an image of another dimension where i get smacked by the pillow. yet whilst the image is being projected time slows down (from the near light speed minipillow) enough  for me to move aside from the projectile. BUT as halleck rolls over the couch he falls then stumbles directly into the dimensional image wake of me actually getting hit by the minipillow thus collapsing the wake. the dimensional void tavells past me knocking me to the ground and to to pillow now well behind my head. the collapsing Dimensional wake/void  finally reaches the minipillow it causes a (chaotic) gravitatioal cascade which warps around in a horizontal ark wehre it eaches it's epoch at  position equal between my face and my own pillow thus causing a collision at a dimentional convergence of the minipillows previous pinnical of gravitational power, respectively... that collision causes a vertex of time encapsulating muller and sending him back through the ether to his second post... and at the same time causing a dimensional reverburation, forcing halleck back to the correct dimension.   MULLER HAS GONE BACK IN TIME TO  HIS SECOND POST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  mwahahahah!!!

muller suddenly pops back to the current time in an instant and now everybody has a large, unexplained lump on there head as if someone had gone back in time and and bashed them with a pillow!

Suprise suprise DuuuuuuDes!
*double-thwaps lukipela and halleck*

ok, now for some commentary aside from my seemingly unintelligible post;

hello, i am a amateur programmer and i am new here. i am fairly profficient at java and c++ but have never taken the time to learn the windows api or opengl to a sufficient degree for a fairly extensive project. I am not interested in making a game per se, but i do like programing all the different aspects. it's like i try to be a mediocre at everything from compression to networking to gfx... And i would just like to say what a great job to all the people who contributed to SC2 in any way.



!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I HAVE TRANSCENDED TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


I PROCEED TO BASH LUKIPELA, HALLECK, FALCON, VOID, AND DEFIANT  AS THEY APPEAR IN THE ROOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

MWAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*pops back to my fourth post...*

Hey y'all, this is my first post. My friend Halleck was showing me SC2, and it was awesome... then i was like "dude i found this artists website from sweeden" and he was like "dude, i know him, he's on the forums at uqm, his name is arne" and i was like wow, then yesterday i was like "dude i found this cool demo game called 'Black Sky' on a opengl link" and he was like "i know that dude, he's Viperg on uqm" and i was like "dude i got to join that site" and he was like "dude i know!!! all the cool technical people are on that forum" and today i was like "dude, ok i signed up" and he said "great now post something" and im like "dude, i am now!"