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By robin, August 2, 2009 4:59 pm

Working feverishly on a renderer for swfs, and it is coming along nicely. I am trying to keep it very fast, I think the best speed will be combo gpu/cpu. The cpu part is using a fair bit of bezier ‘premanipulation’, and then a line scan with basic antialiasing. The goal is to be able to use tiny vector defs for xna games, making them easy to download/store, and zune friendly. It will also be fairly easily portable as the rendering algorithm is just using code and a memory bitmap (so not gdi etc dependencies). No assembler for this version as you can’t use PInvoke in XNA and afaik that rules out assembly (need to investigate more, I am using ‘unsafe’ already though, so maybe).

Every time I delve into the swf format, I marvel at what a fricken genius John Gay is. Anyone can put every possible feature in, given time, and end up with a bloated piece of crap software. Great software is a result of deep thought, which results in everything you need and nothing you don’t. But this, it is only half of what you are sure you needed, and yet the result is twice as much as you thought you could ever use. Its like a winning F1 car that somehow has a movie theater inside it.

Here is a screenshot of the CPU only part, more to come..