SDL::Tutorial::Drawing - basic drawing with Perl SDL |
SDL::Tutorial::Drawing - basic drawing with Perl SDL
# to read this tutorial $ perldoc SDL::Tutorial::Drawing
# to create a bare-bones SDL app based on this tutorial $ perl -MSDL::Tutorial::Drawing=basic_app.pl -e 1
As explained in the SDL::Tutorial manpage, all graphics in SDL live on a surface. Consequently, all drawing operations operate on a surface, whether drawing on it directly or blitting from another surface. The important modules for this exercise are the SDL::Rect manpage and the SDL::Color manpage.
As usual, we'll start by creating a the SDL::App manpage object:
use SDL::App;
my $app = SDL::App->new( -width => 640, -height => 480, -depth => 16, );
A SDL::Rect object is an SDL surface, just as an SDL::App object is. As you'd expect, you need to specify the size of this object as you create it. You can also specify its coordinates relative to the origin.
Note: The origin, or coordinates 0, 0, is at the upper left of the screen.
Here's how to create a square 100 pixels by 100 pixels centered in the window:
use SDL::Rect;
my $rect = SDL::Rect->new( -height => 100, -width => 100, -x => 270, -y => 390, );
This won't actually display anything yet, it just creates a rectangular
surface. Of course, even if it did display, you wouldn't see anything, as it
defaults to the background color just as $app
does. That's where SDL::Color
comes in.
SDL::Color objects represent colors in the SDL world. These colors are additive, so they're represented as mixtures of Red, Green, and Blue components. The color values are traditionally given in hexadecimal numbers. If you're exceedingly clever or really like the math, you can figure out which values are possible by comparing them to your current bit depth. SDL does a lot of autoconversion for you, though, so unless extreme speed or pedantic detail are important, you can get by without worrying too much.
Creating a color object is reasonably easy. As the color scheme is additive, the lower the number for a color component, the less of that color. The higher the number, the higher the component. Experimentation may be your best bet, as these aren't exactly the primary colors you learned as a child (since that's a subtractive scheme).
Let's create a nice, full blue:
use SDL::Color;
my $color = SDL::Color->new( -r => 0x00, -g => 0x00, -b => 0xff, );
Note: The numbers are in hex; if you've never used hex notation in Perl
before, the leading 0x
just signifies that the rest of the number is in
base-16. In this case, the blue component has a value of 255 and the red and
green are both zero.
The fill()
method of SDL::Surface fills a given rectangular section of the
surface with the given color. Since we already have a rect and a color, it's
as easy as saying:
$app->fill( $rect, $color );
That's a little subtle; it turns out that the SDL::Rect created earlier represents a destination within the surface of the main window. It's not attached to anything else. We could re-use it later, as necessary.
If you try the code so far, you'll notice that it still doesn't display. Don't
fret. All that's left to do is to call update()
on the appropriate surface.
As usual, update()
takes a Rect to control which part of the surface to
update. In this case, that's:
$app->update( $rect );
This may seem like a useless extra step, but it can be quite handy. While drawing to the screen directly seems like the fastest way to go, the intricacies of working with hardware with the appropriate timings is tricky.
You can, of course, create all sorts of Rects with different sizes and coordinates as well as varied colors and experiment to your heart's content drawing them to the window. It's more fun when you can animate them smoothly, though.
That, as usual, is another tutorial.
the basics of Perl SDL.
basic animation techniques
chromatic, <chromatic@wgz.org>
Written for and maintained by the Perl SDL project, http://sdl.perl.org/.
No known bugs.
Copyright (c) 2003 - 2004, chromatic. All rights reserved. This module is distributed under the same terms as Perl itself, in the hope that it is useful but certainly under no guarantee.
SDL::Tutorial::Drawing - basic drawing with Perl SDL |