Overview
of version 1.0 Beta 4


Overview

The Ivory Draw component collection consits of 6 components installed on the component palette, plus 2 other base components not installed on the palette, and a unit. In this section, I will introduce these components and classes. Here we will only have a quick look at them, the detailed description can be found in the Reference Manual.

After installation, the component palette looks like the screen shot in Figure 1.




Figure 1: Ivory Draw in the component palette

TIvoryDraw is the main component that is responsible for switching into DirectX mode and keeping track of all the other Ivory Draw components.

TIvorySurface is the major surface component. Surfaces are free spaces where you can draw anything. Later you can show them on the screen. The screen, the background image, a picture, a sprite are all surfaces.

TIvoryBitmapSurface is the a special surface that can load BMP and PCX images from files or resources, and can display these images on itself. These surfaces behave much like TIvorySurface, though they are not exactly the same.

TIvoryBitmap is a wrapper around Windows HBITMAP. It can load a BMP file or resource. These bitmaps are not surfaces, but they can be copied onto any surface.

TIvoryPalette stores the 256 colors that you can use simultaneously. It is able to load a palette from a BMP or PCX file or resource, or you can create your own palette from scratch.

TIvoryMapper is a component that helps you generate maps. TIvoryMapper stores several small images in a large image. It is similar to the VCL component TImageList. You can use TIvoryMapper to do animations, or draw any tiled scene, especially the scene of a 2D game, or store the cards for a card game, etc.

TCustomIvorySurface is the base surface component. You'll never instantiate such a component, but you can descend from it.

TIvoryResFileBase is the base component for reading files or resources. All the Ivory Draw components that can load a bitmap or a palette from a file or a resource are inherited from TIvoryResFileBase.

TIvoryCanvas is the canvas, in other words, the drawing area, of the Ivory Draw surfaces. TIvoryCanvas is much like VCL class TCanvas, except that it is designed for DirectX. When you're drawing a line, a circle, or a text, you'll draw via this canvas object.


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