RepeatUntil: All works perfectly, except the notepad demo. Notepad is opening, but then nothing more: no message, nothing when I type. I have Blitz 3D and win98...
Hmm, I was afraid of that. As I understand it, some (not all) of the messages are interpreted differently on 95/98/ME than on NT/2K/XP. This was one of the "unknown territories" for me.
RepeatUntil: By the way, can I already use BLESS in Cod2Doc? (next version is going to be released in a few days). Will it be free?
If you have confidence in it, you're welcome to use it as it is... It's certainly free right now, as it's a beta. I'm not sure if people will find it useful enough to charge for in the future, when all the issues have been worked out.
skn3[ac]: I don't much like the idea of using input events to hack into blitz, but it seems like a clever way to do it all
Yes, you're right, I would classify it as a "hack" too. =) As it stands, it seems to me the safest (and easiest) way to do it. Coding some other method of communication between bless.dll and your Blitz program would (a) be more complicated for the programmer, (b) have essentially introduced another message queue to the Blitz program, opening the door to all kinds of race conditions and such -- very, very difficult to deal with correctly, especially not having access to the internal workings of Blitz.
Fortunately, the "hack" is (hopefully) quite benign. It works ("plays nice") with Blitz' own internal message pump to get messages to the programmer via either unused UTF-16 codes or unused keyboard scancodes. I still wonder how it will work on a unicode-enabled machine (with the default method) or on a machine with some weird keyboard that actually uses the "unused" scancodes (with the alternate method).
Anyway, you should give it a try for your custom GDI stuff -- I wrote it partly with that dilemma in mind, having run into that problem before (no way to get WM_PAINT).
RepeatUntil: So it's like we can't run 2 programs with BLESS at the same time.
Is it a known bug of the beta version? Is there any chance it will be corrected in the future version?
Is it a known bug of the beta version? Is there any chance it will be corrected in the future version?
Yes, as aCID2 noted, it's a known issue, though it seems to react much worse on a Win98 machine than on an XP machine. Yikes. I am planning on fixing that.
All, thanks for the kind words and support. I hope it (eventually?) works out great in your projects.