Book Image

Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey

By : Andrea Magni
4 (1)
Book Image

Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey

4 (1)
By: Andrea Magni

Overview of this book

FireMonkey (FMX) is a cross-platform application framework that allows developers to create exciting user interfaces and deliver applications on multiple operating systems (OS). This book will help you learn visual programming with Delphi and FMX. Starting with an overview of the FMX framework, including a general discussion of the underlying philosophy and approach, you’ll then move on to the fundamentals and architectural details of FMX. You’ll also cover a significant comparison between Delphi and the Visual Component Library (VCL). Next, you’ll focus on the main FMX components, data access/data binding, and style concepts, in addition to understanding how to deliver visually responsive UIs. To address modern application development, the book takes you through topics such as animations and effects, and provides you with a general introduction to parallel programming, specifically targeting UI-related aspects, including application responsiveness. Later, you’ll explore the most important cross-platform services in the FMX framework, which are essential for delivering your application on multiple platforms while retaining the single codebase approach. Finally, you’ll learn about FMX’s built-in 3D functionalities. By the end of this book, you’ll be familiar with the FMX framework and be able to build effective cross-platform apps.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Delphi GUI Programming Frameworks
4
Section 2: The FMX Framework in Depth
13
Section 3: Pushing to The Top: Advanced Topics

Learning about lights

The TLight class models a light source in the FMX framework. There are three different kinds of lights:

  • Spot
  • Directional
  • Point

You can set the LightType property of a TLight instance to switch the light type for that instance. There are also a number of other details you can set up, including the positioning and orientation of the light source. For some types (that is, Spot) there are additional parameters, such as the spot cut-off angle (SpotCutOff property in degrees) and the light intensity (SpotExponent – the higher the value for this parameter, the more focused the light beam will be), that you can set.

In the following screenshot, you can see what happens when you switch off the light in the last project we discussed (the Viewport demo):

Figure 13.12

However, keep in mind that FMX does not provide a shadow-casting system. Instead, setting lights means defining the lightmap for the scene in order to determine how to render 3D objects...