What is Gorgon?

A 2D graphics library for .NET and SlimDX. Also, it’s proof that I can’t do 3D.

What’s the licensing? What did you do to my soul?

Versions 1.1.x and up of Gorgon are licensed under the MIT license. Your soul is a lie.

How far along are you? Is it done yet? How about now?

Gorgon is complete, released and in version 1.1.x.

What can it do?

Oh sweet jeebus, what can’t it do? It can slice, dice, puree, and even solve pi to 3,899,122,129,991,211,100 decimal places. It rules. Really, it does. It’s better than Half Life 2 because I say it is.

That said, it:

Supports pixel/vertex shaders.
Supports stencil buffers.
Supports png, jpg, bmp, etc.. image formats.
Runs pretty swift. I can dump well over 10,000 sprites to the screen and still get a >=30 FPS.
Supports render targets
Supports drawing to various surfaces (i.e. lines, points, circles, ellipses, etc…)
Supports virtual file systems for packed files and folder mounting.
Has a plug-in architecture, so you can extend it indefinitely.
Has a nifty keen animation system.
Fonts! Bitmap fonts. Flexible bitmap fonts even.
Has support for raw input from input devices. Even has rudimentary joystick support.
Can render into any type of windows control, e.g. a panel, form, textbox (yes, textbox. No, I don’t know why you’d want that).
I’m sure there’s more, but I’m too lazy to look it up.

Yeah, it’s pretty metal.

What do I need to make all my dreams come true?

Your dreams mean nothing, and are ultimately futile. Anyway, you’ll require the following:

.NET 3.5 SP1
Windows XP or later.
Microsoft DirectX 9 (installed by the SlimDX installer which is installed by Gorgon)

To compile the library

Visual C# 2010 to compile the library. If you're tight on funds and don't have a kidney to sell so you can put a down payment on Visual Studio, you can always opt for the FREE Express editions. This is only to compile the library, to use the library Visual Studio 2008 will work as well.

To use the library

You may use any .NET 3.5 enabled language to write an application with Gorgon.

Source code

Source code is included with the installer, however if you want to get the latest and not so greatest version of the source, you may go to the SVN repository for Gorgon (see the Source tab up there? Yeah, click that).