First Steps

I'd hoped to post Wednesday, but that didn't happen.... I want to try to post a couple times a week, and set a hard limit of not less than once every seven days. I'm already a day past due, by that measure.

I prefer to use Code::Blocks as my IDE, but I was having problems getting it to play nicely with the Microsoft compiler and latest DirectX SDK. (I admit I'm not terribly familiar with setting IDEs up.) So I downloaded Visual C++ 2008 Express and it works, but I'm slightly less happy. It behaves somewhat differently than I'm used to, but after spending some time with it, I'm feeling okay.

I prefer games to be designed to run at whatever resolution the player prefers and the hardware permits. Too many games don't do this. I remember it took Dawn of War way to long to support widescreen monitors properly, for example. So my first goal was to create a display settings dialog. Which I've now done:





Right now it only enumerates resolutions for the first monitor on the first display adapter. I don't have a multi-monitor setup, so I don't feel comfortable coding for it without being able to see how it works.

The idea here is that when you run the game, this is dialog pops up first, and then the main window gets sized on creation to whatever the player chooses. Next goal is to actually use these settings to create the window, and to save these settings (INI file, or registry?) so that the dialog needn't be displayed every time the game is run. I also want to add a menu option to resize in-game, which would call this dialog to be displayed.

Looking at the screenshots just now, I notice the tail of the 'y' in 'display' is being clipped. Need to fix that...