Game Programming Retardation HELP!

Get the book ''Inside DirectX.'' Taught me so much than I already knew, and goes much more into detail about the things Lamothe leaves alone. It will help you alot more, just follow it. You may find yourself copying and pasting for a little while, but only because its hard to memorize functions the first or second time you see em.

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A wise man once said "A person with half a clue is more dangerous than a person with or without one."

self confidence is the key to success.
But don''t overestimate yourself too.

I made my 2d game engine just after creating a little DirectDraw APP that display a sprite on a two layered image.
I speed up the process a bit.
(Blitting only what have changed)

And I went to my 2D engine.
My only problem wasn''t DDraw at all but rather not really knowing which kind of 2d engine I wanted.
...bad designed is your worste ennemy...

Think twice before even writting a single line of code.

AS ImmaGNUman said, you''ll do some cut & paste at the beginning since you don''t know the functions name.
You''ll read the DDraw Docs hundreds of time to find what you want.

And after that, you''ll be able to code any remainden part of your engine really fast.



-* So many things to do, so little time to spend. *-

If you think John Carmack knows his OpenGL functions by heart, let me tell you something, u''re wrong.

Here''s an example: Win32 API. Forget DX. There are thousands of Win32 functions that you might have to use. There is no way to know them by heart. No matter how advanced you get, u''ll still find yourself copying and pasting things from the docs, looking up flags, constants, parameters, etc. There''s nothing wrong with that.

Back in the days of learning DirectX, I had the same problem. I couldn''t structure my code, and I had to use the Copy and Paste facility all the time. You always seem to spend more time trying to get the simplest little operation to do what you want it to, than actually writing a game or whatever. DO NOT DESPAIR!

''Inside DirectX'' is a very good book for someone in your position, it helped me a lot. Although it will still be a struggle for a while. However, one day you will wake up in the morning, and the next time you sit in front of your computer you will realise that you know it to the BONE. At which point all is rosey, you can write you own wrapper libraries, and you can get back to the things you enjoy the most. GAMES PROGRAMMING!

Good luck.

Yo dude

Have no fear , don''t worry about re-inventing the wheel. A good idea is maybe to cut Andre Lamothes engine down a bit to parts that are clear to you, and enough to program a simple game.

There is nothing wrong with ddutils.cpp, I personally don''t like Lamothes bitmap loader.

If you would like the concept of ddutils explained then let me know, it is really quite simple once disected.

Don''t worry man , just take one thing at a time.

When u start really getting the hang of things you will look back and laugh

Erick

Green Erick Software

Look up the DirectX functions in the help when you want to do something. I always use the help to look up stuff, if there''s a function I want to use or something. I don''t copy & paste code usually, I try to understand it and then copy it by typing.

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#pragma twice

same here...

btw, furby, do you play half-life every once in a while? In if you do have you played on VectorWorld.com''s gasworks map?