ZeroMemory!

I think in the Game Programming Genesis articles here on Gamedev you saw a macro he made called ZeroMemory. Basically it does exactly what the name says: It fills all the data members with zeros. In a sense it "clears" the memory by replacing whatever junk was in there with zeros. Frankly either I am an idiot and forgot or I just plain dont know what memset is/does. ZeroMemory is good practice for DX objects like DDSURFACEDESC2 that may not have all its fields filled out to replace any junk before you use it (Look in the DX help about DDSURFACEDESC2 if you need to see why you dont fill out all data memebers).

ZeroMemory is actually in the Win32 API. Check it out in MSDN. I''d be surprised though, if it isn''t implemented as either a macro for memset, or that it just calls memset directly.

ZeroMemory is just another way of doing this:

DDSURFACEDESC2 ddsd;
memset(&ddsd, 0, sizeof(DDSURFACEDESC2));

With ZeroMemory you could have done it like this:

DDSURFACEDESC2 ddsd;
ZeroMemory(&ddsd, sizeof(DDSURFACEDESC2));

So ZeroMemory is just a macro defined like this:

#define ZeroMemory(pnt, size) memset(pnt, 0, size)

That''s it ,

-René