I am currently trying to teach myself game programming by reading. I am currently using two books, Isometric Game Programming with DirectX and Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus. Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus suggest writing your own bitmap loader as opposed to using the Windows GDI version that Isometric GPWDX uses. Which is more common? Which do you think would work more effectively, or be considered better programming practice?

This is a personal opinion issue. If you were to write your own loader, it would be a good experience at understanding how it works. However, why reinvent the wheel; that is what APIs are for. The key issue here is that whichever method you choose, will not affect the performance of your game, as bitmaps are not loaded during gameplay, only at the begining or between levels.

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Make it work.
Make it fast.

"I’m happy to share what I can, because I’m in it for the love of programming. The Ferraris are just gravy, honest!" --John Carmack: Forward to Graphics Programming Black Book

Well, you would have to write your own BMP loader if you want
your program running on other platforms than Windows.


Kami no Itte ga ore ni zettai naru!

Thanks, guys! For now, I plan to just develop on Windows, and after I have a firm grasp on that (long, long, long time from now), maybe I could move on to other platforms.

while reinventing the wheel is fun, you can''t reinvent everything due to time it will require. so think about it this way: do you think writing your own bitmap loader is interesting for you? if yes, go ahead and make one. otherwise, use existing functionality. concentrate on what most interests you at any given moment, and you''ll probably get the most out of programming.

Sometimes it''s not just reinventing the wheel. I got frustrated with how all the windows functions arranged and generally worked with bitmaps, so I decided to just bugger off and write my own loader. Wasn''t that hard to write, and now all my bitmap related code works a lot smoother, at least for my thought processes.

-Arek the Absolute

i fail to see what it is you didn''t like in windows. you rewrote loadimage, you still need to use all other windows bitmap functions unless, of course, you rewrote the entire subset of gdi that does bitmap operations?