You should start from scratch and build all new functions yourself. Use the one that came with the book as a guide but try to expand on everything and as you go also try to optimize every function to run the fastest it possibly can. His engine is pretty good, but you *can* expand on it and you *can* optimize it to run much faster. In the long run you will learn every little detail about iso engines and have something to show an employer when you go for that interview. Good luck to you.

im in the same situation as thekid, but do u think its really worth doing all the initializing ddraw, dsound and dinput stuff again, all i have done so far is just make a new bitmap loading functions and a new animation system and ive been using all lamonths stuff for doing all the directx stuff, do u thinkits worth me doing my own directx wrappers

Thanx I will try to make my own functions but are there any special ways to convert his fuctions so that they will be better for an iso engine? I,m doing it in 2d.

Keeping the DirectX wrappers would be cool, But I believe that you could still optimize the way he is setting up DirectX to run. For instance, You might not want to run in windowed mode so you could remove all the crap about dealing with overlay surfaces, loss of some surfaces, etc... I can't really remeber too much about his engine so sorry if his engine doesn't have that stuff to begin with. My experience with wrappers are that they are made for the general case for every type of situation. If you take out all the crap that you don't need, then you will certainly make your engine super charged.

Also, try to keep the surface locking in the innerloop to a minimum, if not non-existant.

i dont know if he fixed it in the new Gurus book, but you should throw away the 16bpp stuff from WGPFD, especially if you are planning on using 16bpp (which seems to be the norm anymore).

i had to change all the 16bpp colour i had to change all the colour conversion stuff, as ive only got his old book WGPD, but about making a new engine, what sorts of things should i add to the animation system, ive thought of a timer for each frame to be played and a sound flag for a certain frame to play a certain sound but thats about it, im sure there are a hundred things i could add so could you tell me the sorts of things i could add to it, thanks later.

You know, one thing you never seen in a iso game is the character fiddling around when he's not moving. Like in most side scrollers, after a couple seconds of not doing anything, the character will look at you and call you back to the computer. Something like that might be interesting.

You can add more percise collision detection with walls and objects by using masks. So instead of the iso block being impassable, the object on it is impassable.

Do I make any sense? I can give you a more indepth example if you want.

Hi I am starting an Isometric Engine using
directX. I currently have LaMothes books Windows game programming for dummies and Windows Game Programming Gurus. I have used the egine packaged with the book quite a bit now when making my new engine should I start from scratch and make all-new functions or should I build on the functions he supplies.

Any Tips on Programming Iso Engines

Yes some more indepth examples would be great, and can you tell me some more things i could add to the animation system, im not really sure what else im supposed to put in, but im sure there are hundreds of things, thanks for all the help, later