hello. I''m new to the world of VC++ programming, and I was wondering if you guys could give me some heads up on what I need to know. I''ve done some work with ANSI C, and I''ve done a lot of work with VB. I''m starting my VC++ by taking a look at some simple MFC AppWiz programs. There is a list of a whole bunch of different project types when I want to start a new project. When making games in VB I''d just use the standard exe project. What do people usually use when they make games in VC++? Is it the MFC stuff or the Win32 apps... I guess that is it for now... Thanks, ~~~~ sjunkim - P0et Liquid Ice Studios members.home.net/liquidicestudios/

MFC is usualy used for tools. It''s rarely used in games because it has alot of overhead. Most game project types end up as blank win32 applications. Or Blank console applications.

Ah I see...

Where is a good place to start on Win32 Applications? The book I''m looking at mostly just covers MFC.

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sjunkim - P0et
Liquid Ice Studios
members.home.net/liquidicestudios/

http://www.aeon-software.com/ has some great tutorials for Windows/DirectX game programming. Basically just how to make an empty window you can use for a game, but that''s all you really need of Windows. You''ll spend most of your time dealing with DirectX, unless you want to do everything yourself (like me), but then DDraw is still the fastest way to get your backbuffer to the screen, so you''ll still need to know how the basics of it.

Thanks man,

what do you mean do everything by yourself?

Another question when I''m doing a tile-based map editor (2d) would I do that in MFC rather than Win32? I''ve made one in VB, so would it also be possible to use that and get my program to read the file that is generated by my VB map editor?

thanks,


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sjunkim - P0et
Liquid Ice Studios
members.home.net/liquidicestudios/

www.winprog.org is a good place to start with win32 API

The one big advantage of using MFC over win32 API is that it makes building a GUI for a form-based application a lot easier. For games, you usually only need one blank window, so you wouldn't gain much by using MFC. As for the map editor, MFC would really speed things up here.

If i were you, i'd start with API first, MFC will be a lot clearer after that. And don't worry about the AppWizard, after i create a new AppWizard project, i usually throw out at least half of the generated code/resources.

and yes, you can read any file you want

Edited by - kvh on July 15, 2001 7:25:27 PM

quote:

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Original post by sjunkim
Another question when I''m doing a tile-based map editor (2d) would I do that in MFC rather than Win32? I''ve made one in VB, so would it also be possible to use that and get my program to read the file that is generated by my VB map editor?

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By all means, if you are comfortable with VB, that is an ideal language for making tools such as map editors in. Of course you can read the generated files in C++. Files are just files, irrespective of what language was used to generate them. You just have to appreciate the format it''s using, and write appropriate code to read it on both sides.

Thanks for your help,


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sjunkim - P0et
Liquid Ice Studios
members.home.net/liquidicestudios/

What I meant was writing your own surface class with blitter/image loader/shape drawing (lines, circles and stuff (you have to do this with DDraw too though)), etc.. Really not that hard once you know what you''re doing, and then you can optimize all your graphics routines for one color depth, and just convert to the screen depth when you''re blitting your backbuffer to it. Of course, DDraw is way faster when you have surfaces in video memory, so if you''re not planning to use a lot of memory on graphics, it probably wouldn''t be worth the trouble.

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-Deku-chan

DK Art (my site, which has little programming-related stuff on it, but you should go anyway^_^)