I am busy with the same : on windows XP.

I use C++ and DX9 for 2D games in 3D graphics.

If you want to draw lines : tic tac toe, card games, casino, then you can use win32 to make a game without smooth animations to learn things, i recommend this first before you add DX9.

On old PCs you learn more then a fast PC, you will be very good in optimizing performance.

2 hours ago, the incredible smoker said:

On old PCs you learn more then a fast PC

I've been working on an older laptop for one at-home project and it's been serving as a sort of minimum spec for me to target.  If it runs well on that old terrible laptop, it'll run on just about anything.

As long as the compiling goes fast enough, then your PC is good.

On 8/14/2017 at 4:31 AM, Krohm said:

No. Absolutely not. What the server does is connect the players. You don't want any heavy-duty processing going on the server, you'll be paying $$$ for saving nothing to the client; client performance is free to use for you; server time isn't. 18 months ago I bought a smartphone for 70; it runs on battery and still has plenty of juice for everything I thrown at it.

Guess this depends on whether it's a multiplayer game you are interested in or not. If it is a multiplayer game...

The client has absolute control over what runs on their machine. Perhaps I should have been more precise...you need to maximize the presentation logic on the player side. The eye candy needs to be on the client side. The actual game logic, particularly the stuff that decides if a move is valid and if it results in a win, needs to be on the server. If you put it on the client side then you leave yourself wide open to cheating and perhaps even a compromised server.

As I said before...if you have a crappy machine, I would suggest doing work in a web browser (suggest Chrome or Firefox). Modern browsers are awesome...SVG (2d) and WebGL (3d) right out of the box. Fairly straightforward and no IDE or even compiler is required.

If you are a big fan of older games, you can see how the eye candy is cheap, but still nice and inventive.

It is very easy to have a particle system make nice engine exhaust with animated explosions, instead you can make a flickering triangle shape, in the end it will do the same very cheap.

I want to have all space-ships with engine exhaust + exploding bullets, + explosions from gun, try that on a old PC,

save on the background rendering with very simple stuff rendered with very fast movement or whatever, it dont matter you dont look to the background.

( i always laugh in most games, with such incredible backgrounds, better then van Gogh or Rembrandt,

you walk past in 1 second without looking, straight to the mission goal, what a waste )

I would have a go at PyGame if you are wanting to make games like you stated.

Have a look at the books by Andre la mothe. Black art of 3d game programming teaches already great stuff but it was targeted to even older machines as it makes use of 16bit real mode in dos. You could use dosbox for emulating that environment. The following books deal with game programming under windows so they probably are more suitable. But I'd suggest to learn c++ and c first! I recommend accelerated c++ by Andrew Koenig. It teaches the old standard but is still relevant as it teaches the foundations of the language really well. You just have to look for the old software like Microsoft visual c++ 6.0 .

I love C++, I like C#, I like ruby ... but I recommend you don't start with C++ as your first programming langauge.  

Start with python, Javascript, C#, ruby, lua or C.  Each of those has a strong reason to be good for starting.  some because they are very easy to start with, some because they quickly become powerful and some because they teach the basics well and let you get more advanced later.

Python with Pygame is my recommendation for you to try for 3-6 months.  If you aren't liking it in that time frame ... try a different approach (python has a very different feel than many programming languages, some people love it, some people hate it ... if it doesn't fit you, just try a C syntax langauge next:  Javascript, C#, C, whatever.

Install Notepad++ for light simple text editing, but also download a lightweight python IDE (use google), install Paint.Net or GIMP for editing sprites.

And make your very first programs VERY VERY SIMPLE ... like 1-3 things only ... here are some examples for startiing:

a. write a rock / paper / scissors program ... cause that requires you to get input from the user, have the computer pick a random choice, and solve and display the results.  Then make it were you can play until you want to quit.  This is the kind of program you would learn to write in your very first programming class.

b. write a "screensaver" type program, something that just fills up the UI with something like random colored lines, or circles, etc.

c. write the game of "pong" or even 1 player pong (no computer opponent) - just have a ball bouncing around and you try to hit it with the paddle.  this is a great code base to have, cause you grow it as long as you want (more speeds, computer opponents, better bounce logic, 2 player mode, etc.) and it needs super simple collision detection and physics, both of which are used in almost every game ever.