Hello all, I''ve been a mild to medium non professional programmer for about the last 5-6 years and I have always been interested in game development. I recently decided to acquire some more information on game development. The last time I looked into the subject which was when I was reading text files off of BBS''s for doing sprite animation and making DOS EMS programs in Turbo C++ & assembly, and I''ve noticed that there have been many changes since those days. I''ve been doing some reading online, I have also purchased Tricks of the game programming gurus. I read the first few chapters and things were moving smoothly which I felt great about, however, when it started coving 2D DirectX programming, I had discovered that Microsoft has been working ddraw out of the picture and support has gone way down for it which makes experimentation and research while trying to follow the book so much harder. So my question is, should I try and learn all of the 2D Ddraw stuff in the book using DX8 or should I simply not learn the 2D stuff and learn right from 3D? I feel that if I skip the 2D concepts I will lack a proper foundation for 3D, however, it feels almost impractical to learn something that not going to be used in the near future. If anyone has some good advice for me, I''d greatly appreciate it. Thanks, Adam

Well, since you may want to make consoles, dialog boxes,
menus, etc, I''d reccommend learning the 2d stuff. It may also
be useful for textures when doing 3D. Myself, I consider to
be in the same situation as you, and I''ve found the book
"The Zen of Direct3D game programming" by Peter Walsh pretty
useful. Don''t get Engel''s book yet, I have it, and I have to
say although it seems like a good book, it looks to cover
advanced topics for a book labelled ''beginning.''

-Lohrno