RPGDX > Forums > General Discussion > On MingW and DirectX. And *cough* RPGs too... Obviously.

Terry · Last edited by Terry on Sat Apr 14, 2007 7:00 pm; edited 1 time in total

I've just a few quick questions. I've got plans to make a few small Role Playing Game projects this summer, and so I decided to finally knuckle down and do some serious windows programming. Up to this I never ventured any further than Qbasic and ASM, so while I have a little programming experience, I've got little very practice with C. I want to start prepared (as I've got a few weeks before I'll have time to start anyway), so I was hoping to get together a few helpful resources.

I've got a copy of MingW on my PC installed and ready to go, and I'd played around with programming some non-graphical mathy programs to get familar with it. Also I've set my sights on using DirectX for simplicity's sake (I'm not interested in cross-compatibility or anything like that). Hopefully over the next few weeks I'll get a bit of practice using it.

I'd really appricate it if the programmers on this forum could point me in the direction of some good tutorials on getting started with DirectX in MingW (or any windows based C compiler), essays on RPG Design (I've always loved FrozenEmu's 'How to make your RPG not suck' guide!), and some good C reference and beginners guides. There's quite a lot of material out there for the first and last of those, so a list of tutorials that you've personally found helpful would be greatly appricated. Anything at all on that second one would be fabulous - I'm very open to new ideas at the moment.

Thanks!

Bjorn · Posted: Sun Apr 20, 2003 11:29 pm Post subject:

In my opinion, using DirectX for simplicity's sake doesn't make any sense. Of course, it's simple to install, but you need advanced knowledge of C++ and Windows programming before even starting on your game (which I haven't, so I might be wrong about this).

The cross-platform libraries are more simple than using DirectX/OpenGL directly because they abstract from lots of stuff. Further more, libraries like Allegro and ClanLib are very much targetted at games, offering more functionality that DirectX and especially OpenGL do not.

But hey, don't let me discourage your bravery! :-)

Rainer Deyke · Demon Hunter Joined: 05 Jun 2002 Posts: 672

I agree with Bjørn regarding the simplicity of DirectX. I have used DirectX in the past. Now I use SDL, not because of the cross-platform compatibility (although that's a nice bonus), but because it makes things so much simpler.

Can't help with learning C - it's been ages since I last used that language. Now I mostly use C++ and Python.

Ninkazu · Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2003 12:59 am Post subject:

I think OpenGL is really easy. I just started reading NeHe's tutorials and I'm really learning! I might write a 3D/2D engine using textured quads for tiles. I dunno yet. I mostly need to work out how I'm going to do this demo for my math project due May 7th.

If you guys would give ideas for easy but cool effects I could do, that'd be great (I'm doing this as a background for a song about math.... stupid project. So far I've come up with a theme for the beauty of math, so I'm gonna do some fractal stuff, and possibly some 3D... but I just don't know yet. I'm really going to have to crack down on myself.

Guest · Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2003 8:21 am Post subject:

Ninkazu, you want easy but cool effects? I can think of a few - most of the following effects can be botched up in ten minutes, and tutorials on how can be found almost anywhere:
Fire effects,
Plasmas,
Interference,
Voxels,
Simple Fractals (Mantelbrot, Julia),
Starfields,
Screen Melts,
Translucantcy (Think overlapped geometry pictures, It'd look really good :)),
Dancing particles...

Hmm... That should do :)

DirectX is difficult? Now there's a surprise. Still, I'd like to take a look at it. Are there any decent tutorials out there?

What's SDL? I've actually never heard of it...

Terry · Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2003 8:24 am Post subject:

Drat and double drat. I thought I was logged in. The above post is mine :)

- Chaotic Harmony

Rainer Deyke · Demon Hunter Joined: 05 Jun 2002 Posts: 672

DirectX isn't so much difficult as annoying and cumbersome.

I agree about OpenGL being easy. It only took me one day to write the OpenGL renderer for Feyna's Quest. Setting up the OpenGL context could be annoying, but that's where SDL comes in.

SDL is a minimal cross-platform multimedia library. On windows it acts as a clean wrapper around DirectX, minus the 3D features. See http://www.libsdl.org.

Guest · Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2003 6:47 pm Post subject:

I use MingW and Allegro, which is a nice cross-platform wrapper which uses DirectX on Win32. If you are planning on using DirectX directly (haha), I think there are special headers specifically for that purpose floating around somewhere on the net. You can't use Microsoft's headers for some reason. (Maybe they tried that.... )

akOOma · Posted: Wed Apr 23, 2003 9:55 am Post subject:

I use Allegro and MingW (Dev-C++), too. I think this would be better than using DirectX, cause DX's most features are 3d, so there are many features you don't need...and Allegro is so easy...
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DrV · Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2003 10:46 pm Post subject:

You *could* use DirectX 7, which has a very nice 2d graphics library by the name of DirectDraw, but... oh well. Allegro is cross-platform. Yay for Linux!