Ok all thanks for your help with many of my questions concerning DirectX, base classes, etc. I'm getting to the point now that an actual game is not far away.
Tonight I'm going to implement a wrapper for DirectMusic so that I can begin loading and playing MIDI's. As well I'm going to re-vamp some of the tile engine so that it can handle multiple tile layers - z layers if you will. This will allow for some very cool parallax scrolling that will look nearly 3D.
My idea is this:
Foreground tile layer - in front of everything
Middle tile layer - where the character's/object's are.
Background tile layer - any background picture I want.
I would like to have music for different levels, sounds for well - stuff that happens, tile's for objects/characters, large tile's for bosses - sprites in my engine are simply animated quads - Direct3D is rendering to the quad so there is no blitting for sprites in my engine - it's all texture mapped quads.
Problem now is....I don't have this stuff. The technical bologna is almost done...so I have an engine with no game. If any of you have written MIDI's, created sound effects, or have tile bitmaps, character bitmaps, large background scenes, etc. and would give me permission to use them or would like to see them put to use, please PM me.
For the background's and layers they don't have to be tiles but they do have to be evenly divisible by 64. Each large bitmap or scene can be broken up into tiles by my editor. This also eliminates the hassle of getting all the tiles to mesh together - since once scene always meshes together. I could also tile several screen size bitmaps to create one large tile set for one layer. Bitmaps should be 24-bit true color and you might want to filter them to see how they look. Direct3D will filter the bitmaps so you will lose some clarity - its possible I might turn this off in certain bitmaps depending on the situation. Don't save the bitmaps as filtered - two filters will not look good. There are no memory limitations or size limitations on bitmaps. I will compress them using my own file format and tile sets will be compiled into a custom format. If you are creating a scene tile by tile - all tiles are 64x64. Transparent color for bitmaps is bright purple - RGB(255,0,255).
Again, this is a serious project with lots of code thus far and it is nearing completion. I'm rather excited about it actually as it would be cool to see an actual game put together using the engine. I also need some testbed platforms to make sure the code runs on different configs and I need to make sure that there are not any memory leaks lurking around hogging resources.
I would also like to implement MP3 support....but that's in the future.
