Win32 game programming

Okay, I'm about to work with allegro, and I'm currently learning Win32 API and my curiousity is arroused.

When you program a Win32 API game, are you just "drawing" and "moving" the drawing?

--Garfield

Win32 dosent do the drawing, well it can, but nothing complex.

Thats where Direct3D and OpenGL come in. most mail loops are just
{
Check for messages
Dispatch Messages
Draw the Scene
Update the scene depending on the time it took to draw
start over
}

Okay, I understand. Thanks.

I'm going to learn allegro, but is DirectX pretty hard to learn?

--Garfield

I reccomend OpenGL, Its easy to learn.

Do you do allegro?

Quote:

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Originally posted by Eber Kain
most mail loops are just

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Haha, that's a funny spelling error :D

No i dont do allegro.

You can draw stuff to the screen the first day you pick up OpenGL, and ive never looked back from there.

i do some allegro... and all my behold stuff is vesa scratch... so... if you need that kind of help, pm me... :) oh, and i've not looked back either... and look what neat things i've beheld... :) hint hint, check out my demonstration...

DirectX is pretty simple, too. Easy to learn, doubly easy if you know the WinAPI.

Took me ~25 mins to get a DirectX program working the first time.

Arg!!! All the game programming languages...which to choose!

What do you all think?

--Garfield

> doubly easy if you know the WinAPI.

Oh, and I do know (well, I'm learning right now) Win32 API.

A typical Windows program (win32 api) is not really designed for game programming. It is designed to give control back to the OS so multi-tasking is faster. I like Allegro because you can make it use DirectX and/or OpenGL. OpenGL is nice, but doesn't work well on some hardware, and has no support for sound, networking, etc. DirectX is a bit clunky in my opinion, but a good option for Windows only as it supports most gaming elements (graphics, sound, networking). It isn't cross platform like OpenGL though.

Allegro wraps the best libs on each platform, gives you their speed, and makes it completely cross platform. That's enough for me, but to each their own.

Whatever you choose, it is important not to "look back" as the others have said. Concentrate on that one lib, know it inside and out. You will be a much stronger game programmer much sooner. In the end, it is you that makes the lib good or not.

-Justin

OpenGL and Allegro are nice choices for cross platform -- but it can be hard to make a truly cross-platform game that works well on all platforms.

Being as I only write games for Win32 anyway (I like to use MMX/3DNow when applicable to handle certain math operations faster) and I like to keep myself familiar with WinAPI style programming, I like DirectX. It's also wonderful for keyboard/joystick handling; I plan to move my sound routines into DirectSound soon, I haven't done so yet.

I haven't looked at the DirectX 8 SDK yet (I'm currently in a different state from my copy of Win98 so I've got Win95 installed, and DX8 won't work on Win95) but using the DX7 SDK, it's easy to learn how to use DirectX. They have step-by-step tutorials which can get you up to speed relatively quickly.

The sample programs are kind of poor style (more globals than needed, etc), and sometimes they show you a kind of poor way to do certain things (like using standard GDI calls instead of DirectX calls) but overall they're helpful.

Allegro it is. Now I just have to dl djgpp to compile the lib.

Yeah, installation is the rough part. You can delete djgpp if you like after it is done. :p

Justin, I'm going to e-mail you so I can get all my thoughts all sorted out, okay? Thanks.

--Garfield

No problem. :)