I'm at school right now and I have a free period so I was wondering...
How much Win programming should I learn b4 moving on to Opengl or directx? Should I only know how to make a window, or enough to make a game. I hear that you need to be able 2 make a basic window for GL/DX.
Stan The Man. Beatles fan
When I was a child,
I spoke as a child,
I thought as a child,
I reasoned as a child.
When I became a man,
I put childish ways behind me"
(the holy bible, Paul, in his first letter to the Cor. 13:11)
Well, the more you know, the better you'll be. At the very least, you should be able to make a window *and understand all of the code*. You should understand things like:
* Messages and message queues
* Event-driven programming
* Multithreading (many games will want to use this to simplify code)
* Synchronization (see MS documentation; you need to control access to shared resources among threads. If you have only one thread, ignore this)
Further, understanding a little about the COM (component object model) of programming will help you learn DirectX, but it's not per se necessary. Many people claim DirectX is harder to understand; personally I find it easier. It's a perfect example of COM in action, and once you're familiar with WinAPI, and some COM, it's very easy to move to DirectX.
I would recommend you learn at least the big picture of COM (i.e. learn "Why do we use COM and what are the main ideas") before DirectX, but it's not strictly necessary; I programmed in DirectX before learning COM.
i only know how to make a window with win32 (well, a tad bit more than just that, but I use NeHe's basecode despite that) but I'm writing a quake3 BSP renderer which is pretty advanced. If you're interested in just writing games, then you can just use Nehe's basecode or the GLut library.
