Thread: Game creation starter.

Actually, I know the bulk of the game is programming (bulk anothr understatement cuz its 95%) but luckily I have 2 extra people for programming and by dad is familiar with c++ and DirectX (He makes firewall technology) so that'll iron out bumps.

Darkness: What in the world would make you think I'm kidding you? I'm dead serious. I've got monopoly. (joke)

Actually, I meant that 3D has the potential to be the least abstract. It isn't inherently so.

Basically though, once you get the static meshes looking good enough, you have to be able to animate them well enough, and add in tons of code to your engine to get them moving at all the right points and whatnot.

With more abstract graphics, you can screw around with stuff more without anyone noticing. That's not to say that you SHOULDN'T make your sprites animate brilliantly and have a skeletal physics model if you can figure out how to do it. But if you don't, nobody's going to care.

I guess it's more of a matter of what people expect and what you actually need to deliver, although that's getting into some weird pseudo-psychological and marketting-related stuff that's semi-irrelevant.

Skeletal models can be done with matrix stacks. But if you don't understand how a matrix transforms a vector...I cannot help you.

And let me say this loud and clear and strong.

Knowing an API or how to use it does not make you a good 3D programmer. By all comparisons I totally suck at 3D compared to the guys making the games out there. Do I know DirectX like the back of my hand....sure, most of it. Does that make me a great graphics programmer? No way.

DirectX, OpenGL, blah, blah, blah. My suggestion to you is go back to DOS, get DJGPP, and learn the concepts of rasterization, polygons, vertices, texturing, etc, etc. Then come back to DirectX or GL and rock the world. You will be very grateful you took time to do the less glamorous stuff and figured out what the hell is really going on behind the code.

For instance:

Code:

void Object::Render(void)
{
  D3DXMATRIX Translation;
  D3DXMatrixTranslation(&Translation,Pos.x,Pos.y,Pos.z);

  D3DXMATRIX Rotation;
  D3DXMatrixRotationYawPitchRoll(&Rotation,Rot.x,Rot.y,Rot.z);

  D3DXMATRIX Scaling;
  D3DXMatrixScaling(&Scaling,Scale.x,Scale.y,Scale.z);

  D3DXMATRIX World;

  World=Rotation*Scaling*Translation;

  Device->SetTransform(D3DTS_WORLD,&World);

  Device->SetStreamSource(0,(void **)&m_pVertexBuffer,0,0);
  Device->SetFVF(ObjectVertex::FVF);
  Device->SetTexture(Texture);

  Device->SetRenderState(D3DRS_ALPHABLENDENABLE,true);
  Device->SetRenderState(D3DRS_SRCBLEND,D3DBLEND_SRCALPHA);
  Device->SetRenderState(D3DRS_DESTBLEND,D3DBLEND_INVSRCALPHA);

  Device->DrawPrimitive(D3DPT_TRIANGLELIST,0,m_dwNumTris);

  Device->SetRenderState(D3DRS_ALPHABLENDENABLE,false);
}

And that is a very slow, very rudimentary render function yet a lot is going on and a lot is going on under the hood in DirectX even though those mechanics are not easily seen here.