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I am working on a blackjack game right now and I want the user to be able to use a mouse and have buttons, and it would be nice if I could load simple bitmaps or jpegs onto the screen. I am only a beginning programmer, so if it is too messy, forget it. Is there a simple way to get this done?
Oh and btw I am using Bloodshed Dev C++.
Look into Win32 API and GDI.
Or the wonderful Allegro library. Home page here. Graphical installer for Dev-C++ here.
As you are a beginner you would learn a lot faster if you did it as a text game and left the bitmap stuff until you are more confident with c++.
Well I finished the blackjack game last night, of course it is text, and it has a dealer with AI (if you can call it AI, it's just stand on 16, hit on everything below), and it deals with the ace being 1 or 11. I think im confident enough to make it look pretty now.
Then buy the excellent programming windows 5th edition by charles petzold and start reading. This is the best book to start windows programming with and he barely touches upon bitmaps until about chapter 10. Programming for windows needs a totally different style to anything that you are used too. You should get that book if you are serious about learning windows programming.
I looked at a preview of the book online and it says the topics are covered in c... excuse me if this is a dumb question but is there any syntax difference between c and c++?
yes some big differences some small.
The good news is once you know both its very easy to convert one to the other.
I use c++ mostly which I learned before I learned c, I had to learn c for networking tutorials which i had in c.
Once you know C++ anything you read in c wont be too difficult for you top understand.
I am 99% sure that the c code used in petzold will also compile as valid c++ . For a more OOP look at windows programming you will need something like :-
Programming windows with mfc by jeff prosise.
This is the "sister-book" of the petzold and i recommend you get them both but because in mfc you often have to fall back on the pure win32 api to get things done so that is why i suggested petzold first. You can go straight into mfc but you will almost certainly struggle after a while. Get petzold! c code is readable and understanable when you get used to hungarian notation.
Petzold used C because Win32 is a C library of functions. Another choice might be Pezolds new book which uses C# to build Windows Forms programs that are part of the .NET Base Class Library. Petzold claims that C# is his favorite language.