As we are getting stuck into the programming component of my Game Development Course this week and starting on a 2D game, I thought I’d do a bit of research into 2D game programming with DirectX9. I had a look through the SDK for tutorials and examples of 2D graphics and found nothing. Apparently the DirectDraw (2D) and Direct3D were merged together in DirectX8. I don’t know about merged, seems more like DirectDraw was completely assimilated never to be seen again! Lucky I found this article on GamaSutra explaining how to implement the old 2D techniques such as blitting with the 3D API. Thank’s GamaSutra!
Ultimately I’m interested in learning DirectX for later on in my course. For anyone interested in writing a 2D game, I’d strongly recommend SDL over DirectX. It’s a much simpler API with lots of 2D stuff and there are heaps of examples to be found on the net.
On a seperate note, the Open Source IDE Dev-C++ is getting better and better. Dev-C++ uses a Windows port of the GCC compiler called mingw. So far I’ve been successful in compiling a couple of the SDK examples after making a couple of minor code changes. I’m not sure how the performance differs between mingw and Visual C++ compiled coded but the price advantage is certainly clear.
