What are the differences between 7 and 8. Which one should I get? I cant find much books on 8 and the forum tutorial on this site says 7 is fine. So what do you all think. DirectX 8 or DirectX 7. What are the differences in the language? Say I bought a dx7 book, would I be able to use dx8 easily?

I would go with 8 for a many reasons. Here are a few:

- Its newer and fully supported by Microsoft.
- Its more stable.
- Its easier to get initialized.
- DirectX 8 uses only vertex buffers for geometry data, where in
7 the fact that you didn''t have to use them confused people.
Vertex buffers are also explained better in the sdk docs.
- DirectDraw is gone (rather integrated into d3d) which makes
coding a lot cleaner beccause you don''t rely on two seperate
parts of an API to do one thing.
- 8 supports the newest features and effects as well as some that
aren''t even widely supported yet (volume textures).
- It allows you to take advatage of the latest architectures,
for example (GeForce 3, XBox etc).

There''s a lot more reasons out there, but those are the biggies of why to use directx 8 over 7. Why would you even want to use an older version of the api anyway? Also, you can learn plenty from the tutorials in the sdk docs included with dx8. There is a lot more information available on the internet for dx8 than there ever was for 7 too. Hope I helped ya.

Plus you can still use all the DX7 API interfaces even with DX8. It is backwards compatible.

It depends on what your trying to make.

If it is a 2D game go with DirectDraw 7 for the graphics.
Use DirectX 8 for anything else.

DD7... m''kay.
D3D8... m''kay.
D3D7... not m''kay.

is there a tut anywhere on 2D with DX8?

Heres a couple of links for you:

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010629/geczy_01.htm

http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1434.asp

http://www.flipcode.com/tutorials/tut_dx82d.shtml

Hope these help.

Cool, thnx alot, I''ll take a nice long look at those.