beefsteak

Hi everybody,

My MORPG "Darkfire Legends" is now online and waiting for players.

The graphics are 2D and retro-style - This has to do with my limited artistic skills, but also with inspirations from old games like final fantasy, secret of mana, diablo and crossfire.

There are plenty of options to customize you character and create a build that is truly unique:

• stat point distribution system, bound to level-ups
• an abundance of rare magical items to collect
• skills to learn
• runes can alter and improve skills
• "alternative" character classes, like the mutant or robot

In order to play the game, please download and run the windows installer (msi):
http://darkfire-legends.com/download.html

The client "should" run on windows xp, vista, 7 and 8.
Fullscreen mode will attempt to use a resolution of 800x600 - which should be supported by most devices.
So far, it is tested only with windows vista and 7 - please report back when you have troubles installing or starting the game.

Any kind of feedback is most welcome!

Special thanks to the gamedev community for supporting me with technical knowledge in several occasions.

You will find many more infos on the website:
http://darkfire-legends.com

Screenshots:

I would like to develop a 2D game client in c++ and windows, with DirectX 9.

Most of the graphics are stored in png format, hence I found textures to be very useful (easy to load png files with "D3DXCreateTextureFromFile").

In order to be able to draw the textures on the screen in 2D, I used one sprite (LPD3DXSPRITE). This seemed like a simple solution and works perfectly fine for textures.

Now I would like to additionally draw some colored rectangles in between the drawing of images. Surprisingly for me, sprites in DirectX don't support any kind of primitive drawing. There is only one "Draw" method that will render a texture to the display device.


So far I've been pondering about the following solutions:

1. Create textures that contain a certain area of solid color. Then draw any kind of rectangle by aligning the small single-colored textures next to each other. I guess it will work but seems really cumbersome, as I will need to write lots of code to manage the color textures and do the drawing.

2. Find a better way to draw my images to the display device, so that i can mix the image-drawing with primitive drawing operations. So far I couldn't figure out how to do it. I suspect I will need some kind of intermediate "surface" object to draw my texture on.

3. Mix sprite drawing operations with device drawing operations. This would require to split up my drawing code to use many different sprites for different purposes. I will need to call sprite.Begin/End very often. On the whole I don't like this idea because it seems "messy".


Thank you for any kind of feedback that will point me in the right direction!