To better understand my cry for help, I provide a little background: As a senior in high school, I worked on programming a very primitive final fantasy tactics style strategy game. Our labs ran C/C++ Mac machines and almost everything I programmed was self-taught. The "game map" was made up of tiles (ex: there were grass tiles, beach tiles, water tiles, rock tiles, etc). The basic mechanics of the simple (and I do mean simple) animations were based on offscreen graphics worlds. I never had time to complete the game before I graduated and now I all I really have access to are Windows PCs. I would like to try to remake (and finish!) my game but I am stuck on how to get started transferring my solutions to certain game problems over to windows. I have no copies of my source for the old game, only a memory of how out certain pieces of our game-fragment ran. Most if not all was coded in C although I do have limited knowledge of C++. Any suggestions, tips, links, tutorials that might help me would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Is your only problem porting (or evolving into) Windows? There are some really good books and online tutorials covering that. Look for words like "DirectX" and "porting games to windows".

And oh yeah, if you're not very familur at all with Windows, very little of your actual game techniques will need to change. With Windows, you just need to access graphics and sound hardware differently.

[edited by - Jiia on August 29, 2002 12:25:54 AM]

I guess porting is the main idea, I have a book on directx, and it has helped somewhat. I think the author is writing to programmers with more skill though because some of what he does goes beyond me. Does this mean I should hone my skills first and worry about the game later?

I hate to say that I liked progamming on Macs better, but for handling graphics, *everything* seemed so much simpler. But then again, things that are more complex usually have more power, not to mention flexibility.

"Does this mean I should hone my skills first and worry about the game later?"

I would do the opposite. Use your current skills to make the game as functional as you can, and slowly learn the parts you think will make it more functional as you need them. Different people learn differently (of course), but I''ve always found it dry as hell to learn something before you see the actual usefullness of it. Learning DirectX for me was pretty much about just typing what they told me, then worry about what it does later. Most of DirectX can be hidden away in your code, never to be looked at again. Once you get the display mode set, load in a bitmap, and draw it, you''ve cracked DirectDraw, as far as 2D goes. If you get stuck, look for free source code to other simple projects that are doing something simular.

Thank you all very much, your input is appreciated.