Hey, Just have a quick question for all of you folks. A friend of mine from my university is giving me help when I need it with DirectX, but he said that I should be learning how to load bitmap files with my own functions, and not GDI functions. He said mixing GDI with DirectX isn''t a good idea. First of all, is this true or no? Second of all, are there any tutorials or text files I can access that give me an idea of the bitmap file structure or how I can go about starting to write my own bitmap loader? Thanks In advance. Mike

hi,

just learn as needed, so right now, i don''t see why you still have to learn loading bitmap since dx has functions to do those stuffs for you,

and yeah mixing gdi with dx is bad but you won''t be using GDI anyway when the player is inside your game..,

what i mean by learn as needed is, of course there''s a lot of advantage if you study lots of stuffs even when you don''t use it but only if you have lots of time to spare, sorry i can''t explain much i just said this coz people most likely will contradict my statement,

1) d3dx can load bitmaps, and it doesn''t seem to use gdi.

2) if you want to learn how to load bitmaps, by all means write your own loader. otherwise, it''s perfectly ok to use other people''s code. i don''t recall anyone recommending writing their own png or jpeg loaders without using libpng or libjpeg; similarly, you don''t have to write your own bitmap loaders if you don''t want to.

3) while the use of gdi is not recommended in performance-sensitive code, and some gdi/dx usage combinations are tricky to get right (fullscreen dialogs seem to be giving people a lot of trouble), in some cases you''d use both gdi and directx to get the job done. a good example is drawing text on screen, generating font texture at runtime.

or you can use c# or vb.