Maybe you can get a game engine, I think that should be much less work then working with an API. You can find some in the FAQ in this forum...

The simplest game projects need two basic things, user input and visual output.

User input is needed in order for the player to communicate with the game.

Visual output is needed to communicate the game state with the user, be it via text in the console or by a 3d graphics api.

Games also need something in between, the game update. The game update is responsible for updating the game state based off the users input and other game specific logic.



This process of turning user input into visual output via the game logic usually happens continuously until the game finishes. So the process is usually organised into a game loop.

A game loop may look something like



Here we have the three basic things that all games need happening over and over again in the same sequence.


A trivial implementation of these three processes can be demonstrated in a simple console game.



Here we have a simple number guessing game. The user is prompted for a guess until he guesses correctly.

As you can see from the code, it has the three basic elements I mentioned above. User input is handled via the GuessANumber function, the game update is done through the CheckTheGuess function, and the user output is handled by the PrintTheResult function.

This may seem a rather simple example, but all games work of this same principle in one way or another, whether the user input is coming from a computer on another network, or from a joypad, it needs to be checked at some point during the game update.

The game state needs updating to react to user input and the changes caused by the game logic. The game needs to be rendered in order to feed back to the user what is happening in the game.

Hopefully that gives you an idea of the kinds of things you need to be thinking about. You can also extend the concept to include things like sound and music.

For 3d and 2d games you will need to use some sort of API to do things like getting user input, and rendering the 3d or 2d world to the screen.

You might want to look into OpenGL, or DirectX. With DirectX, for example, you would use DirectInput to read in the users input, and Direct3D to render to the screen. You can get the DirectX Software Developers Kit from the here. Its quite a big download, but it comes with very detailed documentation.

Quote:Original post by n0o0b
Is there a way to do graphical programs like a tetris or a car racing game ina 2d DOS environment. i spoke to one of my comp sci professors today and they said that the racing car game wold be easier to do. What do you gusy think.

Meanwhile i have been trying to figure out what kind of data structure to use to represent the tetris pieces. Anyone have any suggestions.

n0o0b

Tetris as a grid. You can represent that with a one dimension or two dimension array or list or vector or whatever you prefer. In each cell, you can create a struct representing the cell. The cell would have to have a few attributes:

struct Cell{  BOOL isFilled;  BOOL isAtBottom;  color;}

hope this gives you something to think about... good luck with the project!

I would do a BreakOut-like game. It would teach you most of the basics of 2d game development: collision detection, double buffering, the game loop, etc.