Quote:Original post by Steven Hansen
I wrote a DirectDraw game a long time ago. I'm trying to spice it up a little bit to put it up for sale on the web (children's educational game). I've been using Direct3D (8 and 9) for the last four years.

Updating the game is so frustrating! No alpha blending, scaling looks plain old bad or is plain slow. In general, the win32 api seemed to do almost as good a job in most areas as DirectDraw.

Yep this same thing happened to me. I made a successful DirectDraw game, updated it a couple years later and publisher said 'no way'.

Maybe this is just my two-cents but I'd have to slightly disagree. This is mostly because I'm tired of explaining how to load bitmaps manually because so many people have never written a software blitter.

I would suggest that you learn how to use DirectDraw. Simply for education. I started learning graphics using an old DOS compiler and writing software that directly interfaced with the hardware and I can honestly say I've never regretted doing so. I'm not suggesting you should make any real games with DirectDraw, and Direct3D is definitely a much more robust and all-around better designed API. I'm just saying that knowing where it all comes from can't hurt.

Quote:Original post by lack o comments
Maybe this is just my two-cents but I'd have to slightly disagree. This is mostly because I'm tired of explaining how to load bitmaps manually because so many people have never written a software blitter.

What does that have to do with choosing between DirectDraw and Direct3D? You have to load bitmaps for either (D3D simply provides some utilities that do the work for you, but equivalents were certainly 'out there' for DirectDraw).

And yeah, most people have not programmed an integrated circuit... but heck, they're still using computers! Amazing!

Quote:I would suggest that you learn how to use DirectDraw. Simply for education. I started learning graphics using an old DOS compiler and writing software that directly interfaced with the hardware and I can honestly say I've never regretted doing so. I'm not suggesting you should make any real games with DirectDraw, and Direct3D is definitely a much more robust and all-around better designed API. I'm just saying that knowing where it all comes from can't hurt.

I totally agree. Except Direct3D doesn't come from DirectDraw. And in fact, Direct3D is more closely aligned with the hardware and its drivers than DirectDraw ever was (particularly with modern video cards).

Skip DirectDraw. It's not "old skool cool" nor is it lower level. It's deprecated. It's legacy. There are *better* routes to go, and lucky us, they're faster and more flexible.

The only reason to use DirectDraw is as mentioned my previous posters: for support of a larger platform base on older OS's with non-3D video cards.

[Edited by - Simagery on November 3, 2005 11:54:15 PM]

Quote:Original post by Simagery
The only reason to use DirectDraw is as mentioned my previous posters: for support of a larger platform base on older OS's with non-3D video cards.

Yes, or specialty applications like kiosk games/apps that run on cheap/no 3D hardware...