I'm not good with english, but i'll try my best to explain my ideas. If you see any errors, please post after this, i'll fix them as soon as possible. I'll need all the help I can for this guide :D Introduction Q:Who should read this guide? A:This guide is a very simple guide to lead you into the world of making games. If you know how to use opengl/c++, then this guide may just be too boring for you. But if you want to learn from the very basics, this is exactly what you are looking for :D Q: What do I have to know before use this guide? A: You need some basic knowledge of C(++ is not required) and how to use google. Trust me, if you know how to write a loop to display a sets of "hello, World!", you're in good shape for this guide. Q: How is your guide differ from other guides? A: I'm going to provied simple, clean code that demonstrate the topics i'm going to talk about. I'm not going to give you partial code. I'll make sure there is no error or warning message before I post the code. (Yes, there were some book's code does not even work under debug mode) Q:MS or not MS A:That is a good question. SDL and OPENGL are nice, but I gonna do it in GDI+ and directx. I'm not a MS lover, but trust me, working on windows and VS is nice. Q:What tools do I need for this guide? A:1.Visual Studio will make your life very easy. Version 6 or newer would be enough for this guide. I'm woking on .NET 2003, but since we only work with c/C++, there are not that much difference. 2.Microsoft Windows Platform SDK 3.Microsoft DirectX SDK (I'll use the OCT-2005 copy) Both can be find on msdn.microsoft.com *Suggested by Spoonbender from gamedev.net, min req should be vs.net 2003 *You can also read http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=328532 if you are using visual studio 6. 4. Some kind of 3D modeling tool, GMAX would be enough, or whatever you usually use, as long as you can output it to .X file. but if you don't have this right now, try not to worry about it. Later on i'll do a introduction. *As suggested by Drew_Benton from gamedev.net *GMAX no longer avaible, thus I suggest the alternative - Blender. *This is a open sourced 3D modeler. More details @ blender.org 5. some kind of 2D package. Photoshop, painter or windows' painter would be just fine. You may also choose to use GIMP. More details @ gimp.org 6. IE/Firefox 7. Your hand and your brain. Q: How deep will you go? A: I'm going from how to programming in C/C++ into Vertex Shaders and Pixel Shader. I'll also include basic physics simulation, basic sound editing/authoring, video processing. Trust me, it'll be enough for you to make your own game. Q: How often will you update this guide? A: As often as I can. Since i'm still in school....projects and assigments is bad enough, i'll try my best to update as often as I can. Q: Can I ask questions? A: Of course. But please make sure it's related to this guide. Q: Who are you and what's your experiences? A: I'm a third year student at University of Toronto Canada. Computer engineering. I don't consider myself as an expert in computer programming, but I'll try to explain things in everyday languages. I'm really good with C/C++, algorithms and data structures, macromedia Flash, photoshop and 3d studio MAX. I'm good with DIRECTX, PHP, MySQL. I'm ok with SQL Server, java, OPENGL,win32 api and win32 asm _________________________________________________________________________________________ PART I. Windows event model in a nut shell The minute i stepped into the MS world, i'm confused with the windows event model. There are so many guides on the net that claims to be clear with the idea, but most of them are useless or too complex to understand. So here comes: windows programming 101 :D STEP 1: Create is CALLBACK function to process messages Windoes' code runs in a event based model. In simple words, that means everything is a 'event' to the program that's running right now. And the program will get and process the event using the logic you give it. STEP 2: Registering the Window Class This will assign the process function to the window, set the window's title and other parameters. STEP 3: Create Window and Show window Create windows use the class and show it:) STEP 4: Enter a loop and keeps running and send message to the processing function This is the tricky part.(!) Windows goes into the loop Then there are two choices. I often use peekmessage function. And trust me for now, this is a good choice. After we get the message, we'll translate the message into human language and send(dispatch) it to our logic function. The logic function will process the message and return. Then we get the next message. and keeps going Now...simple enough, we have our very first window. I'll post the code tonight. //Code for this sectionwill be uploaded on nov 28,2005 ______________________________________________________________________________ PartII. Simple input and simple output The easiest way to output a message under windows is the use of a message box. An example would be MessageBox(windowHandler, "Text in the message box", "Titie of the message box", buttons_and_icons_to_be_displayed); The windowsHandler will assosiate the message box to the window you've created and help you deal with events in different windows....but that's for later on. For now, that's just the name of the creater of the messagebox. buttons_and_icons_to_be_displayed is a option for the message box. This varible is a 32-bit, unsigned integer. The type is UINT. Each bit controls a property of the message box. We are going to use MB_OK and MB_ICONINFORMATION. Thus we turn on them in this varible be setting: buttons_and_icons_to_be_displayed=MB_OK | MB_ICONINFORMATION; This is the simple output model we'll use for this part. Now, let's get to the input model. There are two basic input types, keyboard and mouse. Let's deal with mouse first, since it has fewer buttons than keyboard. .....//going to class now, be back tonigh. :P [Edited by - tsxy on November 28, 2005 3:35:44 PM]

Just gonna offer a few suggestions...

You misspelled Microsoft. There's no dollar sign in the word.

Since you're going to work with DirectX, you might want to adjust your min. requirements. Visual Studio 6.0 isn't supported by the DirectX SDK.

Other than that, it might be a good idea if you write a paragraph or something about how much experience you have. Basically, are you worth listening to?

What's that new mode to spell Microsoft like that? I won't argue with the reason of the people to not like microsoft but spell the name right.

Quote:Some kind of 3D modeling tool, GMAX would be enough, or whatever you usually use, as long as you can output it to .X file. but if you don't have this right now, try not to worry about it. Later on i'll do a introduction.

GMAX is no longer being offered, so an alternative should be made. That and you could not use it anyways to get a .X format, it was very restrictive for specific games and was for modding purposes and additional content deployment by end users. You should mentioned the free program Blender and the shareware program MilkShape instead.

Quote:some kind of 2D package. Photoshop, painter or just windows' painter would be just fine.

Once agian, not everone can afford some of those, and Paint is not all that good, so you should metioned free alternatives that perform quite well, such as GIMP, GIMPshop, etc...

And I agree, using M$ shows signs of immaturaity and takes the credibility of your resource away.

Just a few things that stand out with the 1st glance, good luck writing this!

Quote:Original post by tsxy
Q:M$ or not M$
A:That is a good question. SDL and OPENGL are nice, but I gonna do it in GDI+ and directx. I'm not a M$ lover, but trust me, working on windows and VS is nice.

The two are not mutually exclusive. (You can devlop SDL/GL on Windows with Visual Studio)

Thx for all the suggestions :D
I've changed M$ to MS.

Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster

Quote:Original post by tsxy
Q:M$ or not M$
A:That is a good question. SDL and OPENGL are nice, but I gonna do it in GDI+ and directx. I'm not a M$ lover, but trust me, working on windows and VS is nice.

The two are not mutually exclusive. (You can devlop SDL/GL on Windows with Visual Studio)

That's true, in fact, opengl is even easier to use. It needs less initialization than directx, but extensions are not easy to use, where directx updates more frequently. It's just a personal choice, I'm not saying that opengl is any less useful than directx. :)

Quote:Original post by coderx75
...

tsxy: Stating anything political (OR RELIGIOUS, GAH!), whether it is meant to be humorous or it is as simple as placing a dollar sign anywhere in the same post as the words "Microsoft" or "MS", will most likely get you rated down faster than Bush's approval rating. [looksaround]

Irony: a guy using a political joke to explain how political jokes will get you rated down.


tsxy - I don't know for sure on these boards, but I do know most other messageboard software sets a limit on the length of a post. You may be better off writing the guides in a word processor and then either posting a download link so people can review and give constructive criticisms, or else submit it to the articles section of the site. You'll probably find it nicer to work in a word processor as well as far as formatting and spell check and auto-capitalization etc. I'm sure people would be more inclined to edit in that format as well if that is your hope (word format and od format both provide editing/revisioning tools to aid with this).

lol... I think the point of this forum was about the guide i found it pretty interesting being semi-new to programming. i think he would have wrote out microsoft if he would get this much ridicule for it.