Quote:Original post by walnut100
Ok, a little bit of background here. I'm using DirectX9 with the Feb 2007 SDK and C++. My IDE is MSVC8. With some help from DrunkenHyena's tutorials (Which are great by the way!) I've successfully made an application that can use textured quads. My ultimate goal is to create a 2D platformer akin to Mario. I've decided to use a tile based system for graphics.

My questions are...
1. How do I handle resolution changes with a tiled background? I don't want to draw anything off the screen I don't need to...
2. I read something on the forums while I was searching yesterday about storing maps for this type of game in a 2D array or something like that? Can anyone elaborate on what that means exactly?
3. Is there a better way to draw textures to quads for 2D than containers in the vertex buffer? It seems like a pain having to set all those coordinates everytime you want to draw something, especially with map design.
4. Does anyone have any examples of a 2D sidescrolling platformer written in Direct3D and C++? Or maybe some tutorials that could point me in the right direction?

Thank you very much.

class Tile{public:    int TileNumber;    bool Passable;};class Map{public:    Tile *Data;    int ColumnCount, RowCount;    Map()    {        ColumnCount = 5;        RowCount = 5;        Data = new Tile[RowCount * ColumnCount];    }    void Render()    {        for(int Row = 0; Row < RowCount; ++Row)        {            for(int Column = 0; Column < ColumnCount; ++Column)            {                // render tile here				// To figure out what tile to use, we multiply the current row by the number of columns and then add the current color:				// TileIndex = (Row * ColumnCount) + Column				// So, the tile data to use is stored in Data[TileIndex]            }        }    }};

Quote:Original post by walnut100

3. Is there a better way to draw textures to quads for 2D than containers in the vertex buffer? It seems like a pain having to set all those coordinates everytime you want to draw something, especially with map design.

Quote:I'm going to suggest a path for you, whether you take it is up to you. A lot of people have said that it doesn't work, but it really helps me.

Quote:2) You can store map data in any form; I prefer regular arrays, but 2D arrays work as well. For example, a simple map system might look like so:

Quote:4) jnrdev.72dpiarmy.com will help. It's made with SDL rather than DirectX, but it's got all the info you need to get started.

Quote:Hey, you could use the sprite interface provided in DirectX Graphics. These are very easy to manipulate in both 2D and 3D and allow an image to be set as its texture.

Quote:The way I did it was to have all the code work as if the game was running at 1024x768, but then have scaling factor that I would multiply all co-ordinates by prior to rendering each quad. For example, for 800 across, the factor was 800/1024=0.78.

Quote:While deviantDarren makes a good suggestion, if you want the added flexibility of using vertex buffers directly, you can wrap the operations up nicely in a class so that you only mess about with verticies in one place, and the rest of the code just does stuff like:

Buffer.Add(10,20,32,32,Texture);