Hi I have bookmarked the following from gamedev http://www.gamedev.net/reference/list.asp?categoryid=24 I realise there are resources but Im just staqrting out on my 2nd attempt at coding a game in directx. I have made a pong game in the past and I made it object orientated with c++ and SDL. I also wanted to brush up on my architecture and getting a better understanding of My PC at lower levels so I developed the absolute begginings of an operating system, I had it bootstrapped and when I pressed keys the key was displayed in graphics memmory. Next I started writing a memmory manager and I have a good book but I need to go back to it :) Anyway thanks to my limited forey into OS dev its helped me deal better with ugly code and made my debugging skills a bit more meticulous. I have decent experiance with both c and c++ and now understand the concept of the windows API to some degree anyway :) Ok the above gives people an indication of what level Im at I guess, now heres my plan for a game: I want to go 2d again. I want to do a limited 2d space game. I plan to do only 1 area to start with and test it and heres what happens: Load a space background static image. Load a planet image(plan to get a planet animation made up of 2 or 3 sprites that make the planet spin) Load a ship(Get to or 3 sprites which show the ships engine trail as it moves) AFter I have created the above the first thing is to make the ship move around via events when the user presses WASD (UP,DOWN,LEFT,RIGHT respectivly, I may make it so UP adds movement to the ship) Once thats done I will add basic collision detection so that of the ship hits the planet it simply bounces off and later I may make things more complex) I really want to use direct X so Im wandering if people can submit 2 or 3 guides each that they think is best for directx and 2d and would aid me in my aforementioned goals above :) Thanks :) (I really needed to ask this as I realise a good start is everything and any advice is really needed and appreciated) edit----------- Just to show I am searching I came across the following which should be a reminder for me how to setup the sdk and integrate C/C++ into it. http://www.euclideanspace.com/software/games/setup/dx9cs/installation/index.htm

Thanks very much for your reply jollyjeffers, I think I will check out what you suggest.

Cheers for moving the post, sorry for putting it in the wrong place, I know this is no excuse but its been a while since Ive been on here.

Its funny how you mention doing things at a higher level since on another forum I use a guy said , that you dont want to be getting bogged down so much in syntax and language semantics but be able to use structured termns to get stuff done efficiantly and basically get into making real game content progress.

I know I must get a good start as what I plan is a significantly bigger undertaking than my last game, which was big too me hehe.

Im thinking actually think smaller than the above scale down to getting the following working:

1 space static background
1 static planet that does nothing but gets collided with and bounces a ship back

Heres a serious differance from my initial idea and will get me concepts that will stand me in good stead later.

Create 2 ships each with the capability to move via arrow keys

Make it so 2 players try and hide/fly between planets and shoot each other down.
When thats done try and make a basic 2 player multiplayer game where players can connect to each other over the web.

I realise MP is something that people would reccomend not to consider until later but It would be good to learn how to make SP games MP and how to integrate good structured MP code. (Thats something I would love to learn about and its not the first time Ive seen commercial game developers say we cant do MP as it would require chaging all the code!)

The only MP kinda code I have ever seen is code for a very basic MUD, its something I havent looked into but Im going to start coding tommorow. Im actually pulling some web resources at the momment and documenting some ideas briefly.........I didnt do this with my first pong project and It caused me some grief as I did it OO and I was having a hard time tracking what state an object was at. (From memmory I think I had a screen object and that had a method draw which would take other objects and draw them to screen every frame)