Hi , I am still a begginer yes but I have done a fair bit of programming - one of my projects was a 2d pong game using c++ and sdl. Anyway I want to get into DirectX and I want a book that gets down to business as I have many books on C covering all the semantics , methodologies etc. I dont want a book that just deals with console programming as I have books on that plus Im seriously wanting to produce something enjoyable and graphical this time around. What I ended up doing was looking at the gamedev book reviews (Really great section ! what a great idea gamedev, nice work) Finally I read the reviews and the following book came up and it seemed like this is going to be the book for me: Programming Role-Playing Games with DirectX (The great thing is I LOVE rpgs , where as mmy pong game was purely so I could start small :)) You see reading the reviews and features it sounds great. I was wandering what people think of this book good or bad , whether it covers 2d or 3d and if anyone reccomends a better book? You see Im helping my mother buy her new PC so I can only afford one book so I really dont want to buy one only to find it doesnt cover what Im looking for.(Thats happened to me before having books full of 100% high high levels of abtractions which while educating dont really show how things are done in practice) Any input much appreciated. (This book seems like it will be really interesting and practical for me but I figured you all would know better!) Edit-------- Well I ordered that book, It gets good reviews everywhere and is also out of stock everywhere but a few places, I actually ended up paying £64 to get it shipped to the Uk, actually quite expensive - I hope it is good and I dont have to suffer the first 4 chapters of waffle. [Edited by - firefly28 on February 13, 2008 2:42:15 PM]

I have that book MySelf in my honest oppion its a good book but its just a refrence for me now as alot of its info is out dated.

One thing id like to point out is you might want to start off with something easyer like SDL its a great Graphics library and you cna do some easy 2d stuff in it DirectX's com can give you a good headache and ontop of that some documentation on it is not that great online and offline alike.

there are some great reasons to use SDL its reommended for alot of new game programers.

Its platform independant as it will run on alot of os's.

From my own exeperince before i started in or DirectX is it was quite easy to use.

Just a few things to note if you do decied to go ahead and use directX some parts are now outdated and deprecated.

DirectDraw for instance is outdate but if you want to use DirectX to do 2d graphics you can use Direct 3D sprite its nice it will load other image formates besides bmp unlike Direct Draw so you don't have to maualy convert them. All in all you can still use 3d elemnts at the same time with d3dsprite.

If you got a project in the future you want to work give me a hollar :) and mabye i can help ^__^.

ps. Good luck hope this helped out

Regards Jouei.

Thanks very much for the offer :)

Really appreciate that by the way :)

In regards to SDL thats what I did my first and only 2d game in :)[pong , used c++ OO and sdl] .....(Well I drew a static space invader image in basic when I was a lad lol but thats no game nowhere near :) )

Yeah SDL is a great library. Aside from the fact I havent done much game programming I have used quite a few programming languages and as said in another thread after a brief forey into OS dev I have a better idea about what an API does and that my ugly code brain cell should be better now lol

(By the way Im no OS Dev guru , all I had was a bootstrapped OS that could handle me pressing keys and each keypress created an interrupt and the key was written to graphics memmory at B800 onward. (I was set to write a memmory manager and had seen code that worked i.e c and had immplemented a newbie version of memset etc)

The thing is going into the architecture side , although it probably isnt needed Im still hoping its better equipped me for dealing with directx this time around. I managed to create a coloured window in DX in the past, thats it but Its like you say It could be documented ALOT better and some of the online tutorials although they work they arent really giving satisfactory explinations on what some of the ugly code does and why directx has such funny namining conventions.

Im hoping with having that book its going to help, heres the thing even though the book is outdated will the source code still work? Word for word? I checked the reviews and someone says its one of the few books where he didnt have to doctor source (I must admit that annoys me with some of the java books I have)

My plan was to use directdraw for 2d if its still available and I will definatly check out what you are saying in this regard. If it doesnt work you have saved me some headaches in that I will have an up to date alternative.

I dont mind learning directx if its a reasnable book, the limited try I had of it in the past I was working with web scraps(Best description for the) . Either that or advanced 3d stuff. Thats why I figure spend 1 month learning an ok portion of language semantics and pitfalls , and when Im happy I grasp a concept I have the book to guide me towards a final game. I know it maybe isnt the best way Im doing it but I REALLY badly want to learn how to make a game so that I can make a limited multiplayer game and even though directx is ugly its pretty universal , getting my head around it would give me heaps of confidence I think. Plan is after getting some dx competance:

Get a really basic 2d space background
1 static planet
2 ships

player 1 gets 1 ship
player 2 gets 2nd ship

and code basic basic mp game. You see I get the basics about having a main game loop, working out fps and tieing it to movements and I just feel DX is what I need to get some understanding about concepts Im clueless about, i.e multiplayer and being able to use a langauge that is used in many of the best games.

Ive a heap to learn though :) so I will try and make sure my coding is on form again before I ask for help with a project.(I dont want to be getting carried in the project because I dont know enough dx! hehe) Thats great to know people still chip in with projects on gamedev. Thats what it was like when I was on a couple of years back, but I never made a point of tracking any of those users down to see how they were getting on.