This is my first post here at gamedev.net! woohoo! hahahaha well, I have been programming for a few years (dont remember when I started) in the perl/php languages for website stuff (you can see my wonderful php/sql work @ www.srnet.net note: everything there is dynamic, it just looks like html to confuse spiders). i''ve been programming ever since i can remember... recently, i have been trying to get into windows programming. I have been working on it for a week (the c++ language is no problem at all for me)... well, i can now write windows apps from scratch without looking anything up (its a great feeling to be able to do that hahahaha) and i can use gdi to draw stuff, and make little screensaver like things... my most recent creation is a blank screen with 4 points bouncing around, and lines drawn between all 4 points, so it looks like a pyramid, and it bounces around and looks really cool lol. Well, gdi is great and all, but i really want to get into directx (of course) and i know it is a lot of work, and i have a few weeks left in summer to get me started.. i have this book that seems to be highly reccommended in the game programming community (Tips & tricks of the windows game programming gurus). its a great book, but i''ve just finished the windows parts. Now, i''m to the "first contact: direct draw" part. well, i dont know whether to learn it the way the book shows, or to learn from the web, or get another book, becuase it seems there are a million different ways to do one thing (as always), and i want to learn the best way. I downloaded the DX8.0a sdk (a lot of work for my 56k modem) but i read that the 7.0sdk has better ddraw documentation... how should i go by learning this? once i get started, and can make a triangle, you wont believe how happy i will be... well, another thing im wondering about that i havent seen in any of my books (i have a few) is how to open files and modify them and stuff like that (e.g. car & track editors for games) i have no idea how to get started in this area, but i''m sure it ties in with direc3d (because the editors i''ve used for the NFS series use directx) hmmph, it seems i am at the start of my journey across the desert, and i need all the water i can get thanks in advance for any help!

Well. There''s not really that many ways of setting up DirectX. The only issue is that it changes with every release, since Microsoft have the poor tendency to release whatever crap they have at a given point, and then fix it up later. This means that the code has changed quite a bit across DirectX 3, 5, 6, 7 and now 8. But if you pick a single version to work on, there''s not too many ways of going about it.

Opening and modifying files actually has nothing to do with DirectX. File operations read the data into memory, which you then might pass to DirectX, or elsewhere. But they''re independent issues. You can use the built in Windows filing functions, but that''s probably a bad idea if you want your skills to be transferrable to other platforms. Better to learn stdio (standard input/output) if you want to use C or iostreams if you use C++. They are equivalent in functionality, but very different in syntax.

I realize that file i/o has nothing to do with directx... its just getting usable infrormation from like a word file or something confuses me...

i guess i''ll work on the newest version, dx8. there arent many resources about this other than the dx8 documentation, so I guess i will use that