Ok, this is bizarre. I am an extreme newbie, and I am working my way through Lamothe''s latest Gurus book. I am up to example 7_10, which loads a bitmap to the screen (a picture of the starship Enterprise). After a couple of weeks of slogging through the book, I am very excited to be putting graphics of any sort on the screen. Imagine my frustration at being stuck now. I tried replacing the name of the bitmap (in 7_10.cpp) with one I had created, and compiled. Didn''t work. I tried a bunch of other things to narrow down the problem, until finally, I tried copying the precompiled executable and the bitmap from the CD to my local drive. I run it, it works fine. Then, I open the bitmap in Photoshop 4.0, save it under the SAME NAME without making ANY changes, and run the executable. It errors out. This is very frustrating. I made no changes to the code or the bitmap. I am assuming (from what little I know of how bitmap files are put together) that Photoshop encodes the bitmap in such a way that Lamothe''s code doesn''t work? But that would be absurd, b/c _everybody_ uses Photoshop. Any help would be greatly appreciated. It''s example 7_10 from Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus. - Chris the distraught newbie

Oh, yeah, let me be clear:

The file on the cd was bitmap8.bmp (all lowercase).

I opened it in Photoshop 4.0, and it imported its own palette. I then saved it, wihtout changing the name, as a .bmp file, in 8 bit Windows format, without checking the RLE compression box.

:-) Still doesn''t work tho. *sigh*

What do you folks use to create graphics?

-Chris

If your on chapter 7, maybe you could help me with chapter 6 - how do you get the DDURFACEDESC2 variable to register with VC++ - it picks up DDSURFACEDESC, as long as I don;t put the 2 on the end. This is fustrating me now, and I have included all the necessary headers and libraries and put them in the VC++ lookup directories.
Other than that - I can''t help you with your Photoshop problem, because I don''t own it. I''d suggest another test with something like Windows paint - you never know what Photoshop might be doing optimising things...

Cheers,

-Mezz

You can''t Photoshop files because Photoshop calculates bmp files sizes diffirent than t3dlib(i think that was the reason)
You could change the Load_Bitmap_File function or save the image in some other graphic program (like PSP) after you draw it in Photoshop

to mezz did you add the line
#define INITGUID
to your project ?

In Lamothe''s old Window Game Programming you couldn''t load in a bitmap saved in RLE form. I am guessing Photoshop saves in guess what... RLE form. Use Paint Shop Pro and save in RGB form.