Good evening, I am designing an RPG and attempting to teach myself all the relevant skills involved in producing the game.

Before you all laugh, I am not attempting to complete the game as a one man army, I just want to learn a decent amount of art and design so that when I hire an artist, I can more accurately describe what I want in some of their own language.

And so that when I hire a programmer, I can more accurately describe what I want in some of their own language. Besides, the more I learn, the more it all affects my concept (as in, what is realistic, what is workable, what is standard, and so on). Basically I want to be the best team leader I can by having at least some knowledge of all the relevant areas.

Also I just love learning stuff.

Anyway, this is the code I have so far, using Visual C++ 2010 with SDL.

#pragma comment(lib, "SDL.lib")
#pragma comment(lib, "SDLmain.lib")
#pragma comment(lib, "SDL_TTF.lib")

#include "SDL.h"
#include "SDL_image.h"
#include <iostream>
#include <stack>
#include <string>
#include "SDL_TTF.h"
#include "Defines.h"

using namespace std;

int main(int argc, char *argv[])


{
const int SCREEN_WIDTH = 644;
const int SCREEN_HEIGHT = 400;
const int SCREEN_BPP = 32;

SDL_Surface *logo = NULL;
SDL_Surface *border = NULL;
SDL_Surface *screen = NULL;

SDL_Init(SDL_INIT_EVERYTHING);

SDL_WM_SetCaption("Necromancer", NULL);


screen = SDL_SetVideoMode( SCREEN_WIDTH, SCREEN_HEIGHT, SCREEN_BPP, SDL_SWSURFACE);
border = IMG_Load("Graphics/Title/Border.png");
logo = IMG_Load("Graphics/Title/Logo.png");


SDL_BlitSurface(logo,NULL,screen,NULL);
SDL_BlitSurface(border,NULL,screen,NULL);

SDL_Flip(screen);
SDL_Delay( 5000 );
SDL_FreeSurface(logo);
SDL_FreeSurface(border);

SDL_Quit();
return 0;
}

I have copied most of this stuff from websites, so most of it I genuinely have no idea what it does. But after hours of furious tweaking, it creates a screen in the size I want and displays two images I want for 5 seconds. A pretty big win for someone fumbling along.

My question is, where do I insert code to tell the program to 'fade in' the logo, then fade it out again (over a total period of 3 seconds), and what what would that code look like?

Then I would like it to fade in and fade in a second image over 5 seconds, what would that code look like?

Thank you for your time and putting up with my awkward starting point.

Kind regards,

Dan

I wasn't going to laugh, nor was anyone else here.

Get rid of SDL_BlitSurface(logo,NULL,screen,NULL); SDL_BlitSurface(border,NULL,screen,NULL); SDL_Flip(screen); and SDL_Delay( 5000 );

In it's place put the following:

//use SDL_SetAlpha instead of SDL_SetSurfaceAlphaMod when using SDL 1.2 or under.
unsigned int basetick = SDL_GetTicks();
unsigned int currenttick = SDL_GetTicks();
unsigned int time = 1500;//one and half second

while(currenttick - basetick <= time)
{
    Uint8 alph = (((float)currenttick - (float)basetick) / (float)time) * 255;
    SDL_SetSurfaceAlphaMod(logo, alph);

    //clear the screen here SDL_FillRect works, there are other ways to
    //SDL_FillRect(screen, &screen->clip_rect, SDL_MapRGB(screen->format, 0, 0, 0));

    SDL_BlitSurface(logo, NULL, screen, NULL);
    SDL_BlitSurface(border, NULL, screen, NULL);
    SDL_Flip(screen);
    SDL_Delay( 10 );
    currenttick = SDL_GetTicks();
}

basetick = SDL_GetTicks();
currenttick = SDL_GetTicks();
while(currenttick - basetick <= time)
{
    Uint8 alph = (((float)currenttick - (float)basetick) / (float)time) * 255;
    SDL_SetSurfaceAlphaMod(logo, 255-alph);

    //clear the screen here SDL_FillRect works, there are other ways to
    //SDL_FillRect(screen, &screen->clip_rect, SDL_MapRGB(screen->format, 0, 0, 0));

    SDL_BlitSurface(logo, NULL, screen, NULL);
    SDL_BlitSurface(border, NULL, screen, NULL);
    SDL_Flip(screen);
    SDL_Delay( 10 );
    currenttick = SDL_GetTicks();
}

I typed this out quick, there might be errors, but for the most part it should work. It's been a while since I have used SDL.

Thank you for your response.

I should explain, when I said "Before you all laugh" I am sorry if it came across as insecure or aggressive, I was trying to be playful but I sometimes forget that tone is always lost on the internet.

I am about to sleep now but will try this code out tomorrow evening. Thank you again!