Hello, ladies and gentlemen. (Are their ladies on gamedev.net? There must be!) I''ve been out of the loop since last October (Yes, I know...) but I''m back. I''ve been working on my own Tetris clone, where good newbies start their gamedev journey. I got pretty handy with DirectX7, but since I was two years behind(?) I decided it was time to move on with my life and get DX8. What a huge mistake. I am SO lost with this whole merger of DirectDraw to Direct3D...because I''ve *never* worked with Direct3D before, and I don''t know how to get 2D games to work now =( Is there a *2D mode*, or is it all in 3D and will I have to just orient the "camera" so it''s perpendicular to a plane and just flash all the shit on the plane...what of clipping? I am SO lost =( If anyone knows of any "DirectX7 to DirectX8 for Boneheads", or just has some words of wisdom, I will be FOREVER grateful.

If all you want to do is render 2d sprites, but use the 3d engine, you can use transformed and lit vertices. I this case, all of the x,y points you give will be pixel points on the screen -- no need for a camera. Z values will only affect the depth buffer, which you can use to do things like parallax scrolling. You can also use the 3d hardware to do alpha blending, shearing, and rotation without any performance penalty. You will find there is not too much difference from doing things in direct draw, except that you need to fit your sprites into textures and draw everthing with triangles.

Thank you all very much; I''ll see how far I can get with that article.

I wouldnt say that DirectDraw is completely out of the picture (although with direction that D3D is taking, the perks of using 3D for your 2D stuff is getting WAY better and better). DDraw is still packaged in the directx8 SDK, and in some cases, Microsoft mentions that directdraw is still better for some 2D things than an enhanced 2D using D3D.
I''m still using DirectDraw for some of my projects, and theres no reason why you couldnt still use it (although, who knows...with DirectX9, everything Im saying could all change). I guess it depends on what you know, what you''d like to accomplish with your projects, and what kind of effects you plan to have.

- Fuge