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Overawed by Direct3D

Gwahir the Windlord · 2002-01-14T13:01:34

I am an amature game programmer, and have been trying to learn for the past 3 or so years how to code games. My expirence began with Interplay''s Learn to Program Basic, then I graduated to QuickBasic, then to DarkBasic. I have finally made the leap to join the ranks of real programmers, learning C/C++, and am doing pretty well. I have made a few simple but awesome(considering they are made totally by me) 2D games using raw DirectDraw. It wasn''t so bad, with a few helper functions I learned to load and display sprites in just a line or two of code, and could abstract all the junk away from my game code. Now, I am ready to move into the realm of 3D. I took one look at the direct3D code and just about wet my pants. That stuff looks nasty. That I could learn it eventually I don''t doubt, and I plan to, but from what I saw, it seems that you need to fill out multiple massive structs just to display a cube on the screen. Now, there is no way anyone could write a game like that. So they must abstract the hairy, confused code away, and have a nice clean set of functions to use within thier actual game. So, I need to make a wrapper, I think it is called. So far, so good. But now I come to a hard thing. The Documentation isn''t that great, and the only way I can learn to code is by doing. This has held true for every language or API I have learned. But I cannot do it all at once. Or I could, but it would take forever, and result in massive frustration, with most of the code simply copied from tutorials, and me not really understanding it. This leads us to my question. Is there a good open source wrapper for Direct3D that comes with basic functions such as load object, place object, rotate object, ect. Similar to the commands in DarkBasic? To tell you the truth I liked darkbasic''s 3D commands a lot, but after using C++ I cannot endure using BASIC code any more. So I think a wrapper that provided some simple functions like that, but that was open source, allowing me to tweak and experiment with it, and add my own directX commands would simply be great. It would allow me to ease into Direct3D relativly painlessly, while still having fun coding. Thanks. P.S. If you know of such a wrapper, even if it isn''t open source, could you tell me as well? I really want to make 3D games, but learning Direct3D from scratch would take months, and yet be really boring, so I would want somthing to program with, even if it isn''t as professional as Direct3D.

General and Gameplay Programming Programming

Started by Gwahir the Windlord January 11, 2002 05:35 PM

11 comments, last by Gwahir the Windlord 22 years, 3 months ago

a person

118

January 13, 2002 11:55 PM

you do realize that loading various formats ARE ussually done as functions or classes. anyhoo, d3d8 has texture loading capabilities (functions that create a texture surface froma file) which include bmp, jpg (pretty sure), tga (with alpha channel), png (again unsure). the main reason i am unsure about the exact capabilities of the loading functions is simply because i use my own image loader system which stays away from using HBITMAP DIB loading hack style crap. there is also ability to load .x format 3d models. i think there is even a converter with the sdk that converts from 3ds to .x format.

Oluseyi

2,123

January 14, 2002 03:12 AM

OT:

quote:Original post by DanG
He who said money was the root of all evil knew little of the nature of money and less about the nature of man.

Actually, he who said "money is the root of all evil" misquoted a proverb. Ironically, everyone assumes the misquote is the original.

Look it up some time. The actual statement has a subtle but profound difference.

[ GDNet Start Here | GDNet FAQ | MS RTFM | STL | Google ]
Thanks to Kylotan for the idea!

Promit

13,404

January 14, 2002 01:01 PM

When i was using D3D8, i found two "gotchas". One was the matrices things. That was just standard 3D theory though. The BIG gotcha was the vertex structures. After you understand what the hell those are, then things start making sense.

PS when starting, dont worry about rhw. Just set it to one.

-----------------------------
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Overawed by Direct3D

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Overawed by Direct3D

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