Hey everyone,

I know that this forum runs rampant with these sort of posts, and I've read through many of them to no avail, but I thought I had a few more specific questions that I was just wondering if you could help me with. I am a computer science major in college and know console c++ programming fairly well. I am interested in creating a 2D Strategy/RPG game and was wondering what SDK I should use.

DirectX
I have been messing around with DX9 but I'm not sure whether I should be using textured quads or Sprites. The only thing I really need is the ability to do overlay FX and tile tinting. I think the biggest problem that I'm running into is the fact that whenever I start blitting Sprites onto the screen using Draw, it renders them incredibly awkwardly. They are smashed or skewed. I'm using power of 2 sprites. 16x16 to be exact. Also, I tried doing a matrix transformation of 2x on my sprite and it made it awkwardly blurry.. (which is not at all wanted). If you guys could be of help with any of this (via board, email or messenger) just message me on here or leave a post.

OpenGL
I'm not opposed to the idea of using OpenGL if it would be more easy to adapt to the blitting procedures since this is my first game. This is more of an indie side-project-type thing that will most likely never go online, but if-someday-I wanted to make it have fairly simple online features, would DirectX be a more adequate choice?

That other SDK that starts with the letter 'S'
I believe it was called SMFL or something to that extent. If this would be a more appropriate library, I'd be glad to look into it. I don't want something that has zero control over the sprites, though.

I really appreciate you guys reading this and any help will be appreciated.

Thanks,
Justin

That other SDK that starts with the letter 'S'
I believe it was called SMFL or something to that extent. If this would be a more appropriate library, I'd be glad to look into it. I don't want something that has zero control over the sprites, though.

I would recommend SFML for 2D graphics. What do you mean zero control over the sprites? SFML allows for easy movement, scaling and rotation of sprites with a simple function call. What else would you need to do?

I would really only need to color certain tiles. The spirtes are low-detail but I just need to be able to render them cleanly. I'll look into SFML. Thank you for the reply!

No problem for coloring a tile you could use a RectangleShape object to make a tile of whatever size wherever you need it and then use setColor() to make it whatever color you need it to be. Or if you have your own images you can load them as textures and create sprites to manipulate.

You may also want to check out this free (but awesome) 2D engine (http://roswellgames.com/gadget2d/).

It is 'easy' to created an animated gif. It is rather difficult to do something useful with it. Even if you have a system with built-in support for animated gifs (like a web page displayed in a browser) you have no control over the animation or can pick different animations.

An animated gif does not magically become animated when you load it. The loader is responsible for loading the individual frames from the gif file and displaying them. There is nothing gained over loading the animation frames from several files or a sprite sheet. In fact, it will probably be more difficult because the GIF format is limited and old and generic image libraries might not even support it out of the box (or are unable to read the subsequent animation frames).