Re: Games Programming

["Don Williamson" <DonWilliamson@aqua-pacific.com>]

Hallo, not sure if starting games programming in DirectX is a good thing,
mainly because of the length of time it will take you to understand what you
are doing with the damn thing. DirectX (as with all MS API's) has incredibly
ambiguous requirements. I still believe though that DX is the best thing
that happened to the games industry in general for a long long time.

The beauty of DOS is that it's simple and has no hidden extras (well, any
you won't need anyway). If you can set the video mode (few lines) and plot a
pixel (1 line) you'll be sorted for a very long time. After programming
stuff in DOS for a while you may want to progress to SVGA modes (640x480x8
etc). That's when you should consider switching to Windows and DirectX.

I started programming in DOS when Windows was just beginning to become the
platform of choice. The great thing is, I can now understand many of the
things Windows does at the code level because of my experiences through DOS.

Get a good, free C compiler - many people like DJGPP (although I was lucky
enough to have somebody buy me Watcom - REALLY get that for DOS if you can).
When going to windows, try LCC-Win32. There is no reason why you should have
such a powerful compiler like VC when beginning.

Checkout my first ever game in DOS:
http://www.rocketdownload.com/details/arca/pacsetup.htm. Then checkout the
full source code at http://members.aol.com/~karalioth/pacsrc.zip to see how
I started out. And of course, I used the "Teach yourself game programming in
21 days" by the great Andre LaMothe :0)

That book is worth it's weight in gold if you are a beginner.

Seeya,
- Don

-----Original Message-----
From: Firas Wajeeh <fwajeeh@tagi.com>
To: gameprogrammer@gameprogrammer.com <gameprogrammer@gameprogrammer.com>
Date: 14 September 1999 08:36
Subject: Games Programming


>Hi all;
>I want to start learning programming games ,and I want to
>know if I need to learn it on DOS first or go directly and
>start learning DIRECTX,and please tell me what do I need to
>get started in this field since I like it too much,do I
>have to be a guru in C/C++?.
>I have great ideas for great games but I don't know where
>and how to start.
>
>
>regards.
>
>
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