Getting started

A trip to your local bookstore for the title "Teach yourself
DirectX7 in 24 hours" is a good place to start (if you feel like
dropping bucks to start rather than hitting an internet search
engine). I got mine for ~$50 Cdn. And i've seen OpenGL
books as well.

Besides search engines, newsgroups is another good place to try.
 
Im new to this to.
I did make a fju UT map's for my self and some other smole stuff.
I was wandering whitch program can handel the advances off the Radeon and 7500/8500 and Is eazy to juse???
Espacaly for makeing mapskin's.
 
roki said:
more questions :)

what kinda programming background do i need?

and should i go for d3d or opengl?
Click to expand...

A C/C++ or Delphi backgound would be good.

D3D or OpenGL is an age old question and a bit hard to answer. Ask your self this: Do you want portability (IE. able to compile your program for Linux, Windows, Mac, BeOS, etc.). If you want portaibility, then you would want OpenGL, but if you don't want to deal with extensions, then D3D would probably be a better choice, but then you have to wait for Microsoft to update it for added features, and the application would only work on Windows.
 
What about IDEs? Do people still use VisualC++? ;)

Is it worthwhile to go buy it (ugh), or is there a decent free alternative (/me hasn't coded C/C++ since forever)?
 
Ratchet said:
What about IDEs? Do people still use VisualC++? ;)

Is it worthwhile to go buy it (ugh), or is there a decent free alternative (/me hasn't coded C/C++ since forever)?
Click to expand...

LCC-WIN32 includes a pretty good IDE.
 
Visual Basic, and DX8 is the way to go. :D

My grand 3d project involved displaying a single coloured triangle in opengl. It eventually worked... The maths for doing the rotating cube was just too hard so I gave up. :D
 
As far as i can tell, C/C++ is the general route taken
to do alot of this stuff, it really depends on how your
resources (tutorials, etc) are done in, so follow that.

D3D vs OpenGL....OpenGL is portable but DX is a FAR-ranging
programming library, covering input, sound, music, mutiplay,
etc. Even the venerated Quake3 uses elements of DirectInput
to handle the keyboard/mouse aspect of the game.



---
PS what i've gotten so far is how to create and read X files
(no NOT the tv show) and some samples of code for music and
basic graphics, but yeah, this is one of those things you have
to hammer away at for awhile before you get anywhere.

Cheers all!
 
more questions :D

what kinda math background do i need to get started with graphics programming?

thanks guys =P
 
Depends how complex ya want to get. Basic animations within
3 dimensions needs some understanding of matrix math
(cross-product, etc.) If you still remember your high
school math, you should be alright.


Start hitting some tutorials and see how it goes from there!
 
Re: Getting started

roki said:
i would like to get into graphics programming stuff
just where do i really start?? :)
Click to expand...

as far as directx goes - i found the SDK documentation to be some of the most straight forward. but of course - you have to have an idea of what you are trying to do before you do it...

opengl - i would get the red book (Programming Guide). i use it quite frequently after originally learning thorugh it in a college graphics course (okstate - GO POKES!!). its available at amazon and any reasonable bookstore.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/A...96399/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_3_1/107-4552344-0365365
 
Yeah, lots of people use Visual Studio particularly in game development. Pretty good IDE, easy debugger. I'm eager to check out Visual Studio .NET and see what MS gives us this time around. I hear MFC got a huge overhaul, supposedly STL underneath or something.

Silmeron
 
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