Adam's Laboratory - 1 - Experiments in DirectX Sprite Creation, and animation

ADAMS LABORATORY

Experiments in DirectX Sprite Creation, and animation

This first post is an empty post, Watch this space for a progressive tutorial on Experiments in directX.

Read below for more details...

ADAMS LABORATORY

Experiments in DirectX Sprite Creation, and animation

This is the beginning of my personal experiments in directx programming. I hope to take what I learn from these forums and edit this initial post into a Tutorial. The benefits of this will be newcomers will be able to see the processes that have gone into me personally learning directx
but more importantly the problems/errors that arise during the making of a simple 2D game. My intent for now is sprite creation/animation, but eventually I may move into A* Pathfinding...

If they prove a hit, I will delve into other aspects related to directx Programming, possibly making a series of 'Adam's laboratory' posts.

"Software I a Using: " :
I use an IDE called 'NetBeans' to make my C++ programs out of habit, although I intend to shift to eclipse IDE soon, Oh, and am compiling with Cygwin. My operating system is Windows XP.

Lets start where the program starts shall we. (Okay, not with them main() function but you know what i mean!)

The first library I'm delving into is the collective library of directx 9.0.

Code:

---

#include <d3dx9.h>

---

The next part defines a rectangle for us to contain a sprite in.

Code:

---

int main()
{

                    // Sprite is 64x64 in size
                RECT drawRect;

                drawRect.left  = 0;
                drawRect.right  = 64; // Width
                drawRect.top    = 0;
                drawRect.bottom = 64; // Height

---

Not much more can be said at this point about the RECT. So- moving on- we are defining some vectors in a cartesian space. (For those of you not familiar with the term, don't worry too much. it simply means an (x,y) co-ordinate system)

Code:

---

int main()
{

                    // Sprite is 64x64 in size
                RECT drawRect;

                drawRect.left  = 0;
                drawRect.right  = 64; // Width
                drawRect.top    = 0;
                drawRect.bottom = 64; // Height


                D3DXVECTOR2 scale( 1.0f/64.0f, 1.0f/64.0f ); // Scale the sprite down to size of 1 local to the screen
                D3DXVECTOR2 scale2( 800.0f, 600.0f );                // I want the sprite to cover the whole screen for my background image
                D3DXVECTOR2 scale3;

---

Scaling deals with the magnitude(or size) of what we are manipulating here, which is a vector in our game space (Think of it like the position it will occupy on the screen)

Code:

---

int main()
{

                    // Sprite is 64x64 in size
                RECT drawRect;

                drawRect.left  = 0;
                drawRect.right  = 64; // Width
                drawRect.top    = 0;
                drawRect.bottom = 64; // Height


                D3DXVECTOR2 scale( 1.0f/64.0f, 1.0f/64.0f ); // Scale the sprite down to size of 1 local to the screen
                D3DXVECTOR2 scale2( 800.0f, 600.0f );                // I want the sprite to cover the whole screen for my background image
                D3DXVECTOR2 scale3;

                // Multiply the two scale vector objects to scale it to fit the screen
                scale3.x = scale.x * scale2.x;
                scale3.y = scale.y * scale2.y;

---

//EDIT - This will be continued tomorrow, as I am heading to bed now (1.30am GMT heh) but feel free to post on what I have so far, which is gleamed from various sources online)