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CornPoper

Hey. First of all, if I have some spelling\grammer mistakes, sorry. English is not my mother-language.

I'm 13 year old, and I want to learn programming - just for fun.
I've learned some C, I even made a little Tetris game works on DOS, but for some reason it doesn't work on other people's computers...
I also know some HTML and a little PHP with MySQL.

Now I don't really know what to learn and how...
I want to be able to make a simple game (but more complicated then a Tetris) that works on an actual Windows' window.

I'd like if you help me decide what to learn (C, C++, JAVA, C#...), and give me links to some good tutorials.

Thanks

Eriond

Sure. If you already know C, then you should check out SDL. It's written in C, and provides an easy way to draw things onto the screen, without slogging through Windows. It allows you to jump right in and get coding.

You can download SDL from here.
http://www.libsdl.org/download-1.2.php

Also, they have a list of tutorials, to get you set up here:
http://www.libsdl.org/tutorials.php

I recommend using this one:
http://lazyfoo.net/SDL_tutorials/index.php

That should get you started! If you have any questions, feel free to post

Oh, and if you want some C(++) review, check here:
http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial.html

They've got some good tutorials.

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CornPoper

Thanks, but what exactly is this...? How do I use it?

Eriond

It's a library. You essentially link it to your program using what's called (aptly), a linker. All it does is give you a bunch of functions that let you put stuff on your screen.

See this for setting it up http://lazyfoo.net/SDL_tutorials/les...dows/index.php

Once you have it set up, just go with the regular tutorial until you think you've got the hang of it.

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CornPoper

Cool, thanks.
It's working, I made a window that says "Hello world" =]

What's after I finish with that? It's like instead of DirectX and OpenGL, just easyer for beginers, and I should learn 1 of theme? Or that's something else?

Eriond

Well, once you go through all the tutorials, the next step is OpenGL. It's not as hard as you might think. When you're done with the SDL stuff, I'll point you some links for OpenGL.

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CornPoper

Thanks again.

I just read tutorial 5, I've dowloaded the files and made it a project, and when I start it it just flashes and closes... I made break-points to check where the problem is, and I saw that it doesn't load the images well, the pointer to the images just stay NULL.
I have no idea why it happens, please help...
(the image is in the folder, it's not that...)

[Edit]
For some reason, the same thing happens in every project I make... And everything is working fine with the project from the 2nd tutorial.
I checked the propaties like a million times =\

Eriond

That's very, very odd. If everything links properly, and you have no compiler errors... Try with a different image, preferably saved as a bitmap (.bmp)

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CornPoper

I really don't know how it happened, but there was only 1 of the SDL_image dll files ~_~
now it works, thanks.

1 more thing - what exacly does OpenGL do, if SDL does all the graphics (pasting images) and sounds?

Eriond

Well, when people talk of using SDL and OpenGL together, they mean using SDL to create the window and load the images and stuff, while using OpenGL to do the drawing. SDL_BlitSurface, or whatever it is (I forget), doesn't work when you're using OpenGL, you have to use stuff like textures to print images to the screen.

The disadvantages of using OpenGL is that it's harder, but the advantages are that it's like 10,000x faster, and as a consequence you can do a lot more stuff with it. (Scale images in real-time, handle 3D, lighting, very nice blending operations, stuff like that).

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