Contents  Introduction  Overview  Game States  Events and Scripts  Effects  Printable version  Discuss this article  in the forums The Series  Beginning Windows  Programming  Using Resources  in Win32 Programs  Tracking Your  Window/Using GDI  Introduction  to DirectX  Palettes and Pixels  in DirectDraw  Bitmapped Graphics  in DirectDraw  Developing the  Game Structure  Basic Tile Engines  Adding Characters  Tips and Tricks

Introduction

I know, I know, this was supposed to be about writing a tile engine, but after I finished that last article and started thinking about how best to approach the series from here on, I decided that wasn't a good idea. Let me tell you why.

Several times I have either alluded to or actually talked about the fact that you can't structure your game code the same way in Windows as you would in DOS. Everything has to be more organized because the entire main loop must execute at least once per frame, so you don't lose track of the messages that Windows is sending to your application.

Now, you've seen a little bit of this, in the short demo programs I've provided with the previous articles. But you probably haven't already tried to extend this method of programming to something large, unless you've already been writing Windows games based on the previous articles in the series. So, I came to the conclusion that before starting to introduce you to the workings of all the parts of a game, it would be best to devote an article to examining the structure of a game, to see how all those components will eventually fit together.

This article is a bit different from the others in that we won't be looking at much code, if any. So if you haven't read up on DirectDraw, or if some things are a bit unclear, don't worry, because we're taking a break from it. :) All you need is a basic knowledge of how a Windows program works, so the first article or two will suffice.

One other thing that I'll mention here: for this article, and most of the subsequent articles, I'm going to be referring to Terran a lot as an example, so you may want to download the demo so you can see the working implementation of what I'm describing. As of the time of this writing, the demo may not run with all video cards, but once Demo 2 comes out, this will hopefully be resolved. All right then. Let's get to it!

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