Quote:
> I am having trouble understanding the aspects of DirectX Direct Draw
> programming, such as flipping and such. And the MS samples only show
how to
> do it, not what the heck is going on. Any ideas for some direct draw
> tutorials that might be of use? Any ideas when MS might release more
> information for Direct Draw on MSDN?
I had a book on game programming in Windows which was in C++ and
didn't help much, but it helped me understand some of the basics.
Also, there are lots of tutorials on the web, just google for them.
As far as "flipping", I think you're talking about flipping surfaces
and/or blitting, right?
DirectDraw works with surfaces, that is, areas of memory which
represent the screen.
It is slow to write directly to the on-screen memory, so what is
commonly done is to write to a "back buffer" or back surface
and then "flip" or "blit" the bytes over to the on-screen memory.
You can instruct DDraw to do this all in hardware (on the video
card memory using the video card processor) which greatly
increases speed.
This is known as "Double Buffering". You can also use a third
buffer or surface and create a pipeline so to speak to keep
ahead of the video processor. I don't know much about that
though, I've never had a need to do it.
-c
Direct X 9 DirectDraw