How powerfull is BitBlt?

im making a game very similar to "Zelda: A Link to the Past" for SNES and i was wondering if i rely mainly on BitBlt for doing all the animation would I be able to accomplish making a game such as Zelda? So far I have the majority of my game engine made, the main character walks around and there are soldiers which attack you and hit you, you can walk to the edge of the map and it continues on like Zelda, etc. But for some reason I have a feeling that BitBlt won't work to well once I start doing more complex animation and more enemies on the screen and it might just slow down to much, will this happen? Imagine if Zelda was created using BitBlt, would it not have been as smooth or would it be just the same?

I know this is a stupid question but I just don't want to work on this game for a month and find out all that work is pointless because it won't turn out good. Anyways is BitBlt powerfull enough to make games like Zelda is my final question? Thanks for any replies.

I also forgot to mention, is anyone bored enough to help me out a little on my game? I am in desperate need of a pretty good drawer to make some simple frames of animation for enemies in my game. I already made the main characters frames of animation and one of the enemies, but this took me a whole day for each and it is very frustrating becaues I am not that good at it. So if you have some spare time and you want to help me out, please reply and email me at [email protected] and tell me you will help me. Thank you so much for anyone kind enough in doing so, your name will most definatly go into the credits. (wow! the credits, yeah i know big deal, but thats all i can do.)

[Gen-X]

One thing that I would consider if I were you would be to use the DirectX 7 engine.

This can interface with Visual Basic and is designed to control sound, graphics and everything else directly from the required resources and does it a lot better than any Visual Basic routines such as BitBlt.

I believe it also supports things like double buffering which I am sure you are aware of making a graphical game

how difficult is it to learn to use direct x in VB? also would it be hard to convert my bitblt coding to direct x coding?

[Gen-X]

To be honest I have absolutely no idea.

I have only had a cursory look at DirectX 7.

What I did see however was far more features and functions than VB provides, a lot more functionality and it does it far more refined than what VB could. It is used in a lot of games being produced today (StarCraft, Diablo to name a couple)

There are books available from good technical bookshops on how to program using DirectX which would suggest that it might be easy to learn (rather than just by trial and error as you would with VB only and little resources on programming games).

Its just a suggestion if BitBlt turns out to be too slow.

oh ok, well thanks alot, ill for sure look into that tomorrow morning.

[Fox]

BitBlt isn't too slow as long as you don't draw fullscreen

Hmm, why don't you ask this question in the Games and Graphics board? I'm sure there you'll get more help...

Well, my engine uses BitBlt too, and it's fast enough. But I'm not that sure that I'll use DDraw when it's finished


However, there are a lot of examples out there to learn DX, for example at Voodoo VB. Have a look...

[HarryW]

If you want a quick overview of DirectX then take a look at the tutorials at:

http://www.redrival.com/voodoovb

(I hope that's right)

[Fox]

Harry... that's the same page...

[kedaman]

I'm a game developer too. I'm not into DirectX7 yet but I used Bitblt alot, and it's fast enough for games 600*800. Now I use the listimages control to draw everything, it's more faster at the transparent drawings. Cool, thing doing a RPG game. I havent seen Zelda so I have to ask you if you could be more specific, explain more about your game!

[Fox]

800*600??? So you have just one layer, right? Or how fast is your CPU?

Well, I'm making an RPG too and I also use BitBlt. It's fast enough but I'd never play it 800*600 fullscreen... Can you explain a bit more too?

[HarryW]

*Laughs* Oh yeah! Sorry Fox, I didn't see that link in your post

[Sam Finch]

What you want to do is keep all the game logic seperate from the graphics logic, Get your game going with a class module to handle the graphics. your main program doesn't need to know how the graphics are displayed, it can just send commands to the class module through it's properties and methods, then fo getting the game logic right you can just use a load of image boxes in the graphics class. When your happy that your logic works you can just make a new class module with the same properties and methods as the old one but it does it with DIrect Draw or bitblt, then if you really want a challenge you can make one that does Direct 3D. and you're not wasting time redoing the game every time you change the graphics.

[kedaman]

I have Athlon 600, and I haven't tested my Bitblt graphicsengines cuz I've done them on my portable P-200 (with 800*600) two years ago. As I said, I use the Imagelistview control.

Sam, that exactly what I had in mind. Having classmodules to keep different things apart saves a lot of time. I use this tactic: making a usercontrol as the main graphix engine, then supply it with classmodules that can be shared between it and the main program.

well, in my adventure/rpg game, your a guy named Damien and your father is giving you missions to do on earth. The missions are givin to you by this weird mysterious guy that lives in an isolated part of the earth, which he can directly talk to your father the deivl. and you must go and talk to him after you complete each mission to see what else you have to do next. I haven't thought up too much of the story line becaues im too busy creating the graphics and doing all the coding but that was what i had in mind.

i think i am going to have only 2 layers of graphics: 1 is going to be the floor you walk on which is totally seperate from the enemies and you, and layer 2 is all the animated characters. I am running my desktop at 800*600*16b so i made the game automatically change the person you plays the game to that resolution and when you stop the game it will restore your old resolution. I have a 400AMD k6-2 cpu, 128 megs of ram, and a 8 MB ATi 3d card. It's not that low-end so my game is running pretty good on my computer but when i tried it at my schools 486's it runs so god damn slow, and thats without enemies, just you walking!

Well that's all i have for my game right now, you just walk around getting hit (cause you can't fight back yet). But as soon as i get more character animations done ill work on creating the story. If anyone can draw please email me at [email protected], cause i hate drawing animations! thanks for anyone willing to.

Do yourself a favour and have a search around http://www.planetsourcecode.com numerous postings and examples on both bitblt and Directx. Even some game codes posted, that sound kind of like what you are doing, (I haven't seen Zelda either, just going by your description).