Need Game Engine Tips / Help

[StevenHickerson]

Hello,
I'm wanting to write a 2d / 3d game engine in VB. But being a newbie at DX I dont know how to do it. I've looked at a few examples that I've downloaded but still confused. Let me explain what I want the engine to do.

It will be a birds eye view type scroller. It will scroll top to bottom with some left to right screen movement but not scrolling. I also want to incorporate some 3d into it by having hills and pits etc. It would need to be able to handle players and mobs of course.. sometimes 20 + per screen. Oh and I want this DX8 not 7, so none of the dx7 2d stuff please

But here is what I need tips on. Would this be more efficient as a tile map or one large premade map? Also how exactly would I do NPC spawns. I dont want them just popping up in the players screen. I figured I would spawn them off the screen and then move them in but, I'm not exactly sure how to say when to make them spawn and move them in hehe . I planned on using sprites for the NPCS and PCs.. I'm guessing this would be better and faster than drawing each NPC and PC out?

If anyone has some links to where I could download a 2d scroller similiar to this then that would be a great help. I dont want to copy it hehe.. writing my own is part of the fun. I just need some help since I've never done this before. I actually bought a book on dx8 game programming with vb .. but it was a pretty crappy book. It went over teh very basics of dx and then said download and use truevision 3d. A free 3d engine for visual basic. I was like gah that sucks I wanted to learn how to do it myself in DX hehe.

Thanks for any help you can give

Steven Hickerson

[Zaei]

http://www.directx4vb.com/

Start reading =). When you finish the tutorials, THEN you may start thinking about an engine =).

Z.

[StevenHickerson]

Oh oh that site looks promising. I'll star working on reading it tommorow! Thanks for the link