Understanding The Basics of 3D Graphics

[SilverWarior]

Don't get me wrong but working directly with pixels isn't good as it can be werry slow and CPU consuming. Nowadays most of graphic engines use OPenGL or DirectX for renderning graphics becouse both of theese alows to use hardware support for speeding everything up. Also todays graphic engines works with faces and textures.
But I think I understand why you want to do this all by yourself as it can be great lerning expirience. At some point I was trying to do something similar by myself but have abandoned all becouse I didn't get the expected performance out of it.

[WILL]

Hey guys, I moved these posts over into their own thread so we aren't running over the Welcome to PGD thread.

Please continue your conversation as you need. Should you want to discuss something else simple create a new thread in the appropriate forum. This is only done to keep all topics organized for easier reading by all members.

I still say start with 2D, however if you really feel confident in taking on such a large topic as 3D graphics. You can start with something like OpenGL. However if you do not know simple concepts like working with sprites, rotation, scaling, etc... then you should definitely start with 2D before even looking at 3D as a project. Your built knowledge with 2D will become useful when you do start on 3D and are looking at texturing 3D objects and so on.

Also knowing to work with 2D and the 3 basic effects and how well they perform in "software" only you will learn to appreciate hardware acceleration all that much more. The three I'm referring to are of course: scaling, rotation and alpha blending.

JEDI-SDL (uses the SDL API) is a great starting library and is used by the PP4S project because of it's easy of learning and how it helps you move into other advanced graphics programming using OpenGL. It is also supported by any version of Delphi or Free Pascal/Lazarus.

Both (Un)DelphiX and Andora2D are great libraries and have great features but:

• The downside to DelphiX is that it is a very very old library that has been updated by many hands and is not as simple to setup as it once was. There is so much better out there now.
• The downside to Andora2D (in my own opinion) is that the author no longer updates it and future development is looking towards a complete rewrite. Not a great library for long term use.

There are others, but you don't get as near a low-level feel as you get with SDL. I suggest starting with JEDI-SDL which is easy to setup and then once you have an understanding of working with the basics --make a few small games-- then you can have a better look of what is out there and what will work best for how you want to code and what you want to support.

If you pop onto the front page and look under our affiliates display, there are some great resources that will help you learn SDL quite quickly. I recommend FreePascal-meets-SDL to learn how to get started with SDL and the "PPS" (aka Pascal Programming for Schools) project site has some great example programs created by talented high school students who have been working with and learning SDL. Some lead into OpenGL and 3D programming as well.