my little intro :P

[micral]

Download

very simple animation test... need to add more effects and text support

ps: u can press F1 to pause, and ESC to close it

[Valholy]

haha,cool how did you do that?

[Mikey_]

lol that is pretty cool

[micral]

hehe i just added a little catchy tune to it too... same URL.. u can redownload it to listen to the retro tune hehe

the thing was coded in C++, utilizing windows' DIBSection (created with CreateDIBSection) API. a dibsection bitmap gives u a pointer to a buffer that you can directly access to change every bits, so i used the dibsection to do all the drawing (took me several days to put the PutBitmap function to work), then i just call BitBlit to blit the whole thing from my canvas (the dibsection) device context to the window's device context after i've finished drawing a frame. A timer is used to automate the drawing and blitting to screen process, with proper calculations the result is a nice animation effect

the starfield is done by generating stars with random 'x','y' and 'plane' values. the movement speed and color of the star are calculated by the plane value, the higher it is, the slower it moves and the darker the color. after generating the stars i just keep decreasing the x value (and roll back if out of bound) and draw it to the buffer.
the bitmap is more tricky because they use indexed colors so i converted the bitmaps into RAW format, extract the palette data (1024 bytes starting from 0x36 of the BMP file), convert both the RAW and the palette data into a C++ include file, include them in my program. then at run time i loop through the bitmap array, pick the color index and paint a pixel with according color (by looking up the corresponding palette) to the right location on screen (with some minor calculations).

[polobunny]

You should make the F1 to pause also music.
But great.
Where did you got that music now? WHERE!!!

[micral]

i cant remember the addresses
just google for MOD, XM, tracker music ....

oh and i added a little sine scroller to the intro

[polobunny]

Argh, sin so retro.

[micral]

updated new version of mictro
added a bitmap sine wave flag-like effect... and a cutie

[Shadow X]

lol i sat at my comp for 10mins looking at that thing. Its effin awesome

i feel like i should be able ti play it or something

[Sprung]

Very impressive

The fact that you coded this in C++ is the most impressive thing to me. It must be me, but I found C++ to be one of (if not *the*) most difficult languages to understand.

[kohlrak]

I just viewed it again, where'd the girl go? lol

[micral]

hehe the girl was so un-old-school so i left her out.. also to make space for the ball string, otherwise the scene would be too messy.

[polobunny]

I need assembly knowledge, now that would pwn.
Great intro, missed the girl though.
I just hope it will make something that has sense, as i dont see why the balls are there.

[micral]

hehe the title of the program is "Animation Test"... Im gunna put all of my experimentations in there, sorta like a draft paper... I'm still learning it but when I have mastered a decent amount of effects & knowledge I'll put together sth that looks better

also assembly is not that hard, in fact it's easier than C++ in my opinion, at least asm doesnt have complicated concepts of OOP, its data types are also very simple (BYTE, WORD, DWORD, QWORD... all based on the size of the type, no complicated typedef !). the hard thing about asm is creating manageable code with large projects.

If you're interested read the tuts at http://win32asm.cjb.net (I suppose there's no use learning 16 bit asm anymore so that's a site that deals with 32 bit asm, specifically for the windows environment. If you know basic programming concepts already the tuts should be pretty straightforward. Also when programming for windows, http://msdn.microsoft.com is a valuable source of info, since it's impossible to remember all the APIs. You might also try looking for this book called Programming Windows Fifth Edition by Pretzel (think i got the name right).