Home About Us Contact Us our books Subscribe vidcast: creating an emptyproject with SDL and vs2008 by wazoo on February 20, 2010 Hi and thanks for the visit. If you're new here you may want to subscribe to our feed.Hey everyone, In the last vidcast, we went through the process of setting up Visual Studio 2008 to use the C++ game toolkit Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) from http://www.libsdl.org. In this installment, we go through the basic structure of a game, covering the 3 “phases” that a game typically needs for proper execution. startup During this phase of a game, we need the application to prepare our video device for drawing, setup our soundcard and load up any assets we need for the game; artwork, models, music and sound data. This should be taken care of before we start running the game as we then have everything handy for the machine to use. mainloop This is the main program loop which continuously runs the game until either the player quits and/or shuts down the window. Every iteration of the loop, we grab any messages in the event queue and check if the player has chosen to quit. shutdown/cleanup All the memory that was allocated during our startup phase needs to be properly cleaned up to prevent any memory leaks. Memory leaks are memory chunks that are tied to an application. If we quit the application without unattaching these memory chunks, then we have orphaned space known as “memory leaks“. They’re bad, because over time they degrade the overall performance of the machine. Grab the code here – SDLEmptyProject.zip (4) CrunchBase Information Wazoo Enterprises Information provided by CrunchBase { 0 comments } vidcast: setting up vs2008 to use SDL 1.2.14 February 19, 2010 Hi everyone, To help you get started with using the Simple DirectMedia Layer (or SDL) 1.2.14 for game development, I put this little screencast together to help you setup your first project within Visual Studio 2008. Enjoy! CrunchBase Information Wazo