Hi everyone,
I'm new to this forum. Just purchased Emergence today (upgraded from IBasic Pro). Looks very good so far.
I am trying to port a game I wrote in REALbasic to Emergence (much better .EXE file sizes). However, I am confused as to how to approach something.
With REALbasic, you had something called a SpriteSurface, which was a rectangular control that you drew sprites upon. As you all know, the EBasic approach is a little different -- you attach a DirectX 2D screen to a regular window, and it covers the entire area.
In my RB game, the SpriteSurface also has a large static image as a background, as opposed to mapped tiles. This is what I want -- I don't have individual tiles that need to be mapped; rather, I simply have a large static background image that never changes, and I want my sprites to be displayed on top of it.
What I am wondering is, how would I achieve this in EB? I tried LOADIMAGE and SHOWIMAGE to load one of my backgrounds in the dx_windowed example that came with EB, but it didn't work -- the window was all messed up after that.
I did successfully get it to work using one particular method, but I'm not sure if this is the best way. What I did was create a sprite that holds the background image. I display this sprite at 0, 0 so it covers the entire window, then I have the smaller sprites drawn on top of the "background" sprite, and then FLIP occurs. Is this how I should do it?
Any help would be appreciated (sorry if this post was so verbose).
See the 2D users guide for the CREATESPRITE command which allows you to draw directly onto a sprite. Also the smashout.eba sample will help you along.