Getting started with c++ graphics and sound

[tb808kid]

Hi!

I'm just at the the research and design stage for my final college project, I'm just wondering what some more experienced programmers think is the best way to get started with simple graphics and sound. The program is really just going to be a scripting language (not sure if would technically be an actual language) for text based games (well, by that I mean, my program will make a game out of a bunch of text files with instructions and data). I was thinking that I would like to add graphics and sound for certain events to go along with the text. I was thinking a 2D player tracking map would be neat too. So I'm looking for some starting points, like good graphics and sound libs for a beginner, good books - that sort of thing.

[John A]

Well, we have a forum sticky over in the Game Development forum that outlines some resources to use getting started. That said, I'd say probably your best option would be to use something like SDL. It's relatively simple in that it abstracts actual details of communicating with a hardware API (like OpenGL or DirectX), while remaining simpler than a full-blown game engine. This will make it fairly simple to write something like sound or 2D graphics (which in OpenGL would require you to fire up the 3D interfaces). As for tutorials, there's tons of SDL tutorials out there which can be found using your favorite search engine.

[Dave Sinkula]

http://cboard.cprogramming.com/showthread.php?t=33318

Some of the more recent posts may be more pertinent.

I'd better post this too:
http://www.daniweb.com/forums/thread63827.html

[tb808kid]

Thank you, I'm sorry, I totally missed the graphics forum. But I'm avoiding actual game forums because they go into too many advanced topics for my simple little program. SDL looks perfect actually, just the type thing I was thinking about.