[gameprogrammer] Re: allegro

I have used allegro quite a bit when I started with graphics programming and its really quite good, well documented, tonnes of examples and very easy to get into..
I too prefer 3D now with Opengl, DirectX or Ogre3D which can all do 2d you need (2d in Ogre3d is not that awesome though and you have to do a bit of work yourself.) Opengl is great for 2D.
If you are just starting out, have a ok knowledge of C (but poor OO / C++) and want to be productive ASAP, then I recommend you start with Ogre. Check out http://www.allegro.cc where there are tonnes of info, news, demos, games, source, tutorials and helpful forums.
You can see that even today it is very active. If you instead are just wanting to learn, have no hard deadlines to deliver projects in, then take up DirectX or OpenGL, or if you C++ is good, take up Ogre3D.
One benefit of Allegro is that it is crossplatform, and it is a complete game engine (and not just rendering engine) so you get functionality for sound, input, window management and all that good stuff that you normally have to do yourself or use another library for.
Here is an example project I made for uni one semester (its old now, please dont judge me on it :) 
http://aek.bur.st/aek/
Allegro did all of that including running the intro movie which was a FLAC file, with drag and drop interface. You can view to MSVC6 based source code also (if you are running on windows, which the game requires as it uses MFC :( ... silly uni requirements)
Here is some AI stuff from uni, that draws a graph (showing what involved in simple allegro startup/rendering) 
http://aek.bur.st/aek/ai/
And here are a number of 2d vector drawing program snippets (again old, uni days) that uses allegro here and there: http://aek.bur.st/aek/wang/ The 2d vector drawing program is a bit more involved and is horribly inefficient ;)
These are unlikely to compile againt the latest Allegro version, but the Scarrble game source includes the nessecary legacy library files for you to build from. 

Regards,
Josh Stewart

Scott Harper wrote:
I used Allegro once for a Tetris clone I did as a learning project. It works pretty well, though I prefer now to use OpenGL, even for 2D stuff. SDL is a nice multiplatform way to get an OpenGL context on most any system, so I recommend that.
However, if Allegro is what you want, then it's decent. It's really pretty straightforward. My impression is that it was generally a bit more simplistic than SDL, which is probably why I went with it instead while I was learning, but that was a few years ago, and things may be very different now. ^_^;; Just checked the website now, however, and it amuses me that they announced a new version the 21st of last month, and the first change was "MacOS X port is broken." ^_^ That kind of makes me a sad panda...
Also, please don't start new topics by replying to old ones. This wasn't sent in reply to yours, I fixed it for you this time. 

-- Scott (<--Mac user)

On 2007/05/24, at 1:12, Yasser Gonzalez Soto wrote:

Had you ever used allegro for game programming??


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