   Direct3D or DirectDraw?
  Hi there. First post here.I am interested in developing a mostly-2D strategy game (like Advance Wars for GBA/DS if anyone is familiar) that would have some simple 3D elements added in in the future if I get far, like having combat scenes similar to this:I can see how in that picture it could all be done in 2D using a scaling factor on the sprites to represent how "far" the tanks are from the camera. I would like to leave room for 3D effects, or perhaps a true 3D battle scene, albeit with 2D pictures in a 3D plane, as shown here: If I would like to develop on Windows XP and use DirectX (I suppose I'm limited to DX9), and the game would have to run on Windows XP (and newer Windows OSes) and not worry about 3D stuff initially, is DirectDraw still the thing I should be reading up on? Can I then "add in" D3D usage to the app? (I haven't used DirectX in 5+ years, and then it was just to make 2D games comparable to Bomberman).I have heard that DirectDraw has become deprecated(?) in favor of Direct2D, but that D2D is only available on Vista/W7/etc new OSes.Alternatively, can I do everything with D3D that I could w/DirectDraw? I'm thinking I could just have a single square polygon (textured quad?) as my surface, and draw to that, or something? Is it "the way to go" or is that not the right tool for this job?Sorry if my lingo is off, I hope the pictures explain what I'd like to start off with and where I'd like to leave room to go in the future.Thank you in advance. :)[Edited by - Kreychek on April 18, 2010 2:18:58 AM]
you can use XNA 3.1 on your Windows XP to make 2D games;  It is perfectly possible to do it in D3D.Look into ID3DXSpriteYou can draw a background sprite and sprites in front of it to achieve the effect you want.You can set up a perspective projection so everything will look like dragon force(sprites in the back will be smaller).Edit : If you know C# which is easy if you already know C++ then go for XNA or SlimDX they will save your precious time :)   ;  Wow thanks for the quick responses fellas. I will look into these topics, but of course the more input the better.After some further research I found:http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1972.asp...which covers "textured quads" as a method to do 2D in D3D (a term I only found out about from a wikipedia article on DirectDraw saying MS recommends using them). I'm not sure which I'll personally settle on, but thought it might be helpful for anyone else following this train of thought.   