| Submitted by , posted on 17 December 2004 |

Image Description, by When I was starting on graphics programming, and programming in general, the learning curve was somewhat easier than it is these days. Windows APIs, messages, threads, triangles and stuff - you need to know tons and tons more stuff than in the old days. On a 286 DOS system, all you needed was a couple lines of (granted, rather cryptic) assembler, and you were set.
So, to make things slightly easier, I decided to write a tutorial on how to play with pixels. The tutorial is based on SDL, as that's the easiest way (IMHO) to put some pixels these days. My goal was to try to make the person who is reading the tutorial interested in playing with the computer, and to find that programming can, after all, be fun. The tutorial consists of short, understandable functions that make interesting things happen, and there's hints on additional stuff that the student can try to play around with the code.
The 6-part tutorial is suitable for people who are learning programming by themselves, or who know programming but don't know anything about graphics. Programming students may also use it as additional material for programming courses. Bored of those dry programming assignments? Maybe it's time to try something fun.
The IOTD picture consists of screenshots from the five applications that the tutorial goes through.
Top left - x2+y2 pattern, basically just to show how pixels can be drawn.
Top right - simple sprites.
Middle left - simple snow fall effect. Reading and writing pixels.
Middle right - feedback effect. Blending.
Bottom left - primitives; drawing filled circles.
Bottom right - well, I ran out of screenshots, so here's a screenshot of one tutorial page. =)
Oh, the tutorial is available at http://iki.fi/sol/gp/.
If you have a friend who's borderline interested in programming, this might be the thing to push him/her over. =)
Cheers,
Jari

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