Hellows, peeps!

Its been more than 6 years since I last coded something in C and I totally lost touch with allegro and game programming. Now that I have some time I want to recover this much appreciated hobby and I hope that soon, maybe not as soon as I want, this old man will be coding again.

I just have some questions to put myself in the right path:

I must be really old but why the installation area reads more than 4K topics but when I click on it just show 4? I really checked the options and changed them to display 100 but still just 4 shows up. Funny thing...

What would you recommend me? C or C++?

And I would like to say its good to be back! Im surprised with how many small games are in the allegro.cc website and how things have evolved so much! Actually, I feel lost at some things yet...

Anyway, thanks all for keeping everything up! I love you all, guys!
Hugs!

Xavier.

Hello! I agree with Edgar, C with Allegro5, make something amazing!

Hey Xavier, let me help you out a bit.

First you need to pick a compiler that matches your version of allegro (whether it's for 4 or 5). Second download the binaries. Since you're going with CB and MinGW I suggest you start out with my pre-made binaries from here :

https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/616935.

Simply extract the folders anywhere you like. Generally you move the mingw folder to c:\mingw to make it easier for codeblocks and other programs to find your compiler.

Next you need to setup either your command line or your CB project (do not use the global compiler, it just mixes and messes everything up).

First I'll show you how to compile with a simple command line :

Here's a simple list of commands to use with gcc :
-I path\to\include\dir
-L path\to\lib\dir
-l$NAME where $NAME is libNAME.a,
-o $OUTPUTFILENAME
-g (add in debugging symbols)
-O[0-3] (ie. -O1) optimize from 0 (none) to 3 (lots)
-c output only object files
-Wall turn on all warnings
-Wextra turn on extra warnings
-Werror stop on errors (usually not very helpful)

Anytime you open a command shell, you'll need to set your %PATH% variable to include c:\mingw\bin or wherever you installed MinGW. You can do that with :

c:>set path=c:\mingw\bin;%PATH%
c:>set path

The second command will output the current path. You can also change your system environment variable PATH to do the same thing if you want it to be permananent.

In CodeBlocks go to Menu->Project->BuildOptions and click on the overall project button in the top left. Then select search directories and set the compiler and linker search directories to match those of your allegro distribution that you are using (ie. from the binaries I provided, in the \include and \lib folders. You also need to set the linker settings (for the libraries that you need to link to) here :

Compiler Search Directories
{"name":"610945","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/f\/2\/f28c2d7e98ef59a6c8ea033eb235d79f.png","w":744,"h":424,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/f\/2\/f28c2d7e98ef59a6c8ea033eb235d79f"}

Linker Search Directories
{"name":"610946","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/1\/119f8a26416d8aeb73c4241312b2b57c.png","w":744,"h":424,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/1\/119f8a26416d8aeb73c4241312b2b57c"}

Linker Settings
{"name":"610947","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/b\/2bee17cd67ba42461170e7e550ec8e0f.png","w":744,"h":424,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/b\/2bee17cd67ba42461170e7e550ec8e0f"}

After that you'll need to add files to your project by using Menu->Project->Add Files or Menu->File->New File. Then build and run the project as necessary, fixing compiler errors as you go.

There are more advanced things, but those are the basics. I'll see if I can't get this up on the wiki. The page up there for codeblocks and mingw is like 10 years out of date. xD

Ooooook!

Edgar, you are my hero! Everything is working now! I got a small code from the allegro wiki to test the display, compiled it and it works! The only funny thing is that I need to copy the dlls to the folder where the executable is so I can run it. I suppose that eventually Ill find out which dlls are necessary and which arent. I think I can finally begun to focus on learning allegro again alongside C. Thanks a lot, friend! Im your fan now!

By the way, whats that -leagle_debug command on the linker settings?

And Taron, thanks for the advice! Ill go slow and stay just with C for the beginning then. No need to complicate anything anymore than it already is, right?

Is Shawn Hargreaves still around? He still is part of the allegro community?

Thanks a lot, peeps!
Hugs.

Xavier

Allegro 5 sounds more complex but really it all comes down to "set up allegro, setup graphics, make an event queue, tell the queue to respond to whatever events you want (drawing, logic, keyboard), and when the event is fired you call the right function in your main loop."

I put together a "template" main source file that has all those filled in already, so whenever I make a new project it's already ready-to-go.

http://www.shawnhargreaves.com/

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/pix/introduction/