I’ve been disliking the fact that my game was only supporting .bmp image files. BMPs are larger than most file formats, and do not have any sort of image transparency (for shadows and such). I don’t really like jpeg because of it’s lossy compression, which reduces picture quality. Nobody uses that for games anyways. So I set out to support PNGs.

Png support seemed like it would be really difficult to add. I’d have had to download and set up several seperate things in order to add png support to a program. Some of them even forced you to compile them manually… with microsoft visual c++, which I don’t have. Then I found this feature in Dev-C++ which allows simple library management. What that means is that my “game” now supports loading png files. Awesome.

I reformatted my hard drive in order to improve my organization and ironically lost the cd to MSVS 7.0. I tried MSVS 8.0 beta but it is seriously lacking features, so I can’t set it up to use SDL. I have a copy of MSVC++ 6.0 but when a program loads it gives a message “this is just an introductory version of MSVC++.”

So now I can’t program anything.

I downloaded Dev-C++ and I am working on setting up SDL with that. It is really unfortunate that I can’t use MSVS 7.0 anymore, it really screws everything up.

update!:Dev C++ is working better than expected, perhaps better than MSVS!