aibelectronics said:
I've often wondered how:
1) to make menus and dialog boxes using C
What you need is a toolkit to do all the work. Sure accessing the Windows toolkit sounds ok in theory but it is a pain to code for
Personally I would suggest one of the cross-platform toolkits. Since you say C I would have to recomend GTK it is an extreamly easy toolkit to code for and I code with it daily on windows (be it in python but not much different).
GTK comes with a program called GLADE which means you can drop buttons onto a "canvas" and assign "call-back" names. Once happy you can then have GLADE auto-generate your C-code with callback functions already in place - then all you need to do is add your custom code
GTK also has plenty of examples
aibelectronics said:
2) to make games/ multimedia in c/c++? how does one control pre-drawn images by some line of code?
its all via vectors. Say you want picture to rotate you would define the plane and then just get the code to rotate abt an axis.
Sure DirectX sounds good in theory but it is equally "querky" to work with and it will only work for Windows (and then only certain versions depending on what version you use and dont forget licencing fee's if you really start doing something).
OpenGL is a fantastic API for 3D (doesn't do sound you would need SDL) and is very easy to use and it will work on MAC/Linux/Unix/PS3/Nintendo/... as well. SDL is a bit querky but you have to ask yourself it is worth learning - it is getting better
aibelectronics said:
3) mouse programming in c, without the problem of platform dependency..
How most things seem to have settled out is POSIX (Linux,Mac,Unix...) and there are very standard calls for getting access to IO inputs. And then there is the non-POSIX (ie windows). What I have had to do in the past is have a #DEFINE and a IF DEF statement near the begining to load the relevant header file.
Saying that there is alot of work to kinda "bolt" on a POSIX like interface to windows so a code will just compile and run - to some extent