D3000:Is there benefit to coding 2d games in Dx over GDI+?
Yes GDI is not always hardware accelerated so some effect will have to run on the CPU instead of the GPU, this takes processing power away from your application. In D3D you can achieve 2D rendering by rendering with an orthographic projection, rendering in 3D is faster as the GPU is designed to do this.
D3000: When loading images
should I embed them in resource files or from file/stream? What is the best technique?
In PC applications you can load your textures from disc and put them in a managed pool, the DX runtime will then keep a copy in local sysmem and for the active textures a copy in AGP or GPU memory. I believe that most tripple A games only keep a copy on the GPU and us it.
D3000: How have others handled rendering images for different resolutions?
Did you create multiple image sets or simply stretch the images to fit the device?
Rendering for different resolutions is handled by mipmaps of the textures and the type of texture filtering you use, the GPU can do this stuff for you. Gpus prefer power of 2 based texture widths and hieghts.
D3000: For buttons or interactive menus is it better to render an image or to draw the rectangle / text? What's easier or more efficient on memory / performance?
To render an image to screen in D3D you need to send a piece of geometry off that contains the edge points and texture coordinates for that geometry. It is faster to render an image then to actually render the same image as geometry. you can draw quads to a screen for this.
D3000: I'm finding DirectX difficult to learn, more so the
terminology such as Surface, Sprite, Texture, etc...I did find great
examples detailing how to "make a game" but nothing which says "this is
the best way to render a 2d scene and perform animations" (everything seems 3D). Has anyone
found a great resource detailing why you would use one class over the other classes provided? Or detailing where you would use 3d over 2d; best practices?
The reason why everything is done in 3D is because current GPU's are highly optimized to render 3D scenes. 2D can be achieved by rendering a 3D scene with an orthographic projection and keep one coordinate axis the same for any gemotry. Bare in mind that you can also render 3D geometry in an orthographic view it will just look 2D on the screen.
D3000: in GDI+, to display nicely animated scenes /
rendering such as flying or bulging text, I have to hammer out lots of "scene movement code"; does Dx have an easier way to handle 2d animations like the image or text scaling based on a time line like WPF or Silverlight has?
No in D3D you will still have to write similar types of lines.
Sample code can be found on
Codesampler
