\Managed DirectX and XNA Framework news
Just after the first release of Managed DirectX Tom Miller was on the .Net show talking about the new technology.
See Also: Microsoft, Technologies
From Sasha's blog comes news of an MSDN Canada chat entitled Developing Games and Tools Using Managed DirectX. Answering your questions will be DirectX authors Tom Miller, David Weller and Alexandre Lobao along with some other Microsofties
So mark your calendars for January 13, 2005 11:00 A.M. - 12:00 P.M. Pacific time
The ZMan will unfortunately be working his real job so I will have to read the transcripts after the fact. Maybe they will give the web site a plug!
Intel has a resource area for gaming technology including an article about Managed DirectX.
RobyDX (Translated into English by Google) has a huge number of tutorials using managed DirectX on his website. They are all in VB.Net which is great to see since most other tutorials are in c#. For those of you who don't speak fluent Italian, google does a great job of translating. I expect some nuances are lost but its certainly good enough to find your way to the source code.
He has sample code for Direct3d, DirectDraw, DirectInput and DirectSound and topics from beginner to advanced shaders. A lot of hard work went into producing this many samples
Microsoft have announced the latest update to the DirectX SDK which includes the Managed DirectX SDK. Download it here.
Highlights for Managed DirectX:
- BasicHLSL Sample now also in VB.Net
- Complete documentation for all samples
- Some API changes and additions - see the help file for details but Font.DrawText has been updated so Tim and David don't need their workarounds any more.
See Also: Microsoft, Technologies
Softimage
Foundation $495
SoftImage have partnered with the Ogre engine (which will by implication help Axiom) to produce exporters
ekt sent me an email to let me know of 2 managed wrappers for physics engines...
…and a modeling tool I had missed
Just a quick note about how I'm going to update articles on the site. For some articles, where I feel some narrative is necessary for the update, I will include a new news article which describes the update and links to the original article. For others where there is just a new link or a minor update which requires no explanation I will update the article in place and add it to the news category so it will appear in the RSS feed. You will see a 
icon next to the paragraphs that have been added or changed. The article will always be available from its main category for reference even when it drops off the news page. Either way if you subscribe to the feed or just read the home page you will never miss out on any changes
Tom's latest blog entry was not only some publicity for me but also has some information on the issues Marshall mentioned in the interview. Bottom line is that most of those issues are known bugs and were probably fixed in the October release. I will check in with Marshall on their next release to see if they had any problems.
There's also a generous offer to report any other bugs you find to Tom - you can't complain when the lead of a Microsoft product lets you report the bugs direct to him. But lets not use Tom to debug your code eh ? Do some due diligence, post to the newsgroup first so he has plenty of time to produce the next version.
If its good enough for Google its good enough for The ZBuffer. As part of my quest to stamp out programmer art I need to find any little excuse to fire up Maya and practise. So I present to you the holiday logo:
If you want to see a larger animation you can download a Media Player version (365k)
Its been bought to my attention (thanks Diep and Tom's blog) that though Arena Wars is written in managed code it uses OpenGL rather than managed DirectX. Rather than delete the entry I have added a correction.
See Also: Arena Wars, Games
Its been bought to my attention (thanks Diep and Tom's blog) that though Arena Wars is written in managed code it uses OpenGL rather than managed DirectX. The entry will remain for the sake of permalinks.
| " |
Arena Wars is a completely new kind of 3D Real Time Strategy game,
combining the gameplay principles and interface from RTS games with the fast
pace of action-based shooters. Arena Wars is a single and multiplayer game. Multiplayer supports up to 8 players, who can fight against each other and challenge other players from all around the world via the AW Server, whilst the single player mode is loaded with action-packed single player missions against one or more computer opponents. |
" |
Though the site has been up and running for a little over a month I decided to publicize to a wider audience with the interview yesterday. As a result I took over 10,000 page views in the last 2 days. I know quite a few of those were your aggregators pulling down all of the current posts and I know that’s not a big number in the grand scheme of things but its made me happy.
So some quick thanks to:
David, Tom and Jason for the links even though I shamelessly asked them.
Gamedev.net for 540+ referrals beating the closest competitor by 440+
devmaster.net, Craig, codepixel.com (spanish), Jonathan on the channel9 forum, fgoe.ch and the other Craig for picking up the story and linking.
And finally thanks to those who sent me feedback, ideas and corrections - I will reply to all and make relevant updates as I find time (as I mentioned this site is fitted around work and real life.)
Up till now The Zbuffer has been all about links - relying on others to produce the content while I merely point to their greatness. However, whilst that was the plan to get the site off the ground it's not the long term goal.
So today I'm pleased to announce the first original content for the site. I have an exclusive interview with Marshall Belew, the lead developer on Tin Soldiers: Alexander The Great the first retail game written with managed directX.
