\Managed DirectX and XNA Framework news

The Zbuffer will be down for some time on Monday February 28th for a server upgrade.

Kakaruto blog is a French language blog with Managed DirectX content

Written by David Weller and others.

David has made the source (C#/VB) available and fixed it to work with the latest version of DirectX. If its useful don't forget to buy the book

Its hard to find out information about companies that are using Managed DirectX. However this guys blog implies that Wizards of the Coast may be one such company. There's not anything definite in the blog so read into it what you will.

I tried emailing the blog owner with no luck, so WOTC folks if you read this let me know what you are doing if its something you can talk about.

Joshua (Alternate URL) has a managed DirectX game currently in progress called Starlynx.

Update 2/23/05: Joshua is making great progress. He has added more screen shots and some videos to his blog and asked for constructive criticism.

TrayGames is a new online gaming site for those short, quick games that you can just pick up and play any time. Right now they are in a startup/beta testing phase looking for developers and building the initial community. The site is run by a couple of game industry veterans and provides an online multi player framework for you to build your games around. All of the games they will host are .Net based and they ensure that managed DirectX is available, in fact they recommend its use over GDI techniques for speed. Read more in their developer section as well as in their developer faq. Unfortunately the site needs a login to try it out and the invitations are on hold until just before GDC. But it looks like this might be a good way for independent game developers interested in .Net and Managed DirectX to get published. I'll keep you informed of what's happening as I find out more (as long as they include me in the next round of invitations!).

Update: There's a forum linked from the blog page here. Joe told me the team is very busy preparing for GDC so they may not have much time to answer questions but maybe we can get a little more information and at the very least we can get forum accounts set up.

C# game Dev is a blog following Dan's attempt to build a tile based RPG game. There are lots of entries going back to June 03, but it looks like he's kicked of a 'from the beginning' set of articles if you start reading from the Feb 14th 2005 entry.

Robert let me know about the #manageddx channel on the efnet irc network. It was very quiet when I dropped in to take a look this evening (PST) and Robert did say its not very busy there at the moment. Apparently Tom Miller is one of the ops (though Tom is very busy so I'm not sure how often he contributes) and sure enough there was someone called Millerman connected when I looked.

I've always wanted to go to the Game Developer Conference but since I've never been able to make games or graphics part of my job I've never been able to find anyone to pay for me to go. Well this year is no different!

Well actually it’s a little bit different because this year I have this web site and I have convinced myself that going to GDC is an absolutely essential part of my research. Of course I have to pay for myself (unless someone else wants to offer up a donation - however I'm not prepared to make a fool of myself like some people) but that’s no so bad, I don't have any kids so I suspect I'm spending less than a years worth of diapers/nappies (US/UK).

Anyway, on to the important point of the message - if you are going to be there and want to talk MDX or buy me a beer on your companies expense account then drop me an email.

MonkeyCMonkeyDo is a c# game programming site by 2 'blokes' from England. Right now they have the beginnings of a DirectDraw tutorial for a game which they have already completed with promises of much more.

David has the powerpoint slides from his game development talk available on his blog

I discovered a link in my referrer logs from http://bspdx.blogger.ba/. I had no idea where .ba is from - it is apparently Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to the CIA factbook the spoken languages there are Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. Sadly there do not appear to be any online translations that I can find for those languages but it looks to me like there are references to DirectX and C#. Plus the site links to The Zbuffer so its got to be good! So if you are fluent in one of those languages take a look and see if its useful.

Update 2/15/05: Mursel contacted me to let me know that the site is in Bosnian, he would be very happy for other Bosnian MDX developers to get in touch and that shortly the site will be in English.

Dreambeam is an open source worship song presentation program for churches. It is designed for dual monitor support, which means one window for song selection and edition and one for presentation on a beamer. ('beamer' is a German translation for a projector) There are some cool screenshots to see. According to the instructions it uses Managed DirectX.

Dominique Louis from delphigamer.com has converted the Managed DirectX samples to Delphi and posted them on the Borland Developer Network. You need to create a free account to download the samples.

Do you want to write Managed DirectX games using Delphi? Then take a look at DelphiGamer. They have a forum devoted to using DirectX from Delphi.

VBForums has a games and graphics forum which has some Managed Direct posts. If you hadn't guessed from the name, this is all about Visual Basic coding.

Microsoft have announced the latest update to the DirectX SDK which includes the Managed DirectX SDK. Download it here. The only mention of Managed DirectX in the readme is a new HDRFormat sample.

See Also: Microsoft, Technologies

David did a great talk on Managed DirectX to the Seattle .Net user group this evening. Pretty well attended, though I expect there would have been a few more if people had known what the final set of demos would be. He talked about writing games in general (it seems you need to know some math), covered the differences - performance and code structure - between managed and unmanaged DirectX, did some demos and of course plugged his book. He also said some nice things about me and the web site. He ended up talking about how Avalon fits into the picture which was interesting to hear. Watch his blog for a copy of the power point presentation.

So what was the big scoop at the talk? Well after David had finished he introduced Mark and David from the Windows CE team and we got to see the world exclusive public demo of managed Direct3D for mobile devices. The code they showed us was almost exactly the same as the Managed Direct3D code you are writing today. David said that really it was just the device setup that had to change. Obviously being a "compact" version it is not feature equivalent to the desktop version. For example notice that I'm just saying Direct3D - there's no DirectSound or DirectInput on the device and there are other features missing too. Since the demo was running all in software, through the Visual Studio 'emulator' it wasn't fast but it worked just fine. Looks like there's a whole new avenue for managed DirectX developers coming up. As soon as more information is made public you can read all about it here.

Shekky is looking for managed DirectX coders to write some modules for a game engine. You can bid on the work at RentACoder. Looks like he has excellent feedback for paying people on previous jobs.

Johan has made the slides from the Swedish MSDN workshop online - find out the details at his blog.

Homepage, Sandlot games, Microsoft Partner Pack

According to their system requirements this game uses Managed DirectX. You can download and try the game before you pay.

Homepage, Sandlot games, Microsoft Partner Pack

According to their system requirements this game uses Managed DirectX. You can download and try the game before you pay.