\Managed DirectX and XNA Framework news
9/30/05: New version of DXGfx availalbe.
Eteractions is currently a work in progress from Guillaume Randon. It has the beginnings of a world editor and a physics simulator wrapped around a reusable graphics library. Whilst its not complete right now Guillaume has made the source available as sample managed DirectX code. The code has been updated to require .Net 2.0 and has some new features such as a QuadTree and multi texturing.
9/25/05: Slides available.
You can download the slides from PDC Comnet (search for 'Direct 3D') or, since I have no idea how long they will stay there, from ZBuffer Downloads.
This will just be a quick summary of some of the points from the 2 DirectX talks they had at PDC. They were well attended - the first one had to have an overflow room.
- DirectX 10 is the name of the game, they didn't mention WGF once.
- Vista will ship with both DirectX 9 (which contains all the backward compatible stuff (dx8,7,6, direct draw etc) and DirectX10 which REQUIRES DX10 hardware (non exists yet) and will not be backward compatible.
- The DX9 implementation will run all the old programs with no code changes. This is quite amazing considering that in Vista programs have to share the graphics card with the OS.
- There will be some extensions to DX9 that you can take advantage of in Vista.
- If your graphics card is using the new Vista driver model then GDI/GDI+ has *NO* hardware acceleration. In practise this shouldn't be a big deal since the CPUs are so darn fast these days.
- No more managing the memory yourself and worrying about when to create things. Memory is now shared and the OS decides when to page things up to the graphics card.
- No more DeviceLost (Yay). In fact the only time you can lose the device is if someone pulls the card or the drivers get updated. Generally only things that long running apps (like VISTA) have to worry about. [and those of you wondering how you can unplug a card need to think about laptops that have an auxiliary graphics card in the docking station]
- Can't interleave GDI and DX on the same surface any more.
- DX10 supports some new pipeline features:
- Geometry Shader: Runs after the vertex shader. Has visibility to the entire data stream including adjacency etc. Can add or remove data from the stream meaning that you can create geometry on the fly. They had a cool demo of a particle system running totally on the GPU and a scene that had dynamically growing vines, also 100% on the GPU
- Input Streams: This is a way of piping data out of one stage and back into earlier stages next time though. Essential for these totally 100% on the GPU programs. The CPU never has to modify the data.
- Predicated Rendering: Based on a decision earlier in the shader pipeline you can decide not to do something later. The example they showed was to render the bounding box around a complex object and then check if the box was occluded. If it was then the complex mesh also must be occluded so it is never ever passed through the pipeline.
This list is full of very useful, and very technical advice. Not really for beginners to post to but well worth reading if you want to hear from some of the top DirectX folk. There is some occasional Managed content, but generally it is C++ stuff.
There is still much debate over the best way to check for and ensure correct installation of Managed DirectX. While there is no definitive answer yet Chris Smith has created a bootstrapper for VS2005 that he claims will get the job done. Get it from GotDotNet
It was a dark (well not really - the power in LA was back on) Monday evening at the Coding4Fun booth in the PDC Exhibition hall. It was their destiny, the battle they both knew they would one day have to face.
In the red corner, running on Windows CE we have "THE FINALIZER"
In the blue corner, the hero of geeks everywhere, the newly head shaven (he assures me it makes him look tough) NINE GUY.
Of course we got the whole thing on video....
Come by the coding4fun booth in the exhibition hall and see THE FINALIZER and lots of other cool gadgets and robots.
If you want to meet up while at PDC, for a chat about Managed DirectX, quitting your job at Microsoft, game development or anything else then you can meet me at the Coding4Fun booth in the exhibition hall at the following times:
- Tuesday 13th: Most of the evening, or at least until the free beer runs out
- Wednesday 14th: After the keynote, until around 12:30am
- Thursday 15th: After the keynote, until around 11:30am then again during the evening
The badge of course doesn't say ZMan, it says Andrew Dunn which is of course my alter-ego!
Firstly thanks to all those who showed up. It was Monday evening so there are a lot of people not there yet, or who have recently just arrived. We still had 35 attendees. Sadly since the DirectX sessions are not until Thursday I was limited to what I could say about DirectX10. David was there to make sure I didn't violate any NDAs. I thought I was pretty cool wearing my GDC 05 t-shirt until it was pointed out to me that there was a big play station logo on the back.
There was some good discussion with the highlight being David announcing that the October SDK release will include a beta of the .Net 2.0 managed assemblies. No word what that will look like but you heard it first at the PDC.
You would think from the pictures on the website that the LA Athletic club is a real luxury pad. However, my phone doesn't appear to work - the voice mail light was on when I arrived but I can't get any messages. The flashing orange light was really annoying when I wanted to sleep. In addition, the previous occupant appears to have stolen the TV remote control and the alarm clock can only be set if you hold the button down with your entire body weight. Though there appears to be a wireless LAN available and you can connect to it though you can NEVER get a web site up which is why there was no blog entries last night. I was too tired to bitch. I have a horrible feeling its probably because they want to charge me for it. Seems like all the other hotels have free wireless, but not mine. $200 a night ($130 for the PDC) and they ding you for wireless too....
If you 'code your way to PDC' - you get a much nicer room
Well I'm here at PDC, after quite the annoying flight. When you get on a plane and there is a 4 month old baby behind you you know its going to be a fun 2.5 hours. However, the baby made noises for less than 5 minutes and I can forgive that because it's a baby after all. However the guy sitting next to them had a rather annoying, loud nasally monotonic voice and he told his life story to the guy across the aisle all the way there. Then there was the little girl in front of me with a personal DVD player - WITHOUT HEAPDHONES. Her mother of course slept the whole way (after reclining into my lap - come on lady its 2pm get your sleep before you fly) so was oblivious. So we all got to hear Shrek 2. After about 40 minutes I remembered I had my noise cancelling headphones which unfortunatly managed to kill just about all of that. Thanks goodness for technology.
After quite a delay, due to my quitting and other things, part 3 of the texturing series is up on Coding4Fun. The articles should be rather more regular from now on. We are targetting 1-2 per month.
9/9/05: Added Beginning 3D Game Programming
After nagging Tom for over a year he finally gave in just before I left Microsoft and said I could update and host the source code for his 2 books.
To try to protect him from freeloaders who would take the source and not buy the book I have only included the updated files - I think that's a fair compromise compared to not getting any updates. At the moment I have only done the C# code, the VB changes will be almost identical so look for my changes to see what you need to do.
Downloads for Managed DirectX Kickstart, Beginning 3D Game Programming
More great PDC news. Benjamin Nitschke is coming to PDC. Benjamin has done something most of us have yet to do - he has completed several games. We will forgive him for using OpenGL in the first one since he seems to be well and truly into Managed DirectX these days :-)
Dirk Primbs will be there too. He's blogged on some 3d stuff in the past.
Benjamin/Dirk - hope to see you at the DirectX birds of a feather.
Great news from INETA this morning, my proposed session on DirectX has been accepted.
Monday, September 12, 2005 at 8:15 PM
Given that there are probably more managed programmers than native at PDC I think this is going to be a great event for those of us DirectX programmers who prefer to live without pointers :-).
I am delighted to inform you that your proposal, "DirectX - Graphics and Games", has been accepted as a Birds of a Feather session at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2005 in Los Angeles, California.......
Your Birds of a Feather session is scheduled for Monday, September 12, 2005 at 8:15 PM........
We’ve heard the feedback loud and clear from previous conferences: a Birds of a Feather session is a discussion; it is not a presentation, lecture or breakout session. Projectors will not be available. Birds of a Feather sessions fill a niche in the conference – it is an opportunity for attendees to connect and interact directly with one another, to be part of their community.
Notice the description, its *NOT* a presentation so come prepared to meet other MDX folks and talk about things. Casey will be there and hopefully we can take a look at /cameraFlow and maybe even /cfWorldWind. Also Bonk from IRC #manageddx will there too.
Drop me an email if you will be attending the session - I would love to know what kinds of things you would like to discuss.
The Mail Owl Scrolls, may think he is not as worthy as some, but he has quite a good set of sample code himself. Sadly its just the code, no tutorial text alongside, but there are some rarely seen topics in addition to the usual set of beginner code.
Sample Code
- --Index--
- Alpha blending with Vertices and Materials
- Picking/Selecting 3d objects
- Bounding Sphere
Since I restricted the home page to 30 days worth of news there hasn't been a way to read the older items unless they are also in one of the categories. Until now....
You can either follow the archive link at the top of all news and archive pages, or you can make your own URLs in the form http://www.thezbuffer.com/YYYY/MM, where YYYY is a 4 digit year and MM is a 2 digit month (leading 0's of course).
While I was adding that feature I have set the web page titles on all of the individual article pages to match the title of the actual article. Hopefully the search engines will start picking this up soon since I had noticed that all of my entries in google look very similar.
8/29/05 v1.1 released
As you may know, the managed interfaces to DirectShow are rather lacking. David from Lime Green Socks began a project to provide a more complete set. The project, DirectShow.Net, is now hosted on sourceforge.
Yes I know that technically DirectShow is deprecated in DirectX, it has in fact moved to the platform SDK but there is still plenty of demand and questions regarding it in the managed DirectX space.
Well since my attempt at using google ads failed miserably (they revoked my account after I had $150 credit citing 'improper click detection' and refused to explain any further) I have decided to accept ads on the site directly. If you are interested, you can read more on the ad page.
Its hard to set rates, I don't want to rip people off, nor do I want be ripped off so I've based everything around an average CPM of $11. After a lot of searching I have found higher rates, but mainly at large newspapers, and lower rates mainly at non specific link based sites. If you know of any average CPM data that is current I would love to see a link.
While I'm getting started, and to try and help out other community sites I am happy to provide links to non profit community based sites for free as long as there is some vague relevance to The ZBuffers audience.
I also decided to help out the Indie game developers. For the price of one of your games you can get in the 6 way rotation on any of the ads.
Voting has been extended but closes Sunday September 4th
My proposal for a Birds Of a Feather community session at PDC this year has been accepted. There's only slots for 7 sessions so I encourage those of you attending (you have to log in to vote) go and choose your 7 favourites, hopefully one of which will be mine.
DirectX - Graphics and Games
How does DirectX fit into the world of Windows Graphics Framework (Avalon) and Vista (Longhorn)? What about DirectX.Next? Can you really write games in managed code? Do you have a problem you need to ask about? Come and talk about the past, present and future of DirectX both managed and native.
Submitted By: Andy Dunn, TheZBuffer.com
Vote here (after logging in with your passport click BOF voting on the left hand menu)
BoF sessions are not about me talking, they are about groups of like minded community folks getting together and talking about things as a group. There's no agenda and everyone is encouraged to ask *and* answer. So I'd love to see some more knowledgable folks there too. My role will be to moderate and keep the discussion moving.
Normally the blog is 99% Managed DirectX, with the occasional random sidetrack when I'm in the mood. But with PDC coming up and me spending a whole bunch of money to go I am about to break that rule big time.
Well to be honest maybe big time is a little exaggeration, I aim to attend mostly the UI/graphic sessions and given that Avalon/WPF has lots of nice 3D I think there will be some relevance. Also I will be at the Coding4Fun booth/lounge some of the time which is everything to do with the 'Ask the ZMan' MSDN column. Rest assured there will be no Indigo or SQL on this blog.
However I understand that some of you don't give a damn, so I'm giving you several ways to opt out.
- If you read on the web you are screwed - sorry!
- If you use a blog reader and you don't want the PDC posts then change the RSS url to http://www.thezbuffer.com/rss-nopdc.aspx.
- If for some strange reason you only want PDC posts, then use http://www.thezbuffer.com/rss-pdc.aspx. This one is mainly set up so that I can register on PDC Bloggers and get read by BILLIONS of people.
I put on a pair of shorts a couple of weeks ago and found something in the back pocket. A piece of paper that was carefully folded and had obviously been through the washing machine several times. I figure I'd not worn these shorts since last summer (remember here in the Pacific Northwest there is a very distinct 'shorts' season for most normal people). On the piece of paper was a sketch of a web page called 'TheZBuffer'. According to the domain records I registered the URL in August 2002 but for the life of me I can't remember what I intended to do with it.
But by August last year I had amassed a decent collection of Managed DirectX links and was getting ready to do something with them. It took me until October 8th (remember that and send birthday presents) to put together a basic site - all HTML! - and start adding content. But maybe I'll tell more about that story on the sites birthday.
One of my main goals for the site was never to let it go stale, this will be entry 262 in 372 days so I'm averaging about 5 posts per week. I think I can check that goal off.
Odd to think 12 months ago I was sitting in some boring meeting at Microsoft sketching out my future....
