\Managed DirectX and XNA Framework news

12/21/05: Noted that Vista Dec CTP is now availalbe on MSDN

Download December DirectX SDK. As previously hinted DX10 preview (Vista only and ref rast only), an update beta of Managed DirectX for .Net 2.0. Its all here in the read me.

More information on the Managed DirectX for .Net 2.0 beta and Direct3D 10.

According to Tom Miller's blog, Stacks Poker is using Managed DirectX to produce an online Poker experience with full 3d graphics. Right now its just image and videos (no direct links, sorry, the site is a big old Flash application) but you can sign up to be a preview player. The site talks about a fall release so we must surely be close.

ZMan is just an amateur Managed DirectX enthusiast. He spends his time working on some top secret DirectX projects and keeping The ZBuffer up to date. You can find him in the managed DirectX newsgroups answering questions about mesh intersection for the 200th time.

In the real world ZMan used to work for Microsoft in a job that has nothing to do with managed code or DirectX. In July 2005, he quit Microsoft and gave up the great health benefits and 401k's to run The ZBuffer full time and to retrain for a job in the game industry - you can read all about the career change at IndieGameGuy.

He writes a regular column on MSDN's Coding4Fun portal answering questions about Managed DirectX.

Tutorials

• "Ask The ZMan" on Coding4Fun and the channel 9 discussion regarding the articles
  • Texturing Mesh.Cube() Part 1 and Part 2 and Spherical Texture mapping
  • Managed DirectX Screen Saver - Basic setup, Scene graphs and matrix stacks, basic animation

Sample Code

• SDK Tutorial conversions in VB.Net, J#
• SDK Sample conversions (partial) in VB.Net
• Detecting which DirectInput devices are also XInput devices in managed code

 

Brume Homepage (French), Screenshots, SourceForge site

Brume is a .Net 2.0 Managed DirectX game engine written in C# that has an extensive list of features.

Though the sourceforge site was set up in October 2005 the last release was July 2005 and a quick look though the CVS repository shows minimal activity since then. I'm not sure if the move to sourceforge is an indication of a future growth or, like a lot of sourceforge projects, imminent death.

The download contains only compiled binaries and a couple of tutorials. Tutorial 1 is a simple empty project and tutorial 2 is a colored cube. Though the tutorials are too simple to show me what the engine can do they do introduce one very cool feature. Included in the engine is a UI based console that shows you and allows you to modify in real time the state of everything in the scene. Right now the UI is a little confusing and keeps overlaying itself if you are not careful but its quite fascinating. By implication the engine also has a full UI system which doesn't look like one I have seen before. Sadly there is no download for source code and I'm not feeling motivated enough to do the whole CVS thing.

Thanks to Mykre for the pointer to this one.

CreatedByX has a whole set of sample code and resources including a lot of code in VB.Net. I gather the rumours of a switch to OpenGL are overrated and DirectX is still his API of choice.

Sample Code

• --Index--
• Motion blur using fading and multiple rendering
• Orthographic projections
• Using viewports

Retinex is a sample scene graph implementation using Managed DirectX. Looks like at the moment it's a one man project by Tommi Laukkanen.

As Tommi says:

The source consists of few classes and should be good basis for writing your own scene graph based application or game. However it is not complete 3d engine. I recommend trying it out as next step after looking at the SDK tutorials.

He has made the source code available under the BSD license.

I took a quick look at the code and its a fairly standard scene graph implementation. The only problem I had was that you will have to install NUnit or modify the code to get it to compile. There is only one example of how to use it and its very simple. There's currently no other documentation and the XML comments in the code are too sporadic to be of use. But its a great start if you are wondering what a scene graph is and to see how to architect one.

If you are reading this entry then the move is complete and (hopefully) successful. If you see any problems please email ZMan.

The ZBuffer will be moving to a new host this weekend. In a couple of hours I will be switching the DNS entries over. The sites should be no different and if my memory of how DNS works you should end up at the old or new sites depending on how the replication goes. So hopefully nobody notices anything, but you are all now warned

David has hinted on gamdev that the new SDK will be out next Monday if all goes to plan and that it will include a technical preview of DirectX 10 (note that the DirectX 10 stuff only runs on Vista and I have no clue if any managed interfaces will be included with the preview.)

12/2/2005: Updated with details of new version

Sourceforge site, Devmaster.net entry

v0.14.0: .Net version now supports shaders and the code now supports VS2005 including the free express editions.

365 days ago today I sent emails to Tom Miller, Jason Olson and David Weller telling them about TheZBuffer. I put a news item up on GameDev about my interview with KoiosWorks and stood back to see what happened. I had 2500 hits the first day which turns out to be one of only a few 2000+ days I have had.

The first post was actually posted on October 8th but since there is nothing worse than visiting a blog with a handful of posts I chose not to 'launch' until I had some content. I had met Marshall from KoiosWorks at a game development class I did at the University of Washington. When I heard he was working on a Managed DirectX game I arranged the interview and the launch date was set.

I had registered TheZBuffer.com back in August 2002 though as I have previously stated I can't remember what my intention was at the time. I hadn't even started my game development class but I'm sure I thought that I was going to do something spectacular :-) After I finished the class I realised that though I had a shiny certificate it really wasn't going to help me get a job as much as I hoped. The biggest blocker was that jobs at the salary I wanted required 3-4 years of C++ and shipped games - I have many years of coding, but almost none of it in C++. I could take a pay cut but that didn't appeal to me so I went back to tinkering in my spare time and doing my real job. In October 2003 Seattle Sputnik had a .Net and gaming talk that was to become my epiphany. Now I could use .Net languages for DirectX. I had been using them for as long as they existed and VB from VB3 onwards. I started looking around for information and other than Tom's blog there was precious little so I started collecting links. Eventually it dawned on me that nobody else was going to to put a site together, and since I had a cool URL all paid for I started building the site in Summer 2004. Initially it was just a page of links for my own use but by October I had started to realise it was getting out of hand so I added some structure and eventually put the content in a database. The site has been running on .Net 2.0 since long before Microsoft had an official go live license (one of the perks of being a Microsoft employee) though I couldn't talk much about it for the same reason.

So here we are 12 months later and as a result I've got new friends around the world, spoken at conferences, written for MSDN and best/worst of all quit a well paid job on a (calculated) whim. The 318 posts have had over 250,000 page views from over 50,000 distinct IP addresses and monthly traffic is growing nicely. So in the great British birthday tradition drink a pint for me tonight and look forward to the next year.