This blog has moved to http://www.managed-world.com/blog
[Crosspost from Managed World] As Mykre has already pointed out, it appears that the August 2005 SDK has been released. I'm not sure how "official" it is since it isn't reflected on the DirectX community site, or the latest SDK page yet (although that may change by the time you actually read this post). Enjoy ......
[Crosspost from Managed World] I have one piece of advice for all of you game developers out there: learn shaders now!!!! Go out and pick up Sebby's book and do it now. Let's look at some trends in the industry and see if we can't put some clues together (with freely available public information) to justify this decision. 1) The fixed function pipeline is emulated in shaders on a lot of newer graphics cards (meaning the "true" fixed function pipeline is almost no longer) 2) There is an entire Effects ......
[Crosspost from Managed World] Well, I wasn't going to blog about this because I thought it was under NDA. But considering the following information is available in the publicly available slides that you can download from the DirectX MSDN site, I figure that I can blog about it just fine since it's available for the public. If you look for the slide called "Deprecated Components" in the "DirectX SDK Roadmap" talk, you will notice that most of the components will become deprecated (including DirectInput ......
[Crosspost from Managed World] I've gotten a good number of emails lately about the game development articles on GWB lately, so here is a rundown of the current status of them. The current series on the GWB site is basically dead. HOWEVER, there are DEFINITE plans to finish the series under a different name and with a different perspective here on Managed World. All the posts about "BooM" have to do with progress of the game/engine that the articles will be written on. I have decided to get the game/engine ......
[Crosspost from Managed World] While I found this talk interesting, it was a little off base. What it should have been titled was "New Debugging Features in Visual Studio 2005 for Managed Languages." What makes this especially funny for me is that a couple of things happened: 1) The talk started 10 minutes late 2) At the beginning of the talk, he asked how many C# developers there were and only six or seven of us raised our hands (there are maybe 40-50 developers in the room). 3) Knowing that only ......
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Damn it!!! I had a whole long post ready to go that I composed throughout the talk. And I just lost it. Damn it, damn it, damn, it, damn it. Oh well. The gist of it was "GO CHECK OUT PIX NOW!!!!!!!" You have to. I just can't explain how incredibly cool it is. Just check it out.
[Crosspost from Managed World] Interesting. All power point reading, but interesting nonetheless. I just hope there is some "meat" to some of these talks rather than just power point, power point, and more power point. I must take this opportunity to say that after seeing Scott Hanselman talk so many times, I'm an absolute spoiled brat when it comes to presentations. I find that I'm very picky about good presentations and certain things (like power point reading) annoy me greatly. At least there's ......
[Crosspost from Managed World] Well, um, yeah, the keynote.... What can I say? Hrm. It was by Mike Morhaime who is a co-founder of Blizzard. And, I may be crazy here, but I would think that if you are a co-founder of Blizzard you would have SOME sort of public speaking skill. I guess I was wrong. Funny how that works. He read to us about the lessons learned (by his employees evidently) during the global launch of World of Warcraft. However, I did walk away with two distinct impressions from the keynote: ......
[Crosspost from Managed World] Well, tonight was the pre-Meltdown hang. Before the hang actually started, Andy Dunn called me up and we decided to walk over and check out the Seattle Public Library whose architecture is talked about widely, evidently. All I could think of was "what a funny looking building." However, it really is incredible. Starting on like the 4th floor, all the books are on a "spiral" where there really isn't any "floors" per se. It's basically one continuous spiral up many floors. ......
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Well, I'm here at Meltdown. If any of you happen to be here and want to meet up, I'm in room 1618. Ciao!
If you were at the Portland Code Camp and attended some of the Game Development tracks, I would love to hear your feedback. You can either post about it and tell us where it is, or simply add a comment with your thoughts. There are already several pieces of feedback that I think are great (and I want more). This will help us improve v2.0 and make it better for all of you, the ones actually attending the camp ......
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I just came across this article earlier this evening. It is an article about improving Managed DirectX performance. It is written by Tom Miller and is published in the latest MSDN magazine. Enjoy!
[Crosspost from Managed World] Chris Williams and I were interviewed on the latest show of the GWB Podcast about various things like Microsoft Meltdown, Code Camp, and game development in general. It was a blast to be a part of (thanks Jeff!!). It definitely got me more psyched for this weekend's code camp. I felt like a total doofus while recording this but I suppose that's normal. The one thing I can say definitively after listening to the podcast is that I wish I had a more manly voice. Oh well, ......
[Crosspost from Managed World] Well, the early, unfinished, programmer-art, bare-bones prototype is finished for Tanks! I'm starting to get real psyched about this architecture. Anyone reading this that haven't read the book Game Coding Complete by Mike McShaffry, go buy it and read it now!!! (the source and binaries are posted below) Through this whole series of first steps, I have come to learn a couple of things. First, when writing any game that has a physics element too it, it becomes really ......
[Crosspost from Managed World] Following Chris's cue, I am going to post what I'm looking forward to attending at Microsoft Meltdown also (ME TOO, ME TOO, ME TOO!!!). Here's a handful of sessions I'm looking forward to (assuming they don't conflict with eachother (which they probably will)): Best Practices for Windows DevelopmentSpeaker: Chuck WalbournDeveloping games for the Windows platform means more than just using a few DirectX APIs. This talk covers a broad range of topics that game developers ......
[Crosspost from Managed World] This news comes from David Weller. It looks like the Windows Gaming and Graphics Technologies group is finally moving from Usenet to a fully-functional forum environment (RSS-enabled too!!). Check it out ......
[Crosspost from Managed World] Well, it looks like the Game Development track that I'm heading up for Portland's Code Camp (you registered yet?). Here is the tentative lineup (it might still change, but I'm hoping that it won't too much). - Introduction To Managed DirectX, David Weller - Message-Oriented Game Development, Jason Olson - Warplanner - Post Mortem of a Managed DirectX Game, Chris Goldfarb - Implementing Creature AI, Chris Williams - Behold My Bouncing Balls, Jason Mauer - The Power of ......
[Crosspost from Managed World] Mykre recently sent out a reminder that there is an IRC channel for Managed DirectX on EFNet. So, if you want to come around some time, feel free to (it seems like it is pretty quiet (hopefully we can change that)). I'm on there, Mykre is on there, Tom Miller hangs out there (although I hear he's pretty silent), and ZMan says that he'll start checking it out. So, grab an IRC client and head on over anytime (I personally use ChatZilla for FireFox) ......
[Crosspost from Managed World] When an exception occurs while running the sample framework, even if it is handled in a global exception try-catch block, the sample framework will throw an unhandled exception on Dispose. To replicate this issue, simply open up the empty project template and change line 238 in EmptyProject.cs from: effect.SetValue("appTime", (float)appTime); to (in order to force an exception): effect.SetValue("appTm", (float)appTime); Although it perhaps is not the best fix, the quick ......
[Crosspost from Managed World] I'm posting this as a reminder (for me and for others who were curious about this issue). If you are getting an exception when trying to retrieve transforms from your device (like "Matrix view = Device.Transform.View"), it might very well be because you are using a pure device. Pure devices do not support the getting of these matrices (and this is documented in the docs too evidently). Happy Programming ......
[Crosspost from Managed World] There is a bug in the sample framework ResourceCache where if you create more than a single font using the method call ResourceCache.GetInstance()... even if they are different fonts, the call will fail the majority of the time. It appears this happens because the key for the Hashtable used in the ResourceCache is the FontDescription structure itself and the FontDescription does not override the GetHashCode() method from object (resulting in differing FontDescription ......
[Crosspost from Managed World] Andy "Zman" Dunn has started a personal blog. He announced some big news recently about his career, and for us Managed DirectX people, it looks like things are going to be getting exciting around here. So, stay tuned (RSS feed here) and see the excitement grow :). Good luck Andy!!! I hope the best for you (and I can't wait to meet you :D) ......
[Crosspost from Managed World] For all of you out there who are wanting to see more game development articles, I have decided to wait until I have my first prototype of the sample game up and running before I start writing the articles. I think this will be the best thing for all parties involved. That way, I don't have to keep on changing and updating the articles as I refactor my code (it is a work in progress after all). Also, you don't have to wait for me to get my patooty in gear. When you see ......