Entries Categorized as 'directx81'

Rendering Geometry : Vertex Buffers

Date February 4, 2008

At this point in our sample codebase, we should be at a point where we’re ready to tackle something a little stronger
than displaying text, or logging an event to a file; let’s draw a triangle!
Vertex Buffers
The only mechanism that Direct3D employs to draw (aka “render”) geometry to the video hardware is through the use of
Vertex [...]

Fixed Function Geometry Pipeline

Date January 31, 2008

How a vertex becomes a pixel
In the graphics libraries of OpenGL and Direct3D (*pre-DirectX10), the
common method for learning how to properly compute the position, and
other properties, of a vertex has been through the implementation of
the Fixed Function Geometry Pipeline.
This is the main pipeline in which the graphics engine calculates the
proper rendering to a vertex in [...]

Cartesian Coordinate System

Date January 31, 2008

Everyone uses them!
In this tutorial, we’ll focus on the concept of a Coordinate System which is used as our very foundation for positioning every object that we need to draw. Whether we’re rendering a menu system, our player avatar, explosion sprites or
even our high score list, we’re taking advantage of the coordinate system to ensure [...]

Displaying Text

Date January 30, 2008

Basic Font
With the introduction to the DirectX sample framework covered in the
previous tutorial, we can build on that to focus on another crucial task…printing
text. We can use text to display status messages for debugging our game, or
for printing out scores to the player. While there are a few methods of getting
text up and running within [...]

Creating a Direct3D Renderer

Date January 26, 2008

After going through the basics in our previous tutorials, we can jump into Direct3D programming
by learning how to create and initialize what we need to setup before we can draw anything.
Some History…
The whole point of the architecture behind DirectX is to shield you (the programmer) from having to deal
with lower-level details such as setting proper [...]

Adding Configuration and Logging

Date January 26, 2008

In the last tutorial we setup the main application core that we can use as a primitive kernel
to run our games with the help of the DirectX sample framework. In this tutorial we’ll go through
adding some important pieces to your application, even if they might be “unsexy”; reading .ini config files,
and logging.
Reading INI Configuration
An important [...]

Getting Started With DirectX8.1

Date January 26, 2008

This tutorial is an introduction to getting a bare-bones DirectX8.1 application configured and running. While we could get started on our own class framework to take care of the lower-level Windows initialization for us, there really isn’t much point if the goal is to just learn the beginning stages of using DirectX.
EmptyProject == Hello World
For [...]