#slimdx

[mydirectx12demo-blog]

Further Learning

Well, as I come closer to the end of this month, I’ll take a little pause here, and dive more deeper into real time rendering specifically DirectX by exploring few advanced areas like collision detection, clipping, multi-threading, post-processing effect, and tessellation by looking into DirectX12 Development book by Frank Luna. So, hence the learning doesn't end here. After few more days of research and getting a good hand on DirectX12 libraries, I’ll post my learning’s too. And yes, in this journey of learning, I came across many resourceful books, one of them is Real-Time rendering, that gives good general background of components involved in 3D graphics, and then Frank Luna has amazing in-depth view of DirectX. The experience of dealing with SlimDX was handy, as of how comfortable it was to use high-end class libraries provided in c#, but it has its own advantages and disadvantages, when it comes to dealing with DirectX.

[mydirectx12demo-blog]

Testing 2D Tile Based Game World

In this section, I would like to share few issues I'm facing with regards to testing input from the joystick, sadly for some reason I’m not able to move my player and after few seconds of execution, SlimDX application points out that it is not able to accept the input key press. I’m still in process of digging into the functionality. I’m trying to look into the book, but code seems to be good, there is some issue with linking of classes. Online reference for SlimDX and DirectX is also sparse. But surprisingly, I was able to capture how it looked like, here is the glimpse.

[mydirectx12demo-blog]

Testing a Direct2D Game Window

In this section of progress, I would like to test whether my application generates a Direct2D Game Window.

This is the green rectangle with blue border. In future post, we will look into 2D tile based game. Stay tuned!

[mydirectx12demo-blog]

Testing Input from Joystick

In this section of progress, I would like to see if I’m able receive input from my playstation controller. This is how it appears to be -

This is visual representation of how Direct Input and XInput are reading input from the same game controller.

For more reference, look into - Game Development with SlimDX by Micheal Fontanini

[mydirectx12demo-blog]

Getting Input through Joystick

In this section of progress, I looked into creating methods to receive player’s input from joystick. GetJoysticks() method involves getting all desired controllers attached to the system, and then giving it maximum and minimum possible values for each axis on the game controller. Hence, if the joystick points all the way to the left, it’s horizontal position is -1000. And if the joystick points all the way to the right, it’s horizontal position is 1000.

Then I tried putting test code with bunch of if and else to test which button the user is pressing on the controller.

For more reference, look into - Game development with SlimDX by Micheal Fontanini

[mydirectx12demo-blog]

Mouse & Keyboard Input

In this section of progress, I tried to implement mouse and keyboard input which still plays major role in PC games despite players using other types of controllers. The purpose behind this setup is to bind certain key or button to a specific in-game action.

For more reference - Game development with SlimX by Micheal Fontanini

[mydirectx12demo-blog]

Direct v/s XInput

In this section of progress, I would like to devote some time on thinking whether to use DirectInput or XInput? I guess to use both. The reason behind that is we need to use Direct Input to support older input devices that don’t support the new features of XInput. On the other hand, why is it beneficial to use XInput? Because there is a situation where in Direct Input treats left and right trigger buttons on a gamepad as a single button. In order to avoid this, we could use combination of both. And yes, XInput only supports next generation controllers such as Xbox 360.

For more look into - Game development with SlimDX by Micheal Fontanini

[mydirectx12demo-blog]

Testing Game Window

In this section of progress I test to see if I’ m able to run or generate the Game Window for my application. But before that, I implemented main method which creates and object of Game Window class, to specify the window title, window width and height and lastly whether it should be toggled into fullscreen or not.