Starting DirectX Adventures

This week I started playing around with Managed DirectX (MDX) and it’s a really fun thing. I attempted it a couple of times a long time ago but never quite understood it. Now I have a good feeling about it, a sense of order and structure has shown itself in DirectX code.

I’ll probably blog more about my experiences with it in the future, but here are some of the great resources that made me see the light:

• Craig Andera’s Direct3D Wiki: 16 very clear chapters on what’s involved in MDX. This resource gave me the basic understanding.
• Kalme’s Yaboc 2.5D Tutorial: a step by step tutorial about MDX and Visual Studio 2005. Creating the bricks game with game states, utility classes and classes for managing multiple sprites showed me a very nice way to structure a solution for this kind of game. This will most definitely be the base I’m going to start from when trying to write Pong :)
• The ZBuffer: a huge collection of links to other people’s tutorials and other resources. Most likely the first place I’ll check when needing something.
• Tom Miller’s Blog: an MSDN blog about DirectX. Need more explanation? :) This render loop article collects some of the posts on Tom’s blog, and definitely gave me a better view of the importance of a good render loop.
• MDX info: a very nice site with some good examples and ideas, and which I’ll probably be using a lot when I learn the more advanced stuff.

These links were my starting point for gaining knowledge about DirectX, and I would recommend them to everyone wanting to play with DirectX.

Some other links I’m checking out and which will probably help me in the future:

• Using Lua with C#: adding scripting to your game (inspired by an MDX info resource about scripting).
• Craig Andera’s DirectSound Wiki: the Direct3D part helped me build a nice background, when adding sound to a game I’ll be using this one.
• Lidgren.Library.Network: a UDP C# library which I will probably use when I have to add networking to a game. Since DirectPlay is deprecated, networking means using System.Net. You could write that from scratch, with bugs, while someone else probably already did it before you, or use a library; this one seems very clean.

Update: Microsoft stopped developing Managed DirectX shortly after this post and replaced it with the XNA Framework.