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DirectX

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If you're trying to learn DirectX, what has been the most frustrating part of the learning process? Is there anything that could be done to mitigate the excruciating learning curve associated with Managed DirectX? If you could have an article on any beginner DirectX topic magically appear on your computer screen, what areas would it cover?

If you've been working with DirectX for some time now, what were some of the struggles that you encountered at the beginning? Is there any advice you'd want to pass on to those who are just getting started?

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2004
    I think it's simply the lack of beginner friendly documentation that adds to the confusion. The basic concept of flipping, clipping, etc.. is pretty intimidating to the beginner.
  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2004
    The biggest frustration has been the lack of informative documentation for managed DirectX. For example, when you look up a topic in the managed documentation, it is not helpful to tell the user that the Clipping Property "Retrieves or sets a value to enable primitive clipping by Microsoft® Direct3D®." Ok that’s great, but what IS primitive clipping. This seems to be the "Documentation" for nearly every property or class in the DirectX namespace.<br><br>The documentation needs to be more like the .Net language documentation. When you look up a property in C# the property is described in a way that does not assume you already know what the property is for. In addition there is typically an example showing how the property or class is used. It also tells what class the property belongs to and a way to navigate to that class.<br><br>
    It seems that much of this documentation exists in the C++ documentation, but some times it is difficult to coordinate between the two sets of documentation and find the analogous property or class in the managed documentation.
  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2004
    The biggest frustration I had was that all of the samples in the SDK had dependencies on a bunch of helper classes. Perhaps this has changed recently, but it would be good to have a set of samples -- both 2D and 3D -- that are straight Win32 apps without any wrappers or unnecessary abstractions.
  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2004
    I'd like to see some articles about how to create an installer for your game, that includes the MDX - what's the point in creating a great game, if you can't distribute it properly.

    For other MDX students I can only recommend Craig Andera's tutorials - they are really good, and cover a lot of ground. (http://staff.develop.com/candera/weblog2)
  • Anonymous
    April 12, 2004
    I'd definitly have to say the most painful part was the fact that I couldn't run any of the managed direct x code on anyone elses computers. I had people download the .Net framework, and DirectX 9 from Microsoft's site. After that they simply get the message:

    "application has generated as exception that could not be handled

    process id=0x640 (1600), Thread id=0xdac (3500)."

    This even happened with the examples that came with the SDK. It sounds like the DirectX runtime that is available from Microsoft doesn't have the managed extensions on it?

    And I agree with Micael Baerens, http://staff.develop.com/candera/weblog2 has been a great resource while I learn.
  • Anonymous
    April 23, 2004
    Glad you guys liked the tutorial.

    The problem with the DX9 installer is that it doesn't install the Managed DirectX bits by default. Follow the instructions here: http://www.softwright.com/faq/support/3dd_managed_directx_update.html