Managed World

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Meltdown - Best Practices for Windows Game Development

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 some content here though.

One thing I find especially interesting is how specialized DirectX is becoming. What I mean by that is how many DirectX elements are becoming deprecated. From the sounds of it, DirectX is basically being wittled down to Direct3D and DirectSound. Here are the state of the other APIs that I know of:

1) DirectDraw - Deprecated

2) DirectMusic - Deprecated

3) DirectPlay - Deprecated

4) DirectShow - Not recommended for game development

5) DirectInput - Although it is not officially deprecated, it is highly recommended to simply use the Windows hooks instead of DirectInput.

I have a feeling there will be many interesting issues I will see in the next day or two regarding the direction that DirectX is heading.

Posted in Game Development

Comments [4]

Tuesday, July 26, 2005 12:39:42 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Don't forget DirectPlay. I would have to agree that something in terms of news has to be lurking in the shadows just waiting to get out.

Paul

Tuesday, July 26, 2005 12:46:42 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Ah, thanks Paul. I knew I was forgetting one of them. Updated :).

Jason Olson

Thursday, October 27, 2005 5:05:27 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

If they are deprecated that would lead one to believe they might be replaced with something hopefully better. I think stuff like DirectInput was very cool and easy to use. Games aren't changing after all. They still use music and input just as much as graphics. Is there any more detail other than the fact they are being deprecated? I was looking forward to DirectX 10 having a 100% complete managed wrapper along with excellent C# documentation so I could code my engine. This is pretty disappointing. Am I going to have to wait for input/sound/music/movie libraries to be released for Vista before being able to do this?

Nathan Alden

Tuesday, December 20, 2005 1:29:38 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

The whole point of DirectX is that it is an all-in-one package that does everything you need to code a good game or multimedia-intensive application.

If they drop input systems or networking components from it... Well... That will make it pretty useless!

Some people say "use Windows tricks for input [so try to write things to support all possible gaming devices!] and the windows networking object for network [and write all those things to go through NATs, voice compression, ...]" ... why not to write our programs in assembly as well?

That move is probably against any possible modularization idea -except if they'll replace those components with better ones

S. Ali Tokmen

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