Managed World

Well, my private life is officially over. I finally made the biggest mistake (read: "best decision of my life" (behind marrying my absolutely gorgeous bride of course (Hi Honey!!)). I went out and bought World Of Warcraft. After not being able to relax and play games for a couple of weeks due to all the programming leading up to Code Camp, I decided to play games ALL weekend. And you know what? It was everything that I hoped it would be. Call me a slacker, but I enjoy relaxing by parking my butt in front of a monitor and playing video games.

WoW is just as beautiful as Guild Wars and, save for teleportation routines, has no load screens once you're in game (Note To Game Makers: LOAD TIMES SUCK). Being the absolute loser that I am, I actually found myself spending a decent amount of my in-game time fishing, cook, picking plants (aka Herbalism), and making potions. Over the weekend, I was able to get my character up to Level 12.

My character is a Tauren Druid (say hello to my Bear Form bizitch). I'm located on the Draenor server and my character's name is Rendru. Caveat: While Rendru might sound decent and creative, I must admit that there is absolutely NO creativity to the name (tauREN DRUid). You see? Anyways, if you're around, ping me some time. I'll probably be soloing for quite a while (until I get to a certain point) but that doesn't mean we can't chat, right?

Anyways, what does this mean for all of you? Bluntly, I may not get the articles up as fast as I possibly would.

This one comes from a conversation I was having with a co-worker about starting to play First Person Shooters during lunch and/or after work to spice this place up a bit.

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I found another FPS that we can play on our breaks: America's Army, since it is OFFICIALLY free and we wouldn't be braking any laws by doing so.

As Mykre has already pointed out, it appears that the August 2005 SDK has been released. I'm not sure how "official" it is since it isn't reflected on the DirectX community site, or the latest SDK page yet (although that may change by the time you actually read this post).

Enjoy!

I have one piece of advice for all of you game developers out there: learn shaders now!!!! Go out and pick up Sebby's book and do it now.

Let's look at some trends in the industry and see if we can't put some clues together (with freely available public information) to justify this decision.

1) The fixed function pipeline is emulated in shaders on a lot of newer graphics cards (meaning the "true" fixed function pipeline is almost no longer)

2) There is an entire Effects Framework in the SDK to make hooking into Shaders a heck of a lot easier and it is actively being developed on.

3) As my prior post shows, Microsoft is definitely NOT afraid of trimming the fat and is starting to prove just that.

4) In a good number of newer games, the fixed function pipeline is simply used as a "fallback" when some piece of functionality is missing.

Well, I wasn't going to blog about this because I thought it was under NDA. But considering the following information is available in the publicly available slides that you can download from the DirectX MSDN site, I figure that I can blog about it just fine since it's available for the public.

If you look for the slide called "Deprecated Components" in the "DirectX SDK Roadmap" talk, you will notice that most of the components will become deprecated (including DirectInput and DirectSound). In fact, it looks like the only major component of DirectX left is Direct3D, everything else will soon officially become deprecated. Interesting, I must say.

I can't share the other nugget with you though because it's not in the slides posted on the site. Oh well, perhaps it won't be too long before I can share the information....