DirectX10 Tutorial 5: Basic Meshes

Since my car has been broken for the last two days, I’ve taken off work and have been working on my Masters degree, since part of my Masters involves building a small “game engine” for AI testing, I’ve been doing some more DX10 work, so its convenient for me to quickly slap together a few more tutorials.

I covered the basics of indexed buffers and the depth testing in the last tutorial, in this short tut, I’m going to cover the basics of directX meshes. A mesh is a data structure that contains all the vertex and index buffers needed to draw an object. It’s a neater method of drawing objects as we’ll see.

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DirectX10 Tutorial 4: Indexed Buffers and Depth Testing

Okay so it’s been a while since my last tutorial, and I apologize for that. We dealt with textures in the last tutorial, and many of you might be wondering while I handled that so early? Well mainly because D3D 10 isn’t exactly an API designed for beginners, so a critical feature required for any scene rendering (depth testing or z-buffering) is done in D3D by use of a depth stencil texture, covering textures before depth testing makes sense in this case. Remember guys I’m not going to spoon feed you, these tutorials expect you to read the SDK docs for details on the variable types and the methods, these tutorials are just to give you a running start.

Before I get to Depth Testing, let’s draw something a little more complicated that a quad, how about a cube. Using the same method as in tutorial 3 the code to draw a six sided cube is as follows:

DirectX10 Tutorial 3: Textures

So it’s been sometime since the last tutorial and I apologize for that, I’ve been busy wrapping up my exams for my second degree and finishing off a mini thesis for one of my subjects. So now that it’s all over with I‘ve sat down and done a small tutorial on dx10 texturing.

A lot of other tutorials leave texturing for later on in the tutorial but I’m going to do it now because it’s so simple and further illustrates the point of shader programs and what role they play.

DirectX10 Tutorial 2: Basic Primitive Rendering

Okay I managed to find some time and wrote a very basic second tutorial that introduces the main concepts behind primitive rendering in DX10. This tutorial builds upon the base code of tutorial 1 so check that out if you haven’t already.

Also I need to mention that I’m not writing these tutorials for complete beginners, I expect you to at least have a very basic understanding of graphics programming and some of the terminology involved. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail regarding terms like culling, rasterizing, fragments etc.

One last aside before the tutorial, what makes DX10 different to DX and openGL is the removal of the fixed function pipeline. Now what the hell does that all mean? Well in directx9 and openGL, they had default ways of handling vertices, colors, texture co-ordinates etc. You’d pass through a vertex and a color and it would know what to do. It also handled lighting and other effects. In DX10 these defaults were removed and the core API has been simplified and reduced, this allows you to have full control over each pipeline stage and removes any past limitations present on things like the number of light sources and so on, but it has a tiny downside, the code complexity has increased a little.

If we take basic lighting for example, in the past a hobbyist could enable lighting with a few simple function calls and would get a satisfactory result and call it a day. Now for the same effect, the hobbyist would have to write all the pixel and vertex shaders necessary and make use of the phong (or other) reflection model equations to manually calculate the effect of lighting on the scene.

DirectX10 Tutorial 1: Setting up the D3D10 device

So if you read my review of Wendy Jones’ book, you know my feelings on the state of DX10 tutorials and books, I want to try and maybe help some people out with tutorials in getting started with DX10, I am by no means an expert and the tutorials will basically cover everything that I’ve learnt so far. They will not be rehashes of the SDK tutorials nor Wendy Jones’ book. I’m hoping to slowly build up a dxManager wrapper class that can be easily used for some basic D3D apps. So let’s get started with the most basic topic: setting up the D3D device for drawing.

Note: The DX10 SDK tutorials are excellent, they are a must read and my early tutorials will be a concatenation of the information found in them!

Beginning DirectX 10 Game Programming By Wendy Jones – Review

A search of amazon.com in regards to directx10 books yields only three entries: Wendy Jones’ book, a book by peter Walsh which by all account is just a basic update of his previous directx9 book and recently a new book by frank luna which also seems just like an update of a previous book.

I purchased Wendy Jones’ book: Beginning DirectX 10 Game Programming in January of this year and have only recently had the time to sit and go through it. In brief I wasn’t very impressed. This book is nothing more than a rehash of the tutorials available in the DX10 sdk, and to make matters worse you would think that she’d make an effort to improve upon the tutorials, that there would perhaps be more depth and clarity,  unfortunately she doesn’t.