Updates and Getting Started with DirectX

What I've been up to since my last update:

During late January and mid February, I'd organised a short internship at a local company to get some practical, hands-on experience with working in a professional environment making games. It was a great experience, the people I was working with were really friendly and it was nice to get an idea of how social a work environment can be.

I had a few tasks during my weeks there, but the area I spent the most time working on was a Pool game they had for Samsung mobiles. It was interesting learning a new development environment and spending time on a slightly different project than I was used to. Among some fixes for newer versions of Bada and some work on making a menu for achievements, I spent a lot of time creating an AI player so the game could be played by yourself. (You can see a video of the AI in action on the Portfolio page.)

Coming away from internship:

Microsoft XNA Logo

Around the time I was doing my internship, I became aware that Microsoft is effectively dropping XNA. Now while XNA isn't "dead" so to speak (you can still make games using it and there is an open source implementation called MonoGame) it prompted me to start considering how I want to proceed as a game developer.

Typically speaking, most console developers work in C++ for their game code and look for experience with APIs like DirectX or OpenGL, while mobile developers are more frequently using tools like Unity3D (a tool I also had some time with during my internship). Looking through job postings, it was very rare to see anyone specifically mention XNA experience as a desired quality.

As such, I made the decision that once I'd gotten my current project to a reasonable release state, I'd shift focus to either DirectX or Unity3D in order to continue my path as a game developer. Considering how much I'd been focusing on C# since leaving university, I was leaning towards DirectX so I could brush up on my C++.

Getting started with DirectX:

I found that getting started with DirectX was less straightforward than with XNA. XNA has an official portal with several tutorials and samples for beginners to look through, as well as hundreds of other tutorials available on the web. DirectX's main source of documentation is the SDK itself and its sample browser. That's not to say there aren't tutorials available for DirectX online, there are several, but don't expect it to be as straightforward as XNA.

The reason for that is simple. Where as XNA is a tool kit, which gives you a lot of boilerplate code to get started with, DirectX is a collection of APIs and expects developers to code for themselves. What does this mean in practical terms? Take this example. In XNA, when you create a new project you're given a game window with frame methods for Updating and Drawing your elements. In DirectX, you have to create that window yourself and specify all the functionality you want.

It's been quite the learning experience, though I feel like I've gotten a lot of helpful experience from it. Getting reaquainted with memory management is probably one of the more common areas I've spent time with. It's certainly useful to be able to delete a block of memory and know that it's gone the second the line executes. Another area I've had some time with is vertex management and shaders. I'd only recently dabbled with it in XNA, so it was interesting to see how similar it was in DirectX.

Some useful tutorials:

RasterTek "Multiple Light Shadow Mapping" Tutorial

I don't think I could have gotten as familiar as I am with DirectX currently if it weren't for these tutorials. These really helped break it down to simple, easy to comprehend chunks that allowed me to focus on what I was coding and fundamentally understand how it impacted the overall program.

• http://www.experimentsingameprogramming.com/chapter1.php
  A relatively old set of tutorials that focuses on making a simple game of Breakout using DirectX 9. One of the few sets of tutorials I've found that makes an actual "game".
• http://www.chadvernon.com/blog/resources/directx9/
  Another set of DirectX 9 tutorials which goes through the basics such as making a game window, drawing primitives, mapping textures and handling input.
•  http://www.rastertek.com/tutdx11.html
  An extremely impressive set of DirectX 11 tutorials that starts off simple with basic primitives and gradually escalates into common techniques such as multitexturing, shaders, advanced lighting and hardware tessellation.

What's happening next?

Once I've finished my current set of tutorials, I plan to make something very basic in DirectX which I'd always wanted to get around to with XNA. It will probably be more of a tech demo than an actual game, but it's something I originally wanted to include in Project Lead before I decided to move on.