Microsoft DirectX Game Developers SDK
Index: Requirements
Problems Companies
Platforms Languages
Software Research
- Game development SDK.
- Home page: http://www.microsoft.com/imedia/
- Based on COM, so you can use it from C or C++.
- DirectPlay
- Multi player messaging framework.
- Will soon support "lobby servers" for players to rendezvous
with each other, and alternative transport protocols, so you can meet people
over the internet, and dial them directly to play one-on-one, or dial the
bank directly to make secure transactions.
- Will support online money exchange.
- Competing in games of skill for cash prizes is not considered gambling,
so there will be alot of it.
- DirectInput
- Input device interface that supports joysticks and all kinds, game
pads, etc. Supposedly supports force feedback, but I couldn't find anything
about it by looking over the API.
- The Mandala system was demonstrated at the Computer Games Development
Conference, and it used the person's position in the video frame to control
a virtual joystick, that was "plugged in" through the DirectPlay
interface.
- DirectDraw
- Video display device driver interface.
- Lets you query capabilities of hardware and accelerators and take
advantage of them.
- Hardware emulation layer provides support for basic capabilities
that hardware doesn't provide, like scaled blitting and chroma keying, but
not for fancier capabilities that only the hardware layer would support
like overlays, sprites, YUV video, etc.
- DirectDraw supports many video display formats, including YUV video
cards, and it supports both source and destination chroma keying with a
color range (because of the noise in video).
- Lets you memory map the screen and get at the pixels directly. If
the card does not support mapping the entire screen memory (because it's
segmented or even less direct), the hardware emulation layer uses virtual
memory tricks to page the segments in and out as you access them, which
will be slow, but works. You can check the capabilities to see if direct
access is slow, and instead make a direct draw surface of the same format
in system memory, and blit it onto the screen (which is usually more accelerated).
- DirectSound
- Sound mixer, that uses hardware support if possible.
- Does not do sound input or other tasks handled by the Low
Level Multimedia Interface.
- Next version will support 3D sound, with different qualities: pan
and delay, and head related transfer function.
- Direct3D
- Low level 3D interface to DirectX.
- ActiveMovie is the new movie architecture.
- DirectVideo is Video for Windows on top of
DirectX.
- ActiveX Controls will be integrated with
DirectX.
- Here is an article about DirectX and Direct3D
that's interesting: http://www.3dsite.com/3dsite/cgi/publications/tess/issue28.html
- Here is an article about the relationship between DirectX and Intel's
Native Signal Processing: http://upside.master.com/news/atc/9522atc.html