Random Musings of Miller

I just got an email from the folks @ Suva Interactive, and it seems they have a game engine using exclusively managed code and MDX in particular.

I haven’t had enough time to actually look at it in depth, but it looks promising from what I did see.  Seems they entered it into the CSD competition recently, hopefully they did well in that!

I’d recommend checking it out..

Check out the video that David Weller did with Steve Lacey, the graphics lead for Flight Simulator.

About 3/4 through the video his comments:

“The Managed DirectX stuff these days is a great starting point, and for a lot of people a great finishing point as well for shipping titles.”

and

“We internally in the flight sim team use Manage DirectX in a lot of our tools”

Always nice to see the professionals enjoying our stuff.  Now just wait until they see the upcoming Whidbey stuff. =)

The most common topic on my blog returns again.  This time it will be brief as all I’m going to to do now is show you the render loop the June’05 SDK will be using.  A coworker in another group came up with this markedly simple, yet deceptively effective loop for that groups projects.  I liked it so much, i’m sharing it with everyone else. =)

The basic loop (slightly modified from his original version and the version in the new SDK for ease of reading):

public void MainLoop()
{
// Hook the application’s idle event
System.Windows.Forms.Application.Idle += new EventHandler(OnApplicationIdle);
System.Windows.Forms.Application.Run(myForm);
}

private void OnApplicationIdle(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
while (AppStillIdle)
{
// Render a frame during idle time (no messages are waiting)
UpdateEnvironment();
Render3DEnvironment();
}
}

private bool AppStillIdle
{
get
{
NativeMethods.Message msg;
return !NativeMethods.PeekMessage(out msg, IntPtr.Zero, 0, 0, 0);
}
}
And the declarations for those two native methods members:

[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)]
public struct Message
{
public IntPtr hWnd;
public WindowMessage msg;
public IntPtr wParam;
public IntPtr lParam;
public uint time;
public System.Drawing.Point p;
}

[System.Security.SuppressUnmanagedCodeSecurity] // We won’t use this maliciously
[DllImport(“User32.dll”, CharSet=CharSet.Auto)]
public static extern bool PeekMessage(out Message msg, IntPtr hWnd, uint messageFilterMin, uint messageFilterMax, uint flags);
——

Simple, elegant, effective.  No extra allocations, no extra collections, it just works..  The Idle event fires when there’s no messages in the queue, and then the handler keeps looping continuously until a message does appear, in which case it stops..  Once all the messages are handled, the idle event is fired again, and the process starts over.

It seems the folks over at Koios Works are back at it, and this time in full 3D..

From what I’ve heard Tin Soldiers: Julius Caesar has just gone live..

Developing games quickly..  Now there’s a benefit of MDX I like!

Taken from the Chat Announcements blog:

DirectX 9.0 Direct3D Graphics with Visual Basic .NET
Tuesday, April 26, 2005 from 1:00 – 2:00 P.M. Pacific Time (Additional Time Zones)
Hosts: Tom Miller and Adam Gallant. More to come…

Do you have questions about how to best use Visual Basic .NET to program DirectX 9.0 graphics? Are you unsure when to use a particular Direct3D feature? Join members of the Visual Basic and Windows Graphics & Gaming Technologies teams and discuss how to leverage the power of DirectX 9.0 from Visual Basic .NET.

You can view this announcement on Microsoft’s main chat page, or add a reminder to your Outlook Calendar.