Steve Lacey - 10 years of Direct X | scobleizer

androidi

There were around 3 minutes of blue screen at the end of the video (download). And given then title 10 years of... it seemed more like The early years of...

Steve has a blog btw but it doesn't talk technical all that much.

Minh
WOOH! WOOH!

It's good to see some of the graphics guys get some press. Couple of questions:

1) Vista is emphasizing its future role in PC gaming -- what's the chance of that functionality migrating to XP?

2) DX has version numbers, of course, but what's this DDI thing I've been seeing? Seems like a lower-level thing than DX.

IRenderable
Pi

He is so right. It doesn't matter if you are using OpenGL or DirextX, all that matters is that you know the math. Learning the API is trivial. Math is the hardpart. Math is what graphics programming is all about.

DCMonkey
Monkey see, monkey do, monkey will destroy you!

Heh. I've got an unopened copy here of the "DirectX and the Windows 95 Game SDK featuring DirectDraw, DirectSound, and DirectPlay version 4.02" with the radiation logo on it.

Despite the version number on the disk, I think that's DirectX 1.

I got it for being on the beta, though I don't remember being a very good tester. I hope MS hasn't kept that fact on file all these years Smiley

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

Minh wrote:
2) DX has version numbers, of course, but what's this DDI thing I've been seeing? Seems like a lower-level thing than DX.

DDI stands for Device Driver Interface. Each version of DirectX not only publishes interfaces that application developers can consume, it also defines interfaces that driver writers must implement. A driver's DDI version is determined by the DirectX version who's DDI the driver implements. If you have a driver that implements DDI version 8, there will be certain DX9 functions it cannot perform. Note that the fact that a driver implements DDI version 9 doesn't necessarily mean your video card is DX9 capable.

scobleizer wrote:
Do you use DirectX? Tell us about how.

I haven't used DirectX in quite a while. I've beta tested it since version 7 however, and even was among the top 10 most bugs reported for DirectX 8 (got a Sidewinder Force Feedback 2 for that). One of the samples in the DirectX 8 SDK uses code I've written; the sample contained a bug, I sent in a correction, and they used my code exactly to correct the sample. Big Smile