The Mail Owl Scrolls

Animated Meshes are Hard

I have very quickly gotten out of my depth with Meshes.

The first issue is that you must clearly understand Matices and thier manipulation.  The second, and probably the most important is that you need to create your own AllocateHierarchy which manages the information coming from the mesh file.  I've found a couple of forums and sites that discuss this but most of them work in C++ and DirectX 8.  Eventually I found some DirectX 9 examples but be careful, they are for DirectX 9 and not DirectX9b which is the Summer Edition.

I've temporarly lost my links but when I get them back I will post them.

Otherwise, I'm actually gonna take a break from Animation and finish off my tutorials and sample explanations.

Another Mesh sample

I've uploaded a sample demonstrating the code code practice for any mesh.  This time a fully rendered person named Tiny.  It also shows how to let the mesh handle its own textures.

I apologise for the lateness of the supporting documentation, I will be working on it as soon as possible.

DirectX tutorials available for download

Alrighty, let's begin

I have completed the tutorial examples for Tutorial 2 (2a is available for immediate download and 2b and 2c will be available shortly).  I'll be putting working on the documentation this weekend (22-May-2004 to 23-May-2004) and posting it up on the following Monday.

I would love to have your opinions on the examples and especially your questions.

In other news, I'm busy investigating the DirectX Animation Controller for a Tomb Raider style demo.  As soon as I have ANYthing, I'll be sure to post something for you to look at.

First DirectX Sample

I have fixed the lighting sample that I was struggling with on SA Developer (www.sadeveloper.net) and I've posted it as my first sample in the articles section (click here).

The problem was that I didn't have any vector normals in my geometry so the lighting objects had nothing to work with.

Rather than add vector normals, which is a pain as you have to consider the face of each triangle.  I delved into my mesh knowledge and "borrowed" someone elses had work.

FYI make sure you have DirectX installed on your machine to run/debug this application.

Welcome to Mailowl Development

Welcome to the Mail Owl Development site.

If you speak to people about developing computer games in Visual Basic you will get an uproar of negative response.  "It can't be done!" is the general statement, "It's too slow and you don't have the power of C++" is another.

Those who are interested in developing games in Visual Basic normally say "It's too hard and complicated", and those are the people I want to address on this website.  Yes! it was hard, but with Visual Basic .NET and especially DirectX 9 you can create fast running, eye catching games.

Click Here to go to the DirectX Tutorials section

Start of the DirectX tutorials - Layout

I'm going to posting my works on DirectX in the next few weeks, starting now with a layout plan.

1. Definitions
2. Rendering
3. Matrices
4. Lighting
3. Textures
4. Meshes
more examples to be announced as I figure them out.

The problem I've found in the examples from the Mircosoft DirectX SDK and examples from other sites and tutorials is that the next example doesn't lead on from the first, so you can't explore on your own or tweak an example to try other things.  I hope that my examples will be fun, easy to use and readily understandable because the second problem I found was that the tutorials often had a complicated geometry which wasn't understandable to a beginner.