June 2004 - Posts

A little update

Just to get you all salivating I’m going tell you about my current DirectX project. 

 

It’s a Tomb Raider type example where you control Tiny (The star of the DirectX SDK tutorials) in an enclosed room with a street lamp (Animations!).  You can pivot Tiny like you would dear Lara and walk OR run in that direction.  If you hit the wall or the lamp you will stop (a little collision work), and when you walk under the street lamp she’ll light up.

 

Simple I know, but I haven’t seen a VB project come close to this.

 

The animation is my first and current struggle because you need to inherit a class to control the “skeleton” of the animation and because you have to write your own controller there are millions of different ways of doing it.

 

The next problem will then be the collision.  I thought I saw some reference in the object classes to check whether 2 meshes intersect.  I’m actually looking forward to this because I know I don’t fully understand how matrices work or are translated.

Requiring a re-think

Failing my ability to post any useful documentation on Direct X development, I've realised that I had no real ambition to do so.

I play with DirectX because it's something I personally enjoy.  While my views on the ease-of-use with DirectX 9 still hold, I can not devote time to helping would-be developers.

The question now is do I continue to use my blog space and to what ends?

I enjoy reading certain blogs and I'm on the lookout for more blogs that grab my attention, but I'm uncertain as to what I can contribute that's unique and interesting.  The topics I can write about include what I've discovered in my DirectX learning, the challenges and solutions in my work as a Sys Admin and my observations on news articles.

Your thoughts please

Posted by mailowl | with no comments
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