Ramblings of a DirectX MVP playing at the sharp end of 3D graphics
July 21, 2008
Since last time I've been looking into the next bits of hardware I need to buy. I decided to do some digging around for HDD's.
My plan was to have a single super-fast HDD for OS and applications simply so that I could get fast response times. Few things make me as angry as unresponsive programs (I r…
My plan was to have a single super-fast HDD for OS and applications simply so that I could get fast response times. Few things make me as angry as unresponsive programs (I r…
July 18, 2008
I've been a bit quiet lately, but rest assured that I'm scheming and plotting with various projects behind the scenes [evil]
Firstly, I'm hoping to have some news on our Direct3D 10 book soon.
Secondly, I'm going to be at the XNA GameFest London event on 6th August. The pig of superness will also be …
Firstly, I'm hoping to have some news on our Direct3D 10 book soon.
Secondly, I'm going to be at the XNA GameFest London event on 6th August. The pig of superness will also be …
July 10, 2008
So it seems the sleuths of the online world have spotted that Microsoft's Direct3D 11 technology will be unveiled in a little under two weeks from now:
Quote:XNA GameFest 2008 Schedule
Introduction to the Direct3D 11 Graphics Pipeline
Be the first on your block to learn about how Direct3D 11 extends a…
July 01, 2008
I'd completely forgotten about the significance of July 1st what with returning from a weeks holiday and all the media hoopla over the UK smoking ban... turns out I have been re-awarded MVP status for DirectX and XNA for the fourth year in a row ('05-'06, '06-'07, '07-'08, '08-'09) [grin][cool]
Cong…
Cong…
May 16, 2008
So following on from my previous entries I'm still playing around with Visual Studio Extensibility with the eventual intention of creating some sort of FX/HLSL editor.
In my occasional spare time over the last week or so I've been playing with MPLEX and MPPG along with the Babel framework. Mostly ju…
In my occasional spare time over the last week or so I've been playing with MPLEX and MPPG along with the Babel framework. Mostly ju…
May 13, 2008
Cool: WPF Interoperability with Direct3D. Very cool indeed.
I distinctly remember talking with some developers at MIX:UK last year and again, very briefly with Promit (re: SlimDX). Struck me that there was a lot of scope for cool things if you could get WPF<->D3D integration.
I distinctly remember talking with some developers at MIX:UK last year and again, very briefly with Promit (re: SlimDX). Struck me that there was a lot of scope for cool things if you could get WPF<->D3D integration.
Quote:You will be …
May 08, 2008
So I've recently been involved in some discussions about publishing written work online. Unsurprisingly Adobe's Portable Document Format was brought up as an option.
When it comes to web-based publishing I quite simply believe that PDF has absolutely NO place whatsoever. Digital publishing or distri…
When it comes to web-based publishing I quite simply believe that PDF has absolutely NO place whatsoever. Digital publishing or distri…
May 01, 2008
Based on my previous excursions into 'language service' land I know that writing up a brute force pattern matcher doesn't really work too well. Either the code gets too horrific to maintain or the large number of rules just slow down text parsing to below usable speeds.
The Visual Studio 2008 SDK co…
The Visual Studio 2008 SDK co…
April 28, 2008
I recently was party to some conversations between colleagues at work about the dev tools for a 'scripting' language that is heavily used in our team. I generally think of scripting as being more towards NLP than, say, machine language on the old language scale but in this case the "scripting" lang…
April 05, 2008
Well a good evening to everyone (anyone?) still reading this journal [smile]
Things are still pretty hectic for me at the moment so I'm getting approximately zero time to just play with technology or get involved in any of the online forums. Fingers crossed it should sort itself out by the end of Ap…
Things are still pretty hectic for me at the moment so I'm getting approximately zero time to just play with technology or get involved in any of the online forums. Fingers crossed it should sort itself out by the end of Ap…
March 10, 2008
hmm... hello everyone... anyone still paying attention to what I write here? [lol]
Sadly I have little of interest to write, except a general apology/excuse for being largely nonexistant online for quite some time now.
I left my job at Fujitsu Services last week and started today at Barclays Capital …
Sadly I have little of interest to write, except a general apology/excuse for being largely nonexistant online for quite some time now.
I left my job at Fujitsu Services last week and started today at Barclays Capital …
February 03, 2008
Just a quick follow-up to my recent ranting and whinging about Windows Vista HDD performance...
SysInternals' Process Monitor is a great tool if you weren't already aware of it. Get it up and running and set up rules to only output ReadFile operations and hit 'auto-scroll' and you can just watch wha…
SysInternals' Process Monitor is a great tool if you weren't already aware of it. Get it up and running and set up rules to only output ReadFile operations and hit 'auto-scroll' and you can just watch wha…
January 30, 2008
hr = D3D10…
January 28, 2008
You know your computer is having a hard time when there is a delay of seconds between typing on the keyboard and seeing it drawn on the screen. And Windows Media Player keeps stuttering and pausing. And it takes 30+ seconds to switch tabs in IE7. And even longer to switch between applications. So f…
January 27, 2008
I've started doing a bit more reading and research into the 'deferred shading' topic that seems oh so popular these days. There's a lot of really great material available online, many of which are from this site's very own 'Graphics Programming & Theory' forum.
Whilst its far from a perfect rend…
Whilst its far from a perfect rend…
January 23, 2008
So the MVP Summit registration page went live on Monday at some point - bit of a surprise as I got notification on Tuesday ([rolleyes])...
Anyway, got myself registered and booked in at the Sheraton on 6th for Sunday to Saturday. or maybe Saturday to Friday. I forget.
From the look of the event outli…
Anyway, got myself registered and booked in at the Sheraton on 6th for Sunday to Saturday. or maybe Saturday to Friday. I forget.
From the look of the event outli…
January 20, 2008
Now that I've solved my stupid bug I present pictures for you all:
At the top-right is the 'pure' arithmetic implementation as a reference image; down the left-hand side are the look-up texture versions with varying texture densities.
The B&W images are a simple difference between the image on it…
At the top-right is the 'pure' arithmetic implementation as a reference image; down the left-hand side are the look-up texture versions with varying texture densities.
The B&W images are a simple difference between the image on it…
January 19, 2008
Ok, by way of a more detailed follow-up on yesterdays semi-rant stamp-my-feet post.
As you'll see at the end of this post I deserve a public kicking for being such a muppet. I could've just denied this whole story and saved any credibility I had, but I figured you might like a chuckle at my expense …
As you'll see at the end of this post I deserve a public kicking for being such a muppet. I could've just denied this whole story and saved any credibility I had, but I figured you might like a chuckle at my expense …
January 18, 2008
Right, I've had it with bloody look-up textures.
I've been staring at debug output for hours this evening (yes, I know its Friday night [headshake]) and its not making any more sense.
I seemed to get a good lead on texel addressing though. They moved the texel 'centre' with D3D10, but I thought that …
I've been staring at debug output for hours this evening (yes, I know its Friday night [headshake]) and its not making any more sense.
I seemed to get a good lead on texel addressing though. They moved the texel 'centre' with D3D10, but I thought that …
January 11, 2008
So, related to my previous journal entry I'm still debugging.
The basic synopsis is that a CPU-generated lookup table is giving different results to a 'pure' HLSL/GPU arithmetic equivalent.
After debugging various terms it seems that my hypothesis about the trigonometric functions differing is comple…
The basic synopsis is that a CPU-generated lookup table is giving different results to a 'pure' HLSL/GPU arithmetic equivalent.
After debugging various terms it seems that my hypothesis about the trigonometric functions differing is comple…
January 06, 2008
Evening all,
Finally back on the wagon with some Direct3D 10 coding [cool]
I'll save the full story for later in the week as its still a bit WiP but this evening I was doing some debugging and all evidence was suggesting that the HLSL intrinsic function acos() was generating a different result to the…
Finally back on the wagon with some Direct3D 10 coding [cool]
I'll save the full story for later in the week as its still a bit WiP but this evening I was doing some debugging and all evidence was suggesting that the HLSL intrinsic function acos() was generating a different result to the…
January 03, 2008
I was hoping to post some pictures in this journal, but it seems that Sony Ericsson's "PC Suite" software won't work under Windows Vista. Says its a supported OS on their website, but I'm running a 64bit variant and I suspect thats just one step too far for their poor installer [lol]
In an attempt t…
In an attempt t…
December 31, 2007
HAPPY NEW YEAR
Figured it'd only be right for me to post such a message. Things have been a bit quiet around my neck of the woods lately. Seems that for a number of reasons I've simply had nowhere near enough time to work on my various projects in 2007 and I suspect that'll be the case for the first…
Figured it'd only be right for me to post such a message. Things have been a bit quiet around my neck of the woods lately. Seems that for a number of reasons I've simply had nowhere near enough time to work on my various projects in 2007 and I suspect that'll be the case for the first…
December 15, 2007
I've mentioned it a couple of times recently, but I sat my 70-536 MCTS .NET exam on Tuesday afternoon. Scored 859 which is a pass (>700). Yay.
Right, finally twigged what was causing the messed up normals. I apologise for the repeated THUD noise you're hearing but I felt I needed to simultaneousl…
Right, finally twigged what was causing the messed up normals. I apologise for the repeated THUD noise you're hearing but I felt I needed to simultaneousl…
December 08, 2007
Still don't have any games or multimedia development stuff to write about, but today is officially the first of 9 days out of the office. Maybe, just maybe I'll get something done on '3D Pipes in Direct3D 10' [lol]
In the meantime I'm going to complain about security. It's bloody difficult and I cau…
In the meantime I'm going to complain about security. It's bloody difficult and I cau…
November 25, 2007
I briefly mentioned in my last journal entry that I was building a VPC image for Vista and VStudio 2008.
Looks like I made a slight mistake when creating my initial VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) - I accepted the default size of 16gb.
So throwing Vista Ultimate and a full install of VS'08 Pro (inc. MSDN etc…
Looks like I made a slight mistake when creating my initial VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) - I accepted the default size of 16gb.
So throwing Vista Ultimate and a full install of VS'08 Pro (inc. MSDN etc…
November 24, 2007
Just for giggles I'm installing Windows Vista Ultimate and Vistual Studio 2008 Pro. In a VirtualPC. On a laptop. It's been about an hour now and it's about 25% through installing .NET Framework 3.5 [lol]
Anyway, looks like I might have a fairly lightweight December work-wise, which is good. Means I …
Anyway, looks like I might have a fairly lightweight December work-wise, which is good. Means I …
November 17, 2007
So I'm not quite as much of a GPU buff as some people, but I do like to keep an eye on whats going on in the hardware world as well as my more familiar software one.
My general impression of AMD (and by implication ATI) is that they're leagues behind their Intel/Nvidia counterparts. I've been around…
My general impression of AMD (and by implication ATI) is that they're leagues behind their Intel/Nvidia counterparts. I've been around…
November 03, 2007
Right, so I'm going to write up a journal entry on this if only to prove to myself that I have actually done something on this project. It's not as rigourous a write-up as my previous mini-article on debugging.
Pretty pictures:
Taken from a previous journal entry:
It's pretty clear it's fubar'd. Rewri…
Pretty pictures:
Taken from a previous journal entry:
It's pretty clear it's fubar'd. Rewri…
November 02, 2007
*deep breath*
Open Visual Studio
File -> Source Control -> Open From Source Control
'3D Pipes in Direct3D 10'
Pull yourself together, Man!
*Runs away screaming*
Right, silliness aside - I've actually, for the first time in weeks (if not months) opened up my IDE and checked out from codeplex. Friday…
Open Visual Studio
File -> Source Control -> Open From Source Control
'3D Pipes in Direct3D 10'
Pull yourself together, Man!
*Runs away screaming*
Right, silliness aside - I've actually, for the first time in weeks (if not months) opened up my IDE and checked out from codeplex. Friday…
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