I'm gonna try and put some more useful stuff in here. I realised a couple of things the other day: I've been using this journal as my own personal lounge of rubbish and the title for this part of the site is 'Developer Journals'. So I thought it'd be more appropriate to write about development.
Related to my recent thread in the DirectX forum - I'm going to write about how I learn to use the programmable pipeline.
This will probably only be of passing curiousity for advanced graphics programmers, but maybe some of the beginner/intermediate level people will find it useful. If you do find my ramblings useful - let me know!.
I'm going to compile any relevent journal entries into a single webpage for convenience... View the compilation here.
So, Entry Number 1: Background -
I've been working with DirectX for years now, I think it's around 5 in total - but I can't remember a particular date/project that I first used it.
It seems that everyone these days is using the programmable pipeline (Pixel and Vertex Shaders), and for good reason too. Except I'm not. Surprise!
So far the actual **work** I do has no need for anything more than the fixed-function pipeline (it is, after all, a 2D game!).
In my spare time it's not quite so clear-cut - I've done some work with/around shaders, even written some HLSL code, but for the most part it's been graphics demos/samples I grabbed off the net and modified. The code I write completely from scratch, hasn't included any programmable pipeline work.
I find, in a lot of areas of life in general, if you WANT to do something, but don't NEED to do something it usually gets left undone until you have enough spare time.
So, I reckon I've got some time to work on learning shaders [smile]
Next time, "My Goals" - where I want to go with this...
