The only way to suceed using DirectX is not to read a book and do the tutorial and be finished with it when it works or give up when the thing doesnt work. As a programmer the fact that it doesn't work shouldn't be frustrating but an interesting thing for you which would make you look up on why you screwed up or why the book code is screwed up. Looking up the book again to find your error will not be very useful anyways.
The way to work this out is to isolate everything you can get to work on it's own without too much code dependence and test it out to see how it works. I have tried reading books and their exercises and doing them and being done when they we're completed but this leads nowhere.
I have a learned a greater deal reading books for the guidelines on what to do and I would research the rest directly from the DirectX documentation using MSDN. The docs are not very beginner friendly but once you get to know how it works you have everything you need to get it done.
All I can say is that to learn something new, you need lots of patience, curiosity and great research skills. You need patience to find the information using your research skills which is suposed to be fun if you are a bit curious. Then you need to take what you learned and do a demo of your own without the books to see if you really understand what you are doing.
DirectX is not the kind of thing you learn in an evening it is pretty rough to get something done well in the early days especially when you don't have any advanced experience in what DirectX excels at.
Don't give up and develop the necessary skills to learn better :D
BAH! *stabs directX*
I'll do that, Gav. As soon as the slave drivers let me hobble my way home, I'll add you to my MSN list.
Just as a side note, there's two ways that I end up learning things a bit easier. I'm an immediate gratification guy; I often take the easy road. So, since I've learned that about myself, I learn things by constantly keeping two routes:
The first is the obvious way: I study things step-by-step. Let's take the DirectX tutorial folders for example. In this instance, we would take the first folder and memorize it. I believe they tell us how to initialize the directX window.
Here, I like to do what I do when I memorize scripture: I read the first bits, and write it out 5 times. Then I move on. Basically, until I memorize the thing. You may have already done this in the past, so rememorizing it might make things easier. Do this until you've memorized the code from the entire tutorial, and can build it from scratch using your memory. As in scripture, you don't always need to know the orientation of every function, just memorize them so that they'll always be with you. This is not the immediate gratification way, this is the hard work way. The harder work is finding out the smaller and smaller bits, like where the functions are defined and how they are defined.
Also, when I'm doing this, I have a second route of projects. The immediate gratification way is this: I take someone else's more advanced code and rework it. Take, for instance, the 6th DirectX tutorial. I switch some things around. Like, how do I rotate the tiger the opposite way? How do I scale him? What happens when I switch one of these numbers to -5.0f? This is immediate gratification; I immediately feel like a competent programmer.
Somewhere along the lines, we'll meet in the middle.
Again, I'm ranting, but you get the picture. For me, a strong mix of hard work and immediate gratification will turn things around in any discipline. It might be the same with you.
Also, you may have already surpassed this. This is basically advice for the beginner's beginner programmer.
Patrick
Just as a side note, there's two ways that I end up learning things a bit easier. I'm an immediate gratification guy; I often take the easy road. So, since I've learned that about myself, I learn things by constantly keeping two routes:
The first is the obvious way: I study things step-by-step. Let's take the DirectX tutorial folders for example. In this instance, we would take the first folder and memorize it. I believe they tell us how to initialize the directX window.
Here, I like to do what I do when I memorize scripture: I read the first bits, and write it out 5 times. Then I move on. Basically, until I memorize the thing. You may have already done this in the past, so rememorizing it might make things easier. Do this until you've memorized the code from the entire tutorial, and can build it from scratch using your memory. As in scripture, you don't always need to know the orientation of every function, just memorize them so that they'll always be with you. This is not the immediate gratification way, this is the hard work way. The harder work is finding out the smaller and smaller bits, like where the functions are defined and how they are defined.
Also, when I'm doing this, I have a second route of projects. The immediate gratification way is this: I take someone else's more advanced code and rework it. Take, for instance, the 6th DirectX tutorial. I switch some things around. Like, how do I rotate the tiger the opposite way? How do I scale him? What happens when I switch one of these numbers to -5.0f? This is immediate gratification; I immediately feel like a competent programmer.
Somewhere along the lines, we'll meet in the middle.
Again, I'm ranting, but you get the picture. For me, a strong mix of hard work and immediate gratification will turn things around in any discipline. It might be the same with you.
Also, you may have already surpassed this. This is basically advice for the beginner's beginner programmer.
Patrick
There are a lot of things in DirectX that you'll probably never need, or at least for the time being. I was looking through the help file and scrolled through the index and realized that I only know less than 10% of the API. Making a small game requires even less... maybe 3-4%. Just keep doing it. =D
Author
well thanks for everyones tips...
Does anyone have some simple games that I can simply browse through the code?
I think itll make much more sense seeing it all together rather than in a book where just snippets are shown at a time - its hard to see how it all fits together that way.
Does anyone have some simple games that I can simply browse through the code?
I think itll make much more sense seeing it all together rather than in a book where just snippets are shown at a time - its hard to see how it all fits together that way.
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