Does any here have experience using AGEIA PhysX with DirectX? And specifically its character controller? I am looking for a tutorial on how to use the PhysX character controller with DirectX, to create a standard First Person Shooter control. The samples that come with the documentation of PhysX are for openGL, and are not explained very well. I have never used PhysX before, can someone help me get started please?

I could use this nfo also. The tuts for the character controller are not very good for me. Can anyone post some simplistic code for this?

thanks in advance,

Ok well, how about I start simple: creating a plane, and displaying it onscreen (for debugging)

This is part of what I have now:


How would I render this plane onscreen? Using directX..

I see alot of people are viewing this topic.

If you, like me and 7thAvatar, would like to see a tutorial on charactercontrol with PhysX + DirectX, drop a line here!

If there is enough interest for it, maybe someone will be kind enough to make us one :)

Perhaps important to point out (and I sense this is the point of confusion): the mesh or shape you supply to PhysX has absolutely nothing to do with the mesh that you render. They are completely different meshes who's data is stored in different places. In general, the mesh you supply to PhysX is a really simplified version of your actual mesh but in practice they share no data and can thus be considered "completely different".

So in your code you've created an NxPlaneShape but you have nothing to render because you still need to create an actual mesh to render. i.e. some set of vertices, indices, uv coordinates, textures, shaders and whatnot for DirectX to handle.

To put another way, if you don't already know how to create objects and draw them in DirectX (i.e. have an already working application that does this) then do not try to use these 2 APIs together. Start by building a basic "game" just using DirectX: have some objects that move around under your own control which are drawn to the screen.

Otherwise, if I'm off the mark I'm not entirely sure what the problem is. So here's another stab.

Think of PhysX as the "where stuff is" manager. DirectX is just the "draw stuff" manager.

Usually you'd draw something like this (in API agnostic pseudo-code)



Now if you're not using PhysX then:



however, you're using PhysX to figure out where stuff is so



-me

Palidine,

I know how to draw things with DirectX. Infact, I have the graphics part of my engine down; I can load and display meshes, using pixelshaders.

So my engine is at the point where I have a building (which consists of some meshes) and I can walk through it with WASD + mouse look. You know, the controls pretty much all FPS use. (I use DirectInput to do it)

But like you said, Direct3D has nothing to do with collision detection, it just draws. Now I need a way to keep the player from walking through walls, so I looked around and found PhysX :)

I also understand that PhysX meshes are completely seperate from Direct3D meshes. I understand what you mean by "where stuff is" manager. I knew that.

However, looking at the samples for openGL, I noticed they actually draw the PhysX meshes to the screen, for debug purposes. That way I could line up the PhysX meshes with the Direct3D meshes.

The reason I wanted to draw the plane now, is this:
If it shows up on screen, it mean Im doing something right! ;)

Are you saying this is not possible?

The PhysX physics simulation is SEPARATE from the DirectX Rendering API. To use them together, you want to supply some data from your scene (original matrix positions, bounding volume size, a simplified set of mesh data etc.) along with the physical attributes of the things in your scene to the physX simulation via NxActors. The simulation then runs and updates the actors world matrices - thats essentially all it does. Next you take the world matrix of the NxActor (NxActor->getMatrix()) and apply it before rendering your DirectX representation of the object. Remember the two things are separate!

The PhysX SDK comes with an interactive debugger ... it's a long time since I've used it but I remember it being very helpful. You can also get PhysX to spit out buffers full of vertices for rendering debug shapes in-game. Rendering these will give you a visual representation of the actual PhysX actors (including character controller) within your scene. It's all in the docs :)