As part of a programming exercise I'm looking to create my own SlimDX SpriteBatch class, based on that found in XNA.

I've already laid the foundations, with a working (but inefficient) sprite class for a single sprite. I am happily re-using this in my game, but I know it's probably horrifically inefficient compared to the XNA SpriteBatch class.

Can anyone point me in the direction of design notes for this? I know I could just re-use someone else's code, but I'm really keen to have a go myself.

Thanks in advance

Hi Mike - thanks for the post.

Specifically I'm looking for at the least recommended class attributes and methods. From what I can tell after initialisation of the SpriteBatch class, as you prepare to render a frame you 'Add' sprites by invoking the SpriteBatch.Add method, passing the vectors in the form of a rectangle, and the texture for that sprite. As I understand it, this necessitates the dynamic vertex buffer, such that we can draw all sprites via only one draw call - as opposed to reloading vertex buffers with a new data stream per sprite.

I guess I could derive the pseudo-code for the SpriteBatch from a paragraph or two - but as you can tell really I want to nail down the principles of operation before I start coding it.

At the moment I have a Sprite class which contains a vertex buffer, index buffer, and vertices data stream. It has a draw method, meaning at the moment if I want 100 sprites then I've got 100 draw calls for each Sprite object. Instead of this (which is clearly horrifically inefficient - but works...) I want a single draw call - somehow - and the answer is SpriteBatch, I think. Is this right?

I'm using DX11, but I've not read about instancing and geometry shaders much I must admit. I use some basic shader code, which doens't do anything clever.

Thanks for the pointer to the SpriteBatch implementation I'll take a look.

I'm also going to take a look at Nico Shertlers implementation: http://nicoschertler.wordpress.com/projects/

Cheers