Sunday, December 7, 2008

The Start Map



Running in Direct 3D 9 with pretty much everything aside from lightmap updating done.

The world geometry is running from a single Vertex Buffer object, dynamic geometry is drawn using User Primitives (which I might change to dynamic Vertex Buffers, as I've read some bad things about User Primitives!)

That's not bad for just over a day's work - a 95% complete port of Quake 1 from OpenGL to Direct 3D. Useful resources were the DirectX SDK help documentation, Beginning DirectX 9 by Wendy Jones, http://www.directxtutorial.com and http://www.toymaker.info/Games/html/graphics.html.

I found the SDK to be a good reference, but not so much use for practical "how do I" stuff. I got stuck very quickly when I tried to move beyond the scope of the tutorials. The book was great for getting off the ground, showing what's required in a friendly usable style, although it ran out of steam after a while. The two sites deserve special mention for actually daring to provide code for techniques one is likely to use in a 3D FPS. A rare thing among tutorial sites.

Over the next few days I hope to finish this and release it.

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