Scriptionary Blog

I don’t often recommend books, especially when it comes to DirectX/Direct3D. There are many monstrosities out there that should never have seen the light of day.

Once per week or so I browse a local Barnes and Noble hoping to catch a book I haven’t seen before. It rarely happens since their inventory is very stagnant, but still. A month or two ago I accidentally browsed the Graphics/Web section and found “Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 10″ by Frank D. Luna.

The title, publisher (Wordware) and cover were kind of off-putting so I almost didn’t buy it. But I’m glad I did since, in my case, it has become my number one DX10 reference. It’s compact, concise, always around my desk and well written so give it a shot if you have 30 bucks or so to spare.

Today Intel released it’s new issue of “Intel Visual Adrenaline” featuring a three page interview with Tom Forsyth about Intel’s upcoming Larrabee GPU, which is x86 based and fully programmable.

Click here to read the PDF, scroll down to page eight (8)

Larrabee will support a rasterization pipeline as well as raytracing but Forsyth mentions raytracing to be more of a technical feature than a mainstream implementation. Regardless of this, for graphics programmers this should be good as there will finally be a piece of hardware that actually supports realtime raytracing.

Direct3D as well as OpenGL will be supported in addition to the much anticipated programmable route, either through C++ or pure assembly, which should open up the card for people interested in parallel computing.

Sadly there’s no definitive answer from Forsyth on how many cores Larrabee will actually contain. I guess we’ll have to wait for that a bit longer.

PS, if anyone is at GDC listening to Abrash and Forsyth tomorrow, let me know what you got from it.

I haven’t been active at all in the OpenGL circles recently but apparently OpenGL 3.1 was released yesterday. Check out the specs by clicking here at Khronos.ORG.

I have been extremely skeptical about OpenGL 3.0 since it was more like an OpenGL 2.2 and did not implement any of the promised object oriented features that competing APIs like Direct3D implement. Thankfully, this release of OpenGL 3.1 seems to be better at first glance as it not only deprecates but removes the old functionality which has been in the way for so long.

It looks like Khronos has heard and listened to its outraged end-users and finally created a better specification. At least, upon first glance, that’s what it looks like.

With the release of OpenGL 3.1 also comes a new version of GLSL, version 1.40. Most excitingly, NVIDIA has released OpenGL 3.1 drivers immediately after the release of GL, showing that they’re way ahead in the game already (as opposed to AMD or Intel).

It is amazing to me that no major outlets such as Slashdot have picked up this this story and one has to find out about 3.1 by accident or RSS feeds.

OK, so only one day after I publicly whined “where is the DX SDK?” Microsoft has released the March 2009 version. Go figure. Get it here at DirectX 2009 SDK @ MS Download.

Also, there seems to be some interesting stuff bundled with this version of the SDK, here’s my take on the important stuff:

• Technical Previews
  • Direct2D
  • DirectWrite
  • DXGI 1.1
• PIX works on the Windows 7 beta
• Several updated samples

Check out the details at the link posted above. Also, it doesn’t look like the online MSDN library docs have been updated yet but usually that happens pretty quickly.

I wonder what kind of development is going on at Microsoft as there hasn’t been an update for the DirectX SDK since November of 2008. This is quite out-of-sync with their regular release schedule of a new SDK every 3 months.

My guess would be that with the release date of Windows 7 inching closer, the development for DirectX 11 has to be completed soon. Of course this is 100% speculation.

If anyone has a clue, let me know.

In an effort to clean out my closets full of stuff, I’m posting random stuff on my blog for free (w00t!). The only thing that you need to do is reply to the post with a comment. Make sure to include your email address, which is kept private, so I can contact you to get your mailing address, pay the shipping and the item is yours.

First up is a 24 port rack-mountable Ethernet 100M switch that I thought I would come in handy one day.. It didn’t in my case but maybe your home looks like a data center and you need one?

Shipping cost is $15.00 to CONUS only through PayPal. The first person to respond gets the switch and I’ll update the post accordingly when the entire process is completed and the money for shipping has cleared on PayPal.

I bought the switch a year or two ago for $99.00: I unpacked it, moved to another apartment, went wireless, and it’s been sitting idle ever since. I hooked up my laptop to it today and some lights are flickering so I guess it’s working, I don’t have the capacity to test it any further than that.

I’ll keep adding more random stuff randomly so keep your eyes peeled.

After doing all of my web-related development in ASP.NET exclusively for the last year or so I am rediscovering the grace of PHP.

While ASP.NET is extremely easy to use (RAD development, etc.), PHP has one major thing going for it that ASP.NET can’t match yet, namely: performance.

Although it’s possible to create high-performance pages with ASP.NET, it’s not without some terrible strife and hacking on the programmer’s side. Another nice thing (but not a PHP feature) is Apache’s mod_rewrite, God, how I’ve missed that in IIS.

It’s possible that in the near future some PHP related content is coming your way as I’m working on a few big projects done in the language.

Cheers!

Even though I prefer my web servers to run Linux, I just can’t seem to switch my personal computer to Linux just yet. From an end-user standpoint, Linux is still very rough around the edges, here’s my personal checklist (in no particular order) that I’d like to see fulfilled.

• The ability to install a piece of software without having to invoke a CLI.
• A full-featured development environment (that’s not Eclipse) that rivals Visual Studio in C++ development.
• A non-Unix-like file system.
• Better manual when you buy a distribution (SUSE manual: case and point).
• Better IHV driver support.
• Better native ISV software support without having to run Wine.
• And the coup de grâce: An OpenGL specification that can compete with Direct3D.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Linux itself, in fact much of my development time goes into LAMP related work. But for the desktop it just seems like a CLI-ridden nightmare at the moment.