The ZBuffer : Managed DirectX/XNA framework Blogs and People

ZMan is just an amateur Managed DirectX enthusiast. He spends his time working on some top secret DirectX projects and keeping The ZBuffer up to date. You can find him in the managed DirectX newsgroups answering questions about mesh intersection for the 200th time.

In the real world ZMan used to work for Microsoft in a job that has nothing to do with managed code or DirectX. In July 2005, he quit Microsoft and gave up the great health benefits and 401k's to run The ZBuffer full time and to retrain for a job in the game industry - you can read all about the career change at IndieGameGuy.

He writes a regular column on MSDN's Coding4Fun portal answering questions about Managed DirectX.

Tutorials

"Ask The ZMan" on Coding4Fun and the channel 9 discussion regarding the articles
- Texturing Mesh.Cube() Part 1 and Part 2 and Spherical Texture mapping
- Managed DirectX Screen Saver - Basic setup, Scene graphs and matrix stacks, basic animation

Sample Code

SDK Tutorial conversions in VB.Net, J#
SDK Sample conversions (partial) in VB.Net
Detecting which DirectInput devices are also XInput devices in managed code

Tom is the designer and development lead for the Managed DirectX API and has a blog on MSDN. Tom has written 2 books about or using managed DirectX. Managed DirectX 9 Kick Start : Graphics and Game Programming and Beginning 3D Game Programming.

Fixed all the old links, added some new ones including Shadows in 2d

Mykre is a regular in the MSDN forums and has been an MVP for (Managed) DirectX for a year or so. his blog is mostly XNA/Managed DirectX with some art/modelling stuff and the occasion gaming post thrown in for good measure.

Tutorials

1/13/06: Added normal map sample

Finally, someone with code that *isn't* how to create a device from scratch^*. Pieter's website and blog have several advanced tutorials and code samples. He's working on a managed DirectX engine called Xilath, and has some cool screen shots: shader support, shadows and reflections. In addition Pieter did a talk on Managed DirectX and you can download the presentation.

^* I lied slightly, he has those tutorials too.

Tutorials

Sample Code

Added information on Rocket Commander

Benjamin was involved with building Arena Wars, began writing Lost Squadron (currently on hold), and is currently working on a new game project which has yet to be officially announced (I saw a sneak peak video of some of the graphics at PDC and it looks good).

His blog contains a development diary and other game related items such as the normal map compressor tool.

He is also producing a new game called Rocket Commander which will be cross marketed by Microsoft as part of their Visual Studio 2005 release plans. Congratulations on that Benjamin. As the game is developed he will share tips, tricks and code samples. The final game is going to have all of the source code provided. This will be a great learning tool - Benjamin is doing some of the top graphics work with Managed DirectX so its going to be good to look at his code.

I have no clue what it says, or what the guy in the video is saying but if you speak Thai and you are interested in XNA then here are a couple of sites.

ThaiXNA
Exteen including an introductional video

Aaron's main claim to fame is that he's the only person I have heard of who wrote a game (in Managed DirectX) for his girlfriend. We have never heard what the response from his girlfriend was but he moved to Tokyo to be with her so I think we can assume she wasn't disappointed :-)

Other than Texas Quest, it looks like he has some isometric wargame type thing (more) under way.

Tutorials

Texas Quest - 2D rendering in a side scroller, Game design

Sample Code

Texas Quest - complete source code for a 2d scroller game

Thanks to Mykre for pointing out Aarons updates, my blog reader apparantly had given up on the blog. Resubscribed....

8/30/06: Updated link to new blog, added to XNA category

David is the community manager for the Windows Gaming and Graphics group at Microsoft. His blog often has Managed DirectX and XNA Framework content as he also written 2 books Beginning .NET Game Programming in C# and Beginning .NET Game Programming in VB .NET

Useful blog entries:

Jason has merged his blog and Managed World into a single site. He *used* to have lots and lots of managed DirectX stuff, general gaming stuff and other interesting little tid-bits, but until he moves the content you will have to read his old blog.

I'm not sure what happened to the series about the 2d scroller game, everyone should email him and encourage him to move those to the new site.

Jason's Interview with Tom Miller has also changed location.

11/11/05 - added more details

Jesper has hit the three post target and can now be called a Managed DirectX blogger. If you speak Danish you can read his Managed DirectX posts or you can try the translation to English. Either way, take a look as there is a really nice picture of doing transparency. I'm not sure if he is working on a game or just playing with drawing shapes.

Thanks to Thomas for the following translation:

He is unfortunately not doing anything game related. He is creating an application for visualizing some sorting algorithms of a kind. He does not specify what exactly. So even though it looks a bit 3D Tetris like - it is not. But perhaps he'll do the tetris part when he's finished with his current software. We are all game developers at heart anyway!

Mark has just started a blog about Managed D3D for Devices (MD3DM). It early days for this technology since it relies on both Windows Mobile 5.0, which was recently launched and as yet there no no release devices using it, and .Net Compact Framework 2.0 which does not release until November. You can however get the beta of .Net CF 2.0 which includes all the emulators you need to get going. The frame rate won't be great but you can start experimenting. So you read Mark and get ready. We will cover this technology fully here on theZBuffer.com.

CreatedByX (alternative) not only has sample code but has recently been blogging on the subject of Managed DirectX and has a couple of screen capture video tutorials available. Right now he has one on creating a basic shader and another on how to use ATIs Render monkey.

Daniel now has a Jukebox sample, a Media Conversion sample and how to implement a filter in c#.

Rom's Rants is written by Michael Russell who works at Ritual in the QA department. He has a couple of posts regarding Managed DirectX. Looks like he is writing a top down shooter. Also another one about using Quake/Doom fonts from MDX.

Brandon has a great managed DirectX demo on his blog using lots of shaders and implementing some special effects.

Craig is building an isometric tile based game engine in Managed DirectX - follow his progress on his blog.

July 2005: Some new screenshots of ISO engine

Joshua (Alternate URL) has a managed DirectX game currently in progress called Starlynx.

Update 2/23/05: Joshua is making great progress. He has added more screen shots and some videos to his blog and asked for constructive criticism.

Ben Houston, who you may have heard of from the ExoEngine (which is .Net but uses OpenGL) did a presentation called "Introduction to 3D Computer Graphics using Direct3D and .NET" to the Winnipeg .Net users group in February. He has made the slides available on his web site

6/4/06 - project completion

Steven's blog is covering his University project which is using Managed Directx and C# to produce. Its something to do with modelling fractures in materials from what I can understand. (Steven has a layman's guide post specially for people like me) After some initial debate over API, he saw the light and chose what we all know to be the future! He's also British which of course gets The ZMan's seal of approval. He has a dissertation category set up if that's all you want to read.

May 2006: The project is complete and you can check out the final blog entry which contains a video, the full dissertation and a poster.

He also has some opinions on Managed DirectX, though 20% performance degradation for the rendering seems a lot more than any of us have seen. Without seeing the code or something to back up the data I remain cynical. The MeshFlags issue is a general DirectX topic rather than something specific to Managed DirectX.

Joakim has some managed DirectX tutorials.

Lynn has written a book on writing 3D game engines using Managed DirectX Introduction to 3D Game Engine Design Using DirectX 9 and C#. He has a website and a forum to support it.

Craig has a wiki containing Managed DirectX tutorials.

Updated Mitch to his latest position, and added XNA content

Mitch is a program manager on the XNA framework team. Previous to this he was (one of?) the guy(s) responsible for Terrarium. He's got several articles about managed DirectX and game development. There was rumor (and a screenshot which has gone) that a future version of Terrarium might have some real 3-d (Managed DirectX?) in it. He also did some 3D work on something called Mantis.

These days he is 100% on the XNA platform and his blog has plenty of good content:

Jeff Stewart is chronicling the development of his game Vyde. I'm pretty sure it will be in C#, though he appears to be unsure on that at the moment.

Blog and Home Page.

A new blog and website have shown up on my radar. Currently (Aug 1 2005) looking like it is under development. Nothing like a bit of publicity to make sure David doesn't quit after the first blog entry.

(As of today the RSS feed is missing a title)

Blog Content: Delphi.Net, VB.Net 2005, Hex based war game.

Justin's blog isn't just about managed DirectX but he has some posts on it as well as some game design entries.

Mike has a new blog with some managed DirectX content including some math tutorials explaining rotation matrices.

I discovered a link in my referrer logs from http://bspdx.blogger.ba/. I had no idea where .ba is from - it is apparently Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to the CIA factbook the spoken languages there are Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. Sadly there do not appear to be any online translations that I can find for those languages but it looks to me like there are references to DirectX and C#. Plus the site links to The Zbuffer so its got to be good! So if you are fluent in one of those languages take a look and see if its useful.

Update 2/15/05: Mursel contacted me to let me know that the site is in Bosnian, he would be very happy for other Bosnian MDX developers to get in touch and that shortly the site will be in English.

Zach Shewmaker has a blog devoted to his amateur game dev efforts. No real game dev content at the moment, just the intro.

Kakaruto blog is a French language blog with Managed DirectX content

Eugeny's blog has several links to managed DirectX stuff. Its in Russian for those of you who speak this language.

C# game Dev is a blog following Dan's attempt to build a tile based RPG game. There are lots of entries going back to June 03, but it looks like he's kicked of a 'from the beginning' set of articles if you start reading from the Feb 14th 2005 entry.

\Managed DirectX/XNA framework Blogs and People