DirectX Lessons, Lesson 2 (Direct3D Device Initialization)

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Introduction

This is the second lesson in the Game Programming Using DirectX within C#, there's some thing i had forgotten to include in my first lesson, in order to run these lessons in your machine, you must have Microsoft Visual C# 2003 With .Net framework 1.1 and Microsoft DirectX Sdk 9C with managed DirectX installed on your machine.

Now back to our lesson,  now we had reached the beginning of our party, so what’s the Direct3D initialization?

Before answering this Question, we must know about some terminologies used by Direct3D, the most important term of them is the Device, so what’s the Device?

Every pc nowadays has a graphics card, we have hundreds of models, with variety of capabilities, so do we need to maintain a different ways to react with different cards, in other ways do we need to make a code to act with every card model?

No, because if this is true, no one will play any game, cause imagine you had packed you game, and after that a new card had been launched, if these words are true, your game wont work on the new card, so how we maintain the workability of our game on all cards?

Direct3D had answered this question for us, by using what’s known by Device, the rule played by the device is so easy, simply every card vendor make what’s known by Card Driver, which is an Interface to handle any specified use to the card, Direct3D simply uses this Drivers which have fixed framework whenever the vendor is, we’ll look now at this model.

This model is known by HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer), The HAL is a device-specific interface, provided by the device manufacturer, that Direct3D uses to work directly with the display hardware. Applications never interact with the HAL. Rather, with the infrastructure that the HAL provides, Direct3D exposes a consistent set of interfaces and methods that an application uses to display graphics, for more information about this topic feel free to see the DirectX SDK.

Now we had known all what we need about the Device, so initialization is simply to initialize the Device object, in other words to choose its working modes, like resolution, color depth, type of vertex processing and so on, we’ll cover all these topics along we go through our course, but for now we are gonna just initialize the Device by the most simple properties to work with it in window mode without much capabilities.

Now the second lesson had been finished, and we'll jump into the third lesson in the part 3.

Mohamed Meshref