The COMPLETE Effect and HLSL Cross-Reference

By Sebastien St-Laurent ISBN 0-9766132-1-2 Jan 2006 (896 pages) Buy directly from Paradoxal Press at $20.75 (Save 43%)

Page 6 ...etric information is passed to the graphics hardware through the use of a rendering API such as Direct3D. Once this information is received by the hardware, it invokes the vertex shader for every vertex in your mesh. Figure 1.1 includes the functional diagram for a vertex shader 2.0 implementation a...	Page 92 ...emantics can easily be divided into four categories: vertex shader input, vertex shader output, pixel shader input and pixel shader output. Over the next few pages, I will present the four categories in a set of tables describing the semantics and their meaning. Keep in mind that in the tables below...	Page 3 ...are. With the release of DirectX 8.0 came the introduction of vertex and pixel shader version 1.0 and 1.1. Although the standard came with limited .exibility and omitted some features such as . ow control, itwas the .rst step in giving developers and artists the .exibility needed to produce the stun...	Page 51 Generally, point light will attenuate proportionally to the square of the distance from the light. To allow .exibility within your scene, however, you would adjust the light based on the inverse of the distance, distance and distance squared. Thiscode illustrates how it can be done:	Page 17 Now that we have gone over what the reserved words and some of the preprocessor directives for the HLSL syntax are, we can start going over the syntax itself. Syntaxes for computer languages are generally presented in Backus-Naur Form ( BNF) which is an easy to understand form.

Features Added in the April 2005 DirectX SDK Update

This page is a record of the features that were added in the DirectX April 2005 update. To see the latest features in the SDK, see What's New in the DirectX SDK.

• SDK Updates
• Graphics Updates
• Technical Article Updates

SDK Updates

The following features have been updated in the SDK:

• Documentation
• Performance Tools
• Content Tools

Documentation

Setup documentation - The DXSetup documentation has been updated to explain the redist naming scheme and how you can customize the redist to reduce your installation size. See Installing DirectX with DirectSetup.

Performance Tools

Enhancements to the PIX performance analysis tool include:

• You can now open full-stream capture PIXRun files, and render frames from them within PIX, the same way you can with single-frame capture PIXRun files (see Analyzing PIX Data ).
• You can save rendered frames to an image file from within PIX.
• You can adjust the scaling of the Y-axis of the event timeline to see data graphed more clearly (see TimeLine Scaling).

Content Tools

Enhancements to the DirectX Extensions for DCC applications include:

• The Installing DirectX with DirectSetup plug-in has been added to support exporting data to the DirectX X-File format (.x).

Graphics Updates

The following features have been updated in the graphics component:

• D3DX
• DXUT

D3DX

The following new features were added to D3DX:

• UVAtlas API - These new API's (see UVAtlas Functions ) automatically generate a unique UV texture mapping for an arbitrary mesh, maximizing texture space usage and minimizing texture undersampling (stretch). See Using UVAtlas.
• Reduced effects memory footprint - A new flag ( 3DXFX_NOT_CLONEABLE ) has been added to allow users to specify that an effect will never need to be cloned by the effect system. Using this flag can notably reduce the memory footprint for an effect.
• Precomputed Radiance Transfer (PRT)
  • Passing in a NULL parameter for sample locations in the ComputeVolumeSamples API's (see D3DXPRTEngine) will result in transfer matrices being computed at each vertex in the mesh.
  • Improvements have been made to increase the physical accuracy of radiance transfer simulations.

DXUT

Based on customer feedback, the following is a list of major differences and improvements to the DXUT framework:

• Callback functions now pass a void* pUserContext that allows the callback functions to receive context from the application.
• The framework's GUI is now separate and optional from the core framework.
• The framework now allows applications to reject device changes via PDXUTCALLBACKMODIFYDEVICESETTINGS which returns a bool.
• Passing 0 as the width and height to XUTCreateDevice now creates a backbuffer of the same size as the client window.
• DXUTGetExitCode now returns 11 if the last device was a D3DDEVTYPE_REF device type.

For more information about all of these features, see DXUT Reference.

Technical Article Updates

• The DirectX developer Frequenty Asked Questions (FAQs) page has been added to the documentation. See DirectX Frequently Asked Questions.
• A new technical article about the Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 has been added. See Introduction to the 10-Foot Experience for Windows Game Developers.

See Also

What's New in the DirectX SDK