Created for: Spring 2014 Direct3D 11 Learning
By: Bernard Llanos
Project started: May 18, 2014
This program is intended as a platform on which DirectX experiments can be built. It is designed to provide a number of useful services (once fully implemented):
- Loading parameters from text files at runtime, as well as saving parameters to files
- Management of simple windows on which to display rendered images
- Handling Windows messages, including for keyboard and mouse input
- Logging debugging messages to files and/or a console window
This project is now archived (as of September 2014). Some ideas and code from this project may find their way into future endeavours, but it is unlikely that this codebase will be updated.
Fortunately, I was able to use this framework as the basis for a 3rd year game development project (COMP 3501 Foundations of Game Programming and Computer Graphics, Carleton University, Fall 2014), where it proved to be reliable and resulted in a strong separation of code from data (due to the use of configuration files).
In the future, I would like to leverage industry-standard libraries to perform the functions of this project (and more).
Once the program is built and run for the first time, if its
configuration file has not instructed it otherwise, it will
create a text file, .\logger_output\log.txt, before exiting.
This output file provides guidelines on how to configure the program, as it records the parameters that the program can accept. (Note: If you modify the program, please consider outputting the absence from the input configuration files of your new/different configuration parameters to the log files. Also, be careful not to rely on the presence of any configuration data.)
The program will attempt to interpret its command-line string as the location
of a configuration file. If no command-line arguments are passed,
it will try to use
.\configuration\config.txt as a configuration file.
The following works were consulted for ideas during development
- Horton, Ivor. Beginning Visual C++ 2008. Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing Inc., 2008.
- Luna, Frank D. 3D Game Programming with DirectX 11. Dulles: Mercury Learning and Information, 2012.
- Zink, Jason, Matt Pettineo and Jack Hoxley. Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct 3D 11. Boca Raton: CRC Press Taylor & Francis Group, 2011.
- My game development group project for the course COMP2501A
(Offered Winter 2014 at Carleton University)
- This was, in turn, based on the course tutorials, which were based on the Rastertek tutorials (http://www.rastertek.com, which seems to no longer be available as discovered on August 3, 2014)
I did not copy large portions of code directly from any of the above references. However, aspects of this project are essentially amalgamations of code listings from these references.
Visual Studio 2013 running on Windows 7, 64-bit
Note that the "Character Set" project property (Configuration Properties > General) should be set to Unicode for all configurations, when using Visual Studio.
In addition to the default dependencies added by Visual Studio 2013, I have added the following libraries as dependencies
| Filename | Source | Usage |
|---|---|---|
Shlwapi.lib |
Windows platform | File and directory existence and attribute checks, and filepath manipulation |
This project makes use of the Standard Template Library to allow for platform-independent code in most places. The major areas in which the code is dependent on the Windows environment are as follows:
- Error reporting makes use of the
HRESULTdata type, and occasionally some error codes (the 'code' portion of anHRESULTvalue) that are defined within Windows header files.- Note that it would be trivial to define macros to recreate this functionality on other platforms.
- See [Using Macros for Error Handling at MSDN] (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms691242%28v=vs.85%29.aspx) for more information.
- All GUI-related code is Windows-specific.
- Exceptions of type
std::exceptionare created using a Microsoft-specific constructor that accepts a string argument. - The preprocessor directive
#pragma once(used to prevent multiple inclusions of header files) is Microsoft-specific. - See above for the usage of libraries provided by Microsoft Windows.
Most of the code in this project was developed with the intention of reinventing the wheel for practice. While I have tried to make the code robust, my aim was only to capture the essential aspects of this type of system, noting that others have already made far better works that I might rely on instead in the future.
I suggest that you use other, more fully-developed projects (by other authors) that have been created to provide a superset of the functionality of this program. For instance, there is the Hieroglyph 3 engine, available at http://hieroglyph3.codeplex.com/ under a very flexible license. Nevertheless, if you have comments on this project or wish to use large portions of the code, I would appreciate if you sent me an email at [email protected] (primarily because I value any opportunity to learn from you in the process).