Friday, November 7, 2008

Sidetracked

Wow, it has been awhile and I haven't really had time to work on my graphics projects. I have been really busy at work. When I do finally make it home, I usually get sidetracked with other things. I finally got to level 60 in Mass Effect. I am over halfway through the excellent novel Prey by Michael Crichton (I can't believe he's dead now). I have also been piecing together ideas for my own novel (I've always wanted to write a novel).

In terms of the DirectX 10 work, I did manage to get multiple render targets working. However, I got sidetracked by a bright idea I came up with involving using "strokes" generated in the geometry shader to do some NPR post processing. I was having a hell of a time trying to get multiple vertex buffers working. As I was investigating though, I found out that it wouldn't work anyway because the buffer size is limited to 16-bits (65,536 vertices). I needed more than that ... alot more. It would be a rather long explanation to explain why, so I'll just say that I was trying to essentially use the vertex shader as a pixel shader.

XNA 3.0 is out now, and I'm really surprised that I have not yet downloaded it. It sounds like they added in some nice features though (new Media classes, ClickOnce deployment, etc.).

I am really missing C#, so I may just go back to XNA and just wait for it (or some other C# graphics library) to get Geometry Shader support.

I was also reading about some of the features that are going to be in C# 4.0, and I am really excited. They are finally adding in optional parameters. Plus they are adding a dynamic type, which could prove useful in some cases.