Saturday, October 10, 2009

SlimDX August 2009 Release

A new version of SlimDX is now available. This version wraps the latest DirectX SDK release (August 2009, thus the name). This means that things like DirectX 11 and Direct2D are now officially supported (previous releases were beta).

You can download the installer here:
http://code.google.com/p/slimdx/

You can also read a little more about this release at the GameDev.net forums:
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=549927

I'm looking forward to trying it out. Unfortunately, I still don't have DX11 hardware, so I'll probably hold off on things like tessellation or the compute shader.

Saturday, October 3, 2009

Disappointment

Since I have never used the Geometry Shader, I've been reading tutorials on how to use it to generate silhouettes and stencil shadows via the adjacency information being passed through the index buffer.

From my posts in the past, it is pretty obvious that I am really excited about tessellation and I want to make use of it ASAP. So, a natural thing that came to my mind was combining the two together to tessellate a mesh and then generate silhouettes.

No can do. I was completely and utterly disappointed to find out that you can NOT use adjacency information alongside the tessellator.

I quote from the official DirectX 11 docs: "A geometry shader that expects primitives with adjacency (for example, 6 vertices per triangle) is not valid when tessellation is active (this results in undefined behavior, which the debug layer will complain about)."