Rom's Rants: [MDX] DiggerDX Part 0

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

[MDX] DiggerDX Part 0

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to be converting DiamondDash by Cory over at AddressOf.com from a GDI+ application to a Managed DirectX application. We're going to call the changed version DiggerDX.

My goals during this project:

1) Change as little code as possible. DiamondDash is already a functioning application, so if we don't have to change something, why should we? There are times when complete rewrites are necessary, but I'm hoping this won't be one of those times.

2) Use Managed DirectX 1.1 in a Visual Basic 2005 application. Microsoft may act like they have forgotten about the coders that use VB 2005, but I haven't.

3) Lead into another tutorial. DiggerDX is going to be a very low-impact game to work on, but the next game should be written from scratch. DiggerDX will establish the skills needed, and then we'll move on to more advanced skills.

You can download DiamondDash from here:

http://www.addressof.com/blog/articles/samples.aspx

(Note: DiamondDash is available for download as source only. You'll need Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition at the least to compile it and try it out.)

posted by Michael Russell at 7/11/2006 12:01:00 AM