Beginning .NET Game Programming in VB .NET

ISBN-13: 9781590594018 / Angielski / Miękka / 2004 / 444 str.

David Weller; Alexandre Santos Lobao; Ellen Hatton

Opis

BACK A FEW YEARS AGO I HAD AN IDEA. What if I could make the power of the DirectX API available to the developers who were going to be using the new set of languages and common language runtime that Microsoft was developing? The idea was intriguing, and opening up a larger portion of the world to DirectX was a goal I was only happy to endorse. - Besides, what developer doesn't want to write games? It seems that at least once a week I am answering questions directly regard- ing the performance of managed code, and Managed DirectX in particular. One of the more common questions I hear is some paraphrase of "Is it as fast as unmanaged code?" Obviously in a general sense it isn't. Regardless of the quality of the Managed DirectXAPI, the fact remains that it still has to run through the same DirectXAPI that the unmanaged code does. There is naturally going to be a slight overhead for this, but does it have a large negative impact on the majority of applications? Of course it doesn't. No one is suggesting that one of the top-of-the-line polygon pushing games coming out today (say, Half Life 2 or Doom 3) should be written in Managed DirectX., but that doesn't mean that there isn't a whole slew of games that could be. I'll get more to that in just a few moments.

Spis treści

A table of contents is not available for this title.

O autorze

Sometime around 1974, David Weller discovered a coin-operated Pong game in a pizza parlor in Sacramento, California, and was instantly hooked on computer games. A few years later, he was introduced to the world of programming by his godfather, who let him use his Radio Shack TRS-80 computer to learn about programming in BASIC. David's first program was a simple dice game that graphically displayed the die face (he still has the first version he originally wrote on paper). He quickly outgrew BASIC, though, and soon discovered the amazing speed you could get by writing video games in assembly language. He spent the remainder of his high school years getting bad grades, but writing cool software, none of which made him any money. He spent the next 10 years in the military, learning details about computer systems and software development. Shortly after he left the military, David was offered a job to help build the Space Station Training Facility for the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). From that point on, he merrily spent time working on visual simulation and virtual reality applications. He made the odd shift into multitier IT application development during the Internet boom, ultimately landing inside of Microsoft as a technical evangelist, where he spends time playing with all sorts of new technology and merrily saying under his breath, "I can't believe people pay me to have this much fun!"