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SlimDX August 2009 Now Available

Started by jpetrie Oct 10, 2009 at 3:18 PM 15 replies 5.4k views

Original Post

Oct 10, 2009 at 3:18 PM

The SlimDX August 2009 official SDK release is now available! Get it now. This is a major release in terms of new functionality, mainly due to the long-awaited inclusion of (non-beta) Windows 7 support. The new Windows 7 features include Direct3D 11, Direct2D, and DirectWrite. What's New Full release notes can be found here. Major points to be aware of include:

Performance improvements to many calls due to improved stack allocation policies for local interop storage.
Quaternion multiplication is now being performed in the correct direction (that is, the direction that is consistent with Direct3D).
Quaternion subtraction is now being performed correctly (before the operation was actually multiplying).
Direct3D 10 now exposes predication support on the device.
Many missing methods related to shader compilation and manipulation were added to the Direct3D 10 APIs.
Support for Direct3D 10.1 was added.
Support for Direct2D is now official.
Support for Direct3D 11 is now official.
Support for DirectWrite is now official.
Lots and lots and lots of bug fixes.

Do note that we recommend considering using the latest SVN release for active development using Direct2D, Direct3D 11, or DirectWrite as these APIs are still very new and are most likely to receive the most updates. What's With the Name? You might be wondering why this is the "August" release, despite the fact that we're well into October. We chose to keep the same name as the official DirectX SDK that corresponds to this SlimDX release in order to reduce confusion and simplify discussion. Future Directions The August release of the official SDK marks the last release of the DirectX SDK for which Microsoft has provided a firm ship date. We are not currently aware of when the next release of the SDK will be. Our plans for the next iteration of SlimDX include some fairly major changes to the library, including support for interfaces, a redesigned sample framework and sample set, and some other surprises. You will most likely be able to hear about these changes via the developer blogs and/or Twitter feeds. This will help you keep abreast of the upcoming changes, especially if you're a user who does not track the head SVN revision of SlimDX. Finally... ...we'd like to thank all our users for enduring the wait for this release; the official DirectX SDK shipped later than expected and included a number of additions that required more changes than usual on our end to update SlimDX to target the latest SDK. These delays unfortunately pushed us into a timeframe where none of the SlimDX developers had as much time to dedicate to the project as we would have liked, which delayed our release even further, and we appreciate the patience shown by our users while we addressed the last lingering bugs and issues. As always, please report any bugs, problems or feature requests on our issues page and to stay up to date with the latest happenings regarding SlimDX, you can follow us on Twitter!

Washu

Oct 10, 2009 at 5:48 PM

About time. Yeesh, I tell you, we start letting promit slack off and this happens. [grin]

Oscon

Oct 10, 2009 at 6:40 PM

Awesome, been waiting for this :) Thanks for the hard work.

AlexandreMutel

Oct 11, 2009 at 1:46 AM

This is great, thank you!

Shadnor

Oct 11, 2009 at 4:25 AM

Excellent work :) !
Thank you very much

akadajet

Oct 11, 2009 at 8:26 PM

Quote:
Quaternion multiplication is now being performed in the correct direction (that is, the direction that is consistent with Direct3D)

This confused me so much a few months ago. I need to redo some of my camera code, but at least it will be a bit clearer.

This looks like a great release!

jpetrie

Oct 12, 2009 at 12:04 PM

Quote:

This confused me so much a few months ago. I need to redo some of my camera code, but at least it will be a bit clearer.

Yes, it was a very unfortunate failure on our part, which is why -- even though its a minor change -- we're calling it out in the release notes. :)

LTKeene

Oct 12, 2009 at 4:28 PM

This is great news. A few quick questions:

1) Are there examples on using Direct2D and Compute Shaders?

2) Can I build/test/deploy SlimDX code that uses ONLY those two APIs on class 10.1 hardware?

3) Lastly...anyone tried any of this on WPF?

Thanks for the great work guys, can't wait to get started!

-L

jpetrie

Oct 13, 2009 at 12:25 AM

Quote:

1) Are there examples on using Direct2D and Compute Shaders?

No, since we are heavily re-engineering the sample framework and revising the sample set for the next release, we did not do any work on them for this release.

Quote:

2) Can I build/test/deploy SlimDX code that uses ONLY those two APIs on class 10.1 hardware?

I'm not sure exactly what you mean; we delay-load the DLLs we depend on, and as long as you are doing something that is supported by the native API, you should be fine. I'm not precisely sure how much of what you seem to be asking you'll get from the feature level support provided by D3D.

Quote:

Lastly...anyone tried any of this on WPF?

A WPF sample will be in the next release. I've been talking with some users who are using WPF and SlimDX, and what I've heard is that the previous D3DImage related approaches don't work as well, or something. But I don't have much in the way of details right now.

Hazard_X

Oct 15, 2009 at 2:34 AM

Thanks alot for the release! I started to work on my new D3D11 Engine and noticed some things:

1) Is there no Mesh class in Direc3D11? The D3D11 Namespace doesn't contain such a class, while D3D9 and 10 got it. Is the Mesh support deprecated, meaning that we need to load and handle mesh data ourselves? I guess it wouldn't be that dramatic, but it would make getting into it alot harder.

2) Is it really necessary to construct a new InputLayout for every single Shader Pass? I'm just wondering because it wasn't in the DX9 VertexDeclaration.

3) Another very minor thing i noticed is that Direct3D11.EffectPassDescription returns an Direct3D10.ShaderSignature object. I guess it isn't relevant at all, but the D3D10 and D3D11 namespace mixup is a little bit irritating. Is it meant to be this way?

Thanks for your help!

Mike.Popoloski

Oct 15, 2009 at 5:58 PM

Quote:
Original post by Hazard_X1) Is there no Mesh class in Direc3D11? The D3D11 Namespace doesn't contain such a class, while D3D9 and 10 got it. Is the Mesh support deprecated, meaning that we need to load and handle mesh data ourselves? I guess it wouldn't be that dramatic, but it would make getting into it alot harder.

No, D3DX11 doesn't have a mesh interface.

Quote:
2) Is it really necessary to construct a new InputLayout for every single Shader Pass? I'm just wondering because it wasn't in the DX9 VertexDeclaration.

You create an input layout based upon a shader signature. If the signature doesn't change, you don't need a new layout.

Quote:
3) Another very minor thing i noticed is that Direct3D11.EffectPassDescription returns an Direct3D10.ShaderSignature object. I guess it isn't relevant at all, but the D3D10 and D3D11 namespace mixup is a little bit irritating. Is it meant to be this way?

D3D11 relies on types from D3D10 in several cases. This is one of those cases.

GrasshopperDotNet

Oct 15, 2009 at 11:33 PM

Yeah, unbelievable work. That was quite a wait, and understandably so. "Anything worth doing is worth doing well.", my mother always says. Many thanks!

Hazard_X

Oct 16, 2009 at 4:10 AM

Quote:
Original post by Mike.Popoloski
D3D11 relies on types from D3D10 in several cases. This is one of those cases.

Thanks for your reply. Another small question: How to compile a shader effect file in D3D11? Effect.FromMemory doesn't seem to take uncompiled data... or maybe something else is wrong. The "An undetermined error occurred" message isn't very helpful on this. A MiniTri11 example would help alot to get started with DX11.

samv

Oct 19, 2009 at 1:05 PM

Quote:
Original post by Hazard_X
Effect.FromMemory doesn't seem to take uncompiled data... or maybe something else is wrong. The "An undetermined error occurred" message isn't very helpful on this. A MiniTri11 example would help alot to get started with DX11.

This might solve your problem.

Hazard_X

Oct 21, 2009 at 2:28 AM

Quote:
Original post by samv
This might solve your problem.

Thanks for your reply, but the thread is related to D3D9 and does not apply to D3D11. It seems like compiling of shaders is not implemented in the current release, which results in D3D11 being pretty much unusable. :(

I filed an issue here:
http://code.google.com/p/slimdx/issues/detail?id=550

Mike.Popoloski

Oct 21, 2009 at 9:41 AM

Quote:
Original post by Hazard_X
Quote:
Original post by samv
This might solve your problem.

Thanks for your reply, but the thread is related to D3D9 and does not apply to D3D11. It seems like compiling of shaders is not implemented in the current release, which results in D3D11 being pretty much unusable. :(

I filed an issue here:
http://code.google.com/p/slimdx/issues/detail?id=550

You can use the Direct3D10.ShaderBytecode class to handle the compiling of shaders. They use functions from the D3DCompiler library instead of using Direct3D10 specific functions. Up until the August release, this was necessary for doing any shader work in D3D11.

Hazard_X

Oct 21, 2009 at 2:17 PM

Quote:
Original post by Mike.Popoloski
You can use the Direct3D10.ShaderBytecode class to handle the compiling of shaders. They use functions from the D3DCompiler library instead of using Direct3D10 specific functions. Up until the August release, this was necessary for doing any shader work in D3D11.

Thanks for the reply! Direct3D10.ShaderBytecode.Compile works fine and compiles the code (even with target "fx_5_0"). As a small sidenote: The entryPoint parameter should be able to accept Null/Nothing as it is meant so be while compiling effect files. A workaround is to use a random string like "x", but that's not how it should be.

However, even though it compiles fine i'm not yet able to constuct the Direct3D11.Effect, because it doesn't have any constructor or From* method for the ShaderBytecode class. It only takes a byte array or a stream, but none of them are exposed by the ShaderBytecode class. :( Any idea?

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