Not to burst Qimmers bubble, but a couple things.
1. There will be no Dx10 for XP. Your friend is clueless. Game developers will have to write two rendering pipelines for a while to come Dx9 and Dx10. The DXUT Lib takes care of alot of that for you in regards to setup Creating a Dx9 Context or Dx10 context based upon enviorment. Vista supports both for these reason. Dx10 is not backwards compatibile. It is entirely different architecture then Dx9. Dx9 supports fixed piplines Dx10 does not. Dx10 requires Unified Shaders Dx9 does not. There are no Dx10 cards currently available. End of the Month most likely.
2. The SDK DxUT Lib that you are wrapping, is a good starting point, however it wont work on anything but WinNT Kernal OS. Not that I think supporting Win9x is important but figured you might want to know that.
3. An engine requires more than just wrapping DXUT. Its just the basics, so you need to understand your 3d Math inside and out. How is your trig?
Now for advice, take your time, and dont even begin to estimate how long its going to take. You wrapped the libary and got some basic rendering going. Dont take offense thats not a big deal. And there are many talented programmers here that can do that. As for learning C++. There is good and bad programming in C++ whats good for VB or Blitz is more than likely very bad for C++. I have been programming various languages professionaly for over 25 years and can program in C++ but dont even remotely consider myself great at it. I know enough to get by.
Make sure you really learn the language and understand. This is probably the best book.
http://www.mindview.net/Books/TICPP/ThinkingInCPP2e.html
Good luck on your start in programming, many of us were you a long time ago.
Doug Stastny
1. There will be no Dx10 for XP. Your friend is clueless. Game developers will have to write two rendering pipelines for a while to come Dx9 and Dx10. The DXUT Lib takes care of alot of that for you in regards to setup Creating a Dx9 Context or Dx10 context based upon enviorment. Vista supports both for these reason. Dx10 is not backwards compatibile. It is entirely different architecture then Dx9. Dx9 supports fixed piplines Dx10 does not. Dx10 requires Unified Shaders Dx9 does not. There are no Dx10 cards currently available. End of the Month most likely.
2. The SDK DxUT Lib that you are wrapping, is a good starting point, however it wont work on anything but WinNT Kernal OS. Not that I think supporting Win9x is important but figured you might want to know that.
3. An engine requires more than just wrapping DXUT. Its just the basics, so you need to understand your 3d Math inside and out. How is your trig?
Now for advice, take your time, and dont even begin to estimate how long its going to take. You wrapped the libary and got some basic rendering going. Dont take offense thats not a big deal. And there are many talented programmers here that can do that. As for learning C++. There is good and bad programming in C++ whats good for VB or Blitz is more than likely very bad for C++. I have been programming various languages professionaly for over 25 years and can program in C++ but dont even remotely consider myself great at it. I know enough to get by.
Make sure you really learn the language and understand. This is probably the best book.
http://www.mindview.net/Books/TICPP/ThinkingInCPP2e.html
Good luck on your start in programming, many of us were you a long time ago.
Doug Stastny