I was playing around with the AppWizard a little bit ago and I'm really torn. On the one hand, it seems to make a very stable framework with all the proper checking of caps and so on providing some pretty good looking support for quite a few DirectX features. On the other hand, there's a lot of stuff in there that I've never seen before and the format it uses is different from anything I've used before. There's large portions of the code that have me completely baffled as to what they're doing and why they're there. I'm sure I can figure this out with the docs if I spend some time going through the code, but I'm not sure how useful that would be. I've been playing around with C/C++ for a few years and understand the basics pretty well. I've written some very basic applications with DirectX 8.1, but I've never actually written (or rather completed) an actual game. I do this only as a hobby and I don't have tons of time to play around with the stuff every night, but I decided to put some effort in and make another attempt at making a game. My question: Do you guys think it's worth it to start off with the appwizard and edit from there or should I do everything myself so I'm more familiar with the code? Do the wizards add a bunch of junk I'm not going to need? I'm using Visual Studio .NET, DirectX 9 and WinXP Pro. Thanks for any ideas/opinions you guys might offer. Edit: Almost forgot. I've never used Managed C++ - I have a book on it, but I haven't gotten to reading it yet. Would I be better off going back to the DirectX 8.1 SDK until I know programming and DirectX a little better? [edited by - JimboC on February 24, 2003 7:34:40 PM]

Personally, I like the appwizard that comes with dx9. It gives you a very basic engine in just a few mouse clicks. It''s nice when you don''t really have to worry about initializing d3d, directInput, directSound. It also handles switching from windowed to fullscreen for you, so you don''t have to worry about that either.

If there is some code that you don''t like or don''t think is necessary, you can just remove that class or file from your project. For example, I didn''t like any of the file or mesh classes that it generated, so I removed them and made my own, custom mesh class.

Hope this helps a little bit

I''m primarily a hobbyist too. To learn, I wrote my own framework, but after a few revisions, my own work was getting more and more like the Microsoft framework, and I abandonned it for Microsoft''s. In the end, I don''t think it was necessary but was a bit helpful.

I think you''d be just as well off to learn how to use Microsoft''s which doesn''t necessarily mean learning what their code is doing. Actually, I found the tutorial here on Vertex Shading Part II by Wolfgang Engel useful for this. The first few pages of this tutorial discuss how to use the MS''s framework. The rest of the tutorial discusses vertex shading which will probably be initially confusing for you if you are unfamiliar with it, but those few paragraphs on the framework helped me a lot.

I am having similar thoughts. I am currently taking Zen of Direct3D book and translating it to C#. This process is going well and I am learning alot. However, I am wondering if I should dedicate my time to learning the provided DX framework instead? More thoughts/advice would be appreciated.

Has anyone used the framework in their actual game development or mostly started over from scratch?

Thanks,
Dan