Games - DirectX

	Games - DirectX

DirectX is a collection of APIs for easily handling tasks related to game programming on the Microsoft Windows operating system. It is most widely used in the development of computer games for Microsoft Windows. The DirectX SDK is available free from Microsoft. The DirectX runtime was originally redistributed by computer game developers along with their games, but later it was included in Windows. DirectX 9.0c is the latest version of DirectX. The latest versions of DirectX are still usually included with PC games, since the API is updated so often.

DirectX APIs

The various components of DirectX are in the form of COM-compliant objects.

The components comprising DirectX are :

DirectX Graphics, comprised of two APIs (DirectX 8.0 onwards):
*DirectDraw
: for drawing raster graphics
*Direct3D
(D3D): for drawing 3D graphics primitives
DirectInput
: used to process data from a keyboard, mouse, joystick, or other game controllers
DirectPlay
: for networked communication of games
DirectSound
: for the playback and recording of waveform sound
DirectMusic
: for playback of soundtracks authored in DirectMusic Producer
DirectSetup
: for the installation of DirectX components
DirectX Media
: comprising of DirectAnimation, DirectShow
and DirectX Transform for animation, media streaming applications, and interactivity respectively
DirectX Media Objects: support for streaming objects such as encoders, decoder and effects

History

Originally targeted at the game development industry, DirectX has become more widely used among other software production industries. Most notably, Direct3D is becoming more popular among the engineering sector because of its ability to quickly render high-quality 3D graphics using the latest 3D graphics hardware.

In 1994, Microsoft was just on the verge of releasing its next operating system, Windows 95. The main factor that would determine the value consumers would place on their new operating system very much rested on what programs would be able to run on it. Three Microsoft employees—Craig Eisler, Alex St. John, and Eric Engstrom—were concerned, because programmers tended to see Microsoft's previous operating system, DOS, as a better platform for game programming, meaning few games would be developed for Windows 95 and the operating system would not be as much of a success.

DOS allowed direct access to video cards, keyboards and mice, sound devices and all other parts of the system, while Windows 95, with its protected memory model, restricted access to all of these, working on a much more standardized model. Microsoft needed a way that would let programmers get what they wanted, and they needed it quickly; the operating system was only months away from being released. Eisler, St. John, and Engstrom conspired together to fix this problem, with a solution that they eventually named DirectX.

The first release version of DirectX was shipped September of 1995 as the Windows Games SDK. It was the Win32 replacement for poorly designed, ill-conceived APIs for the Win16 operating system (DCI and WinG). The development of DirectX was led by the team of Eisler (development lead), St. John, and Engstrom (program manager). Simply put, it allowed all versions of Microsoft Windows, starting with Windows 95, to incorporate high-performance multimedia. Eisler wrote about the frenzy to build DirectX 1 through 5 .

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