You will find a new post that provides current status of SharpDX development.

Feel free to share your remarks about it here!

Thumb up for SharpDX Toolkit, any thought when you'll commit new effect framework?

amerkoleci wrote: Thanks! Don't know yet, but it is probably not going to appear before the end of august, as I'm currently working on texture loading (mostly DDS, which is the only texture format to support mipmaps, 3d textures, texture 2d arrays, compressed BC textures...etc.) and I will be on vacation next three weeks, so...

I'm also not yet entirely done with the design of the Effect API. I'm still a bit undecided to use the old FX format (with techniques/passes), but It has some caveats that I would like to resolve: like the ability to specify a shader that is already precompiled (For example, you want to develop a post process effect that will use a vertex shader generating a quad. I want the system to be able to support late binding with this vertex shader, meaning that you could reuse binary shaders when building an effect for example).

But if you have any suggestions regarding the Effect system, it is a good timing to do it.

Wow,

Didn't know that you wanted to add a higher abstraction layer over sharpdx.
That's pretty good news !

Keep up the good job.

Thats correct, but i think rewriting hlsl parser/process doesn't make sense at all as there is already the DirectX11 FX framework which is in C++ and can easily be used for manipulate effect system, maybe some kind of material system would be nice, Material -> Techinque -> Pass -> RenderStates would be the best approach.

Amer

amerkoleci wrote: Oh, I was not thinking about parsing HLSL (though I have a full parser working as a private project) but at reading the FX bytecode (like this one I did last year).

But I will not probably use FX file, as It is really not future proof.

Concerning Material vs Effect, I will probably keep the Effect name, as Material is a more complex thing than just Effect. Also, I'm not sure about the opportunity to keep the sub-division Technique/Pass.

We just corresponded briefly on my blog (where I posted about SlimDX vs. SharpDX).

Wondering if the toolkit yet supports loading 32-bit RGBA textures as PNGs? And is there an equivalent of SpriteBatch? I just checked out the sources and I don't see a SpriteBatch class. In fact even SharpDX.Toolkit.Graphics.GraphicsDevice seems to have no methods for texture drawing -- yet this is something that people expect to be simple. Did I miss the convenient way to do it in the toolkit?

My apologies if you see these questions in two places

...and I see that I must catch up if I'm going to hang with the big dogs (I know you are actually human), because SharpDX.sln won't load in VS2010. Downloading VS2012 RC1 now....

RobJellinghaus wrote: As it is explained in the news, the Toolkit is in development phase, not even in alpha, so texture loading as well as effects are on the way, but not yet implemented.
Texture drawing with Direct3D11 cannot be done without an effect or a shader. Once effects are done, It will be quite easy to implement a SpriteBatch.
RobJellinghaus wrote: Hm, ok, I thought that VS2010 was able to open solutions saved on latest VS2012, even if VS2012 is not installed, but It seems not (It seems that I can open SharpDX.sln on a computer that has both VS2010 and VS2012).

Thanks as always for the speedy replies. Anytime I find a project where the developers reply quickly I know it is a good project to use -- the BASS guys are the same way.

So what I hear is that the toolkit can't yet be used for texture rendering? What is the smallest amount of code that would have to be written to change that? The only API my program needs is DrawSprite(Texture2D texture, Vector3 position, Vector2 scale, float rotation, BlendMode mode, Color color). Really all I need is compositing textures multiplied by a color. Is there a way I could contribute to adding such an API to the Toolkit? I am quite incented to have such a thing very soon, e.g. within the next week.

(I am going to try ANX just to see if its version of this is viable for me -- I hope that it will be. Then I can move to the Toolkit later as it catches up and then surpasses ANX in functionality.)

Hi

Great news here...

I don't know if you're aware of it but I started working on an open source project named ICE which goals is to create a set of contracts for low level game architecture implementations to try provide the gamedev community with a unique approach to structure their game features/services so that one could move from one to another with a similar API approach. Have a look at https://github.com/Indiefreaks/ice to learn more about it.

I see a lot of similarities on your implementation approach and mine (we share almost the same objectives).
Since you're in the early development phase, would you consider using and even contributing to the graphics related contract part in my project?

If so, it would be great to actually have your experience and best practices defining the missing classes and methods in ICE...

Have a specific look at the ICE Core api (the Graphics namespace mostly) and compare it to your code as well as my DirectX implementation (in the API/Directx folder) to see how it is meant to work.

Thanks for the time you'd spend considering this