I’m not sure this is the right place to post this (is there a right forum?). Maybe someone can help me, though.
I’m very comfortable programming in OpenGL, and I need to write some code using DirectX. I am looking for a good tutorial/guide (and a reference too, I guess). I don’t need anything explaining the fundamentals of 3D graphics, math, or other issues – just the nuts and bolts of DirectX.
So far all of the books I have found are “game programming” books that seem to suck.
I work with DirectX at work and have a pretty good handle on it (that’s what our previous engine was written in so we’re sticking with it for legacy reasons). In my experience, the DirectX documentation is pretty lacking. It fails to describe rasterization appropriately and the texture matrix documentation is absolutely horrible. For instance, it claims that you use a 4x4 matrix for generating 2D texture coordinates, but really, you’re using a 3x2 matrix for 2D texture coordinates; it just happens to be shoved into a 4x4 matrix type. The documentation also fails to describe interactions between some render states in adequate detail. Fog and ZBias are some good examples of this (specifically, fog and it’s interaction with shaders). I wouldn’t be surprised if there are 2 pages of OpenGL documentation to one page of Direct3D documentation when covering the same things. However, for all of the documentation’s shortcomings, it’s still a great place to start (besides, I doubt any books cover some of these things). One great place to keep up on things is the Direct3D mailing list. You can find it at: