I like to move it move it

The GameDev.net article "Working with the DirectX .X File Format and Animation in DirectX 9.0 contains a sample that's a little out of date. I updated it to run with the latest SDK. A VS 2005 solution is also included now. You can download it here.

Tales of two PCs

Yesterday I made a computer 50% more powerful in a couple of minutes. Of course, that wasn't a real big deal, since it's my father's Celeron 300A machine. I found some RAM at home, and turned out it was 64MB of SDRAM which fitted nicely into his PC, upping RAM to 192MB. I then overclocked the CPU to 450MHz. The idea was to get Celestia to run decently.

Unfortunately, when it comes to my own PC, I had a much longer and unsuccessful experience. I've been trying to install Vista without much success. Version after version come up with a MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION. So today I took out all the cards, even replaced my Radeon 9800 Pro with a PCI card, disabled everything in BIOS, but no luck. When I put it all together, it turned out that I didn't plug the power cable into the Radeon well enough, which first resulted in a blue screen and then the small of something burning. I had to open it up. Plugged it better and it seems to work now. Still, no Vista for me.

I'm free! I'm free!

No I'm not. I'm still shackled to a desk. But thanks to Jack Hoxley, I know that Develop magazine is free. The PDF version, at least. It's free, and I'm shackled to a desk. That's just not fair, I tell you. I think I'll download it and lock it inside a disk drive. That'd even things out.

A day at the Opera

Since Opera is providing all that nice webspace, I decided to post StreamOut.zip there.

Opera is good. Use Opera. :D

The world is safe again

Rewrote the missing code (minus comments, sadly), and found a bug. Like most bugs it was a small type -- copy/paste issue, probably -- which took me hours to find.

Apocalypse syndrom

Apparently I nuked the world and need to start rebuilding.

When I posted the sample, what I thought I did was make a copy of my code, edit it, archive it and post. What I really did was move my original files, edit them and delete them. Which means that there's quite a bit of code to rewrite. It's just so "me".

Row row row your bytes gently down the stream

Here's a copy of my post from that other crappy blog.

Someone on GDNet asked about stream output in D3D9. Since I'm writing a sample which includes this functionality, I decided to take that code and put it online for people to see. It's not the most complete code, and I trimmed it down even further by removing irrelevant stuff, but it should give anyone interested a good idea of how to do calculations in a vertex shader and then output the results to a texture, one pixel per vertex output.

The archive is available here: StreamOut.zip.

Not another blog! Nooo!!!

"For every blog entry, a baby seal dies in an alternate universe."

Blackborne Silverhand, Sixth Dimensional Elf of the Evercourt Reality

There goes another poor baby seal. Bam! Poor thing.

It's not my fault, really. It's the guys at xr4free, who wanted me to sign up for their blog site. So I tried it, but it's not that great. I thought about LiveJournal, but someone took the username ET3D there, and he's not even using it.

It's not that easy to find a blog site to post at, you know, when you're a non-blogger and don't regularly read blogs. Most of the people I know who have blogs have them at their own site, or somewhere that's not a general purpose blog place. Like Jack's journal at GDNet. But doing enough googling is apparently the answer to everything, so finally I settled, for now, on Blogger.

Since this is my first post, I obviously have no idea whatsoever what to expect. That said, I'm not too keen on started a blog at yet another place.

Not that I really need a blog, but sometimes it's good to have a place to post stuff. Like that D3D sample code I posted at my xrblog blog. I'll probably duplicate it here in a future post.

So until next time, keep the world clean, save our environment, and for the sake of all those cute baby seals, please blog less.