It has finally happened! I have started working on my master’s ("diploma") thesis, two months before the deadline. Among other things, it will be a game, but I will not say what kind just yet (although many people already know anyway). Normally, two months is a mountain of time, but when it comes to writing a 3D game with physics, logic, AI, network support, and all the other delights, that deadline is clearly impossible. I have no idea what I am going to do. On top of that, I still have another course to complete—an exam, a term paper, and a lab assignment. And although a rough 2D prototype of the game without all the aforementioned bonuses is already finished, it is unlikely to help much.
Nevertheless, I will gradually show the results of my work here. Today I achieved tremendous success—I made a rotating three-dimensional cube. Unfortunately, there is no lighting yet, because it requires normals (perpendiculars) to the surfaces, the book does not provide them, and I am too lazy to calculate and enter them myself just for one cube.
The cube
Malicious tongues will say that this is hardly an achievement, especially considering that I followed a book and some articles. However, please note that it was made in C# using the brand-new February beta of Managed DirectX for .NET Framework 2.0. The documentation is fragmentary, there are almost no examples, and there are no articles or books (they are all outdated), while the API—that is, the set of functions a programmer works with when using third-party libraries—keeps changing all the time. Fortunately, the concepts have not changed much this time. Just minor things such as function names.
So there is every chance that in a couple of weeks I will learn to write simple 3D applications, and for now I do not need anything more. Writing 3D games used to be a fairly complicated process that required a highly skilled programmer. Poor children learning programming and trying to jump straight into games had no hope of achieving anything. Now, with Managed DirectX, everything is much easier, and even I, despite not being a particularly good programmer, hope that the game will work out.
P.S. By the way, the cube was captured from the screen using HyperCam and converted to GIF using "123 AVI to GIF Converter".