Last Word

With a basic understanding of vertex shaders in hand, you now have the tools to begin exploration of the limits of the possible in the vertex pipeline. You can now use constant and diffuse colors, perform texturing, and handle basic lighting tasks. Shaders and the programmable pipeline offer great creative freedom for 3D programmers and provide a vehicle to stay on top of the ever-increasing feature set of today's 3D graphics hardware. Next month we will continue the coverage of shaders.

I'd like to acknowledge the help of Mike Burrows and Mike Anderson (Microsoft) and Chris Seitz and Chris Maughan (nVidia) in producing this column.

Your feedback is welcome. Feel free to drop me a line at the address below with your comments, questions, topic ideas, or links to your own variations on topics the column covers. Please, though, don't expect an individual reply or send me support questions. Remember, Microsoft maintains active mailing lists as forums for like-minded developers to share information:

• DirectXAV for audio and video issues at http://DISCUSS.MICROSOFT.COM/archives/DIRECTXAV.html

• DirectXDev for graphics, networking, and input at http://DISCUSS.MICROSOFT.COM/archives/DIRECTXDEV.html

 

Driving DirectX

Philip Taylor is the DirectX SDK PM. He has been working with DirectX since the first public beta of DirectX 1, and, once upon a time, actually shipped DirectX 2 games. In his spare time, he can be found lurking on many 3-D graphics programming mailing lists. You can reach him atmsdn@microsoft.com.

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