What's New in the June 2005 DirectX SDK
The following features have changed in the June 2005 DirectX SDK update:
SDK Updates
The following features have been updated in the SDK:
Performance Tools
Enhancements to PIX include:
- The ability to view the contents of a Direct3D surface such as a render target or a texture surface. This allows you to debug visually what is being written to (or read from) the surface. See Surface View.
- The ability to view the Direct3D device state as of any moment within a frame. The state is organized into categories that correspond to the different stages of the pipeline. See State View.
- A new action to save all device state to an HTML file. See Experiment - Advanced View.
- New keyboard shortcuts to pause, single-step or toggle wireframe mode when playing back a full-stream capture. See Playing back a Full Stream Capture.
Content Tools
Enhancements to the DirectX Extensions for DCC applications include:
- Maya - You can now access DirectX shader parameters using the MEL scripting language. This allows a developer to create standard MEL scripts to interact with the DirectX shader assignment and parameters to make it better fit with your content pipeline. See DirectX Extensions for Alias Maya.
- DXSAS 1.0 Viewer - Use the DirectX Viewer (dxviewer.exe) to view meshes and effects that implement the Microsoft DirectX Standard Annotations and Semantics specification.
Redistributing the SDK
DirectXSetup has been updated so that you can specify which components are optional for the purpose of reducing the size of the redistributable. For this release, D3DX and/or Managed DirectX are optional components, and are not required when you wish to redistribute DirectX. The default behavior remains unchanged; DirectSetup will install all SDK components.
Graphics Updates
The following features have been updated in the graphics component:
D3DX
- Effects System: A new method has been added to delete unused effect parameter blocks at runtime, reducing the amount of memory used by the effects system. See ID3DXEffect::DeleteParameterBlock.
- UVAtlas Functions - The April 2005 SDK introduced the UVAtlas library for generating a unique UV texture mapping on an arbitrary mesh. This release features improvements to the UVAtlas algorithm, as well as new documentation describing usage, best-practices, and example results (see Using UVAtlas).
- IMT computation - A series of new functions have been added to automatically compute Integrated Metric Tensors for a mesh based on an input signal. The output of these functions can be used to drive texture-space prioritization for texture parameterization via the UVAtlas API's. For example: using IMT computed from a normal map (see D3DXComputeIMTFromTexture) will generate a UV Atlas that devotes more texture space to triangles with high-frequency normal-map detail; flat triangles with constant normal data will receive appropriately less texture space. IMT can be computed from a texture, from per-vertex values, or from a user-defined per-vertex or per-texel procedural signal. See UVAtlas Functions for more details.
- PRT speed improvements - All of the PRT runtime functions (D3DXSHEvalDirection, D3DXSHRotate, and all of the D3DXSH*Light functions) have been optimized; rotations in particular are significantly faster, showing a 20x improvement at 6th order.
Samples and Tools
Support for VS.NET 2005 for C++ and MDX samples.
- Added VS.NET 2005 support for C++ and managed samples.
- Improved Direct3D starting point samples. A new sample called EmptyProject provides a minimal starting point for a Direct3D sample application, and a new sample called SimpleSample provides a basic starting point similar to the other Direct3D samples which shows the typical policy used by the rest of the DirectX SDK samples.
- Upgraded the UV Atlas Command Line Tool to include Integrated Metric Tensor (IMT) array support and more adjacency options.
Technical Article Updates
See Also
What's New in the October 2006 DirectX SDK
