This blog is the opportunity to do it !
Let me present myself at first, quickly.
I'm Fabian Ceressia, leaving in Belgium. My primary job is mainly focused on datawarehousing stuffs.
It has been a long time that I'm interested in game development, as far as I can remember it all begin with MDX (Managed directX), the first managed wrapper around directX by Microsoft.
I did a break, after some months of playing with it, to stick again into the game development when XNA slowy started to take off.
XNA was really great, and samples all around the web made it easy to learn from it.
While playing a little bit with the new toy, my curiosity, and the need to "understand" how it was working behind the scene, makes me switch to SlimDX directX wrapper. SlimDX being a thin wrapper around DirectX (Nearly one to on mapping with directX API functions).
It was at the time the only managed wrapper around directX that was giving full access to DirectX11 API.
And for the matter of learning the "beast", I did begin to create my own "Engine" above slimDX using C#.
It was mainly a challenge, and quickly the need to use this engine raised, that's where I decided to create a Voxel landscape rendering (Aka minecraft like), to see were I could go with it.
Here are some early short video done with it :
Nothing really fancy, but it makes me realize, the it was clearly possible to do a game using managed environment.
Soon after I begin to "work" on my game (Utopia), a new wrapper did appeared, managed by Alexandre Mutel : SharpDX.
I was one of the early adopter, and was clearly a good choose seeing how it progress lately.
The next major release of SharpDX will include a nearly ready to use "Toolkit", a replacement for XNA but giving access to all new directX API functionality !
When I did begin my first "Engine", I didn't know enough about the global DirectX architecture, and structure decisions where badly done. This new "Toolkit" layer proposed by SharpDX is really well done, and is hiding good complexities from raw directX API (Giving also easy access to WP8/Win RT environment)
So here we are, I decided to start this blog as a way to share my discoveries of this sharpDX toolkit.
This blog aim will be to expose my various tests with this new tools, alongside the creation of a new small framework around it where I will slowly import Tools I did create with my previous engine. (Camera manager, state managers, sound manager, Noise generator, ...)
Fabian.
