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DirectX is a collection of APIs for easily handling tasks related to game programming on Microsoft Windows. It is most widely used in the development of video and computer games for Windows. The DirectX SDK is available for free from Microsoft. The DirectX runtime was originally redistributed by game developers along with their games, but later it was included in Windows. DirectX 9.0 is the latest version of DirectX. The latest versions of DirectX are still usually included with PC games, since the API is updated so often. Hardware manufacturers have to write drivers for each individual piece of hardware to make them DirectX compatible. Many modern hardware devices only have DirectX compatible drivers (In other words, you must install DirectX before you will be able to use that hardware). Early versions of DirectX included an up-to-date library of all of the DirectX compatible drivers currently available. This practice was stopped however, in favor of the web-based WindowsUpdate driver-update system, which allowed users to download only the drivers relavent to their hardware, rather than the entire library.
1 DirectX APIs
The components comprising DirectX are :
- DirectX Graphics , comprised of two API's:
- DirectInput: used to process data from a keyboard, mouseA mouse is a handheld pointing device for computers, involving a small object fitted with one or more buttons and shaped to sit naturally under the hand. The underside of the mouse houses a device that detects the mouse's motion relative to the flat surfa, joystickA joystick is a computer peripheral or general control device consisting of a hand held stick that pivots about one end and transmits its angle in two or three dimensions to a computer. Most joysticks are two-dimensional, having two axes of movement, just, or other game controllerA game controller is an input device used to control a video game. A controller is typically connected to a personal computer or a video game console. A game controller can be a keyboard, mouse, joystick, paddle, gamepad or any other device that can receis
- DirectPlayDirectPlay is part of Microsoft's DirectX API. DirectPlay is a network communication library intended for computer game development, although its general nature certainly allows it to be used for other purposes. DirectPlay was traditionally one of the com: for networked communication of games
- DirectSoundDirectSound is a library of objects for recording and playing sounds with very low latency, and for allowing your game a high level of control over the sound pipeline. It also includes a system for 3D sounds (playing the sound in such a way that it seems: for the playback and recording of waveform sound
- DirectMusicDirectMusic is a high-level set of objects, built on top of DirectSound, that allow you to play sound and music without needing to get quite as low-level as DirectSound. There's also strong support for 'dynamic soundtracks' having music which changes in r: for playback of soundtracks authored in DirectMusic Producer
- DirectShowDirectShow is a large collection of objects for working with multimedia data. The library mainly consists of "filters" objects which process data which you'd then connect up into "filter graphs. For example, you have filters that read data from a file, an: for streaming audio and video
- DirectSetupDirectSetup is an extremely simple library of functions for installing DirectX on a machine. It also provides a way to check the version of DirectX that is present. DirectSetup is part of the DirectX API. External links .: for the installation of DirectX components
- DirectX Media Objects : support for streaming objects such as encoders, decoder and effects
