Adding a Joystick to DirectX

29th April, 2009

Having acquired a joystick I was eager to try it out in my DirectX project. This is theoretically a very easy thing to do, but of course, it isn’t turning out that way. While the sample project and tutorial instructions are incredibly easy to follow, and the sample project compiles and runs perfectly well, starting to apply this code my own project is not straightforward.

Something which I am now starting to accept is pretty typical of Microsoft’s code is that they do something totally differently to the way that they themselves have said it should be done, and don’t bother explaining WHY.

Nevertheless I shall persevere with adding this to my project with the intention of linking camera control to the joystick, but the responsiveness of the motion will be dependant on the strength of biofeedback signal.

Update: I discovered I was trying to fix an issue that didn’t exist when all that was required was including the dinput8.lib file to the project…

DirectX Coursework2 Hand-in

2nd April, 2009

Here is a screenshot of my mobile lights floating around the fish model all wrapped up in a micro-terrain:

Update on DirectX 2

29th March, 2009

Here are some screenshots I took a couple of days ago of developing my mobile lights. I’ve also decided to re-use the fish model for now since I have nothing better to replace it with!

Here is a shot of my first light, not doing very much interesting.

The final lights are completely mobile and have behaviour determined by taking analogue signals from my USB circuitboard. The motion ranges from soothing and gentle to fast and erratic.

Finishing Scripting and Update

11th December, 2008

I haven’t posted in a few days because I have been busy rounding off the rough edges to my scripting coursework, most of which was completed a long while ago. I have solved a couple of the persistent issues, one of which was a depth problem where randomly half-way through a gallery the depths of the images after the one being displayed would reverse their order (a pretty unsightly effect).

Following this I’ve withdrawn some light reading for my dissertation… and of course I need to concentrate on dealing with C++ and DirectX.

Gallery Menu Image

Creating a Visualisation in Visual Studio 2008 (Part 2)

6th December, 2008

Ultimately the point of researching how to create a Media Player visualisation was to be able to include DirectX capability.

After a lot of searching I found information on the subject (http://www.tech-archive.net/Archive/Development/microsoft.public.win32.programmer.directx.graphics/2004-11/0316.html) saying that the Summer 2003 DirectX SDK features a demo being implemented in a Media Player visualisation.

The Summer 2003 SDK: The Summer 2003 DirectX SDK

Creating a Visualisation in Visual Studio 2008 (Part 1)

2nd December, 2008

I vaguely remember trying out something a long time ago with an old SDK and an old educational version of Visual Studio (obtained from university in the first year). There was a sample visualisation in C++ that could be immediately tested out in Windows Media Player.

But this was a long time ago and the files have been lost under several OS reinstalls and the voluminous expansion of accumulated stuff. Instead I would have to start anew with recent SDKs and the new Visual Studio 2008 for my Programming for Digital Media module. But because this wasn’t straightforward, and the number of circles I’ve had to run in will prove tedious to recount, I’ve decided to simply post what you DO need to do to get this to work.

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