Readme

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Thank you for purchasing Special Effects Game Programming with DirectX. This readme file contains last minute information regarding the book and the sample programs contained on this CD.

Known Issues

• Some of the sample programs from chapters 4 through 10 run slowly on certain graphics cards. This is due to the easy (but limited) way the code sets up the rendering device.
  
• The pixel shader sample programs run notoriously slow when rendered through the reference rasterizer. Not much that can be done; the CPU is doing a lot of work to run the pixel shaders. Your best bet is to upgrade your graphics card to one that implements pixel shaders in hardware.
  
• Inside the FrameMove() function of most of the sample programs, you'll notice an odd line:
  
  if (m_fElapsedTime < 0.0001f) m_fElapsedTime = 0.0001f;
  
  For some reason (on my system at least) occasionally m_fElapsedTime will become negative. This line checks for that condition and fixes it.
  
• The music/wave player in Chapter 3 (Ch3p1_PlayAudio) sometimes behaves erratically, playing songs correctly at first but speeding them up terribly after the first few seconds. I'm not quite sure why this happens; I only know that on my box the Microsoft sample program does the same thing.
  
• On some cards, the green spaceship in Ch20p3_ComplexExplosion isn't rendered. If this happens to you, try replacing the X file with another model, and/or check the book home page for source code updates.
  
• There have been reports of the installation program for Universe Image Creator locking up while copying files. If this happens to you, try running the installation program directly from Windows Explorer (i.e. navigate to goodies\universe and double-click plugins.exe), instead of running it through the CD navigation program.
  
• On some machines, the WinCVS installation program refuses to run through the CD launcher. Again, the solution here is to navigate directly to Goodies\WinCVS and launch setup.exe.
  
• Many of the sample programs behave poorly on older graphics cards.  The sample programs in this book are targetted at graphics cards that support vertex and pixel shaders in hardware (i.e., nVIDIA's GeForce 3).  If you have a slightly older card (i.e. GF2 or maybe even TNT) the sample programs should still run, albiet not very well.  If you have a very old graphics card some sample programs may not run at all.  Short of buying a new card, your only other real option is to debug the source code and see if you can figure out what's making the program fail on your particular card.  Often times changing a couple of parameters in CreateDevice fixes the problem.  If you fix something, please either let me know, or post it on the message boards, so that others may benefit.
  
• Some of the frame rate displays occasionally don't work, or display incorrect frame rates. As far as I can tell this has no effect on the actual simulation, and it only happens on excessively fast machines, so take it as a compliment.  If it's really bugging you, try changing the types of the time variables (m_fElapsedTime et al) from floats to doubles.

Where to Go for Help

If you're having trouble, the best place to look is at http://www.spin-studios.com/products/dxfxbook. There you'll find up-to-the-minute information about this book, along with discussion forums and FAQs.

Also, you can email me, the author, Mason McCuskey, at mason@spin-studios.com. I'll try to respond to your email as quickly as I can, but it make take a few days, so be patient. In the meantime, try browsing the forums and FAQs mentioned above.

If you're on ICQ, feel free to chat with me. My number is 833907. I can't guarantee I'll be able to chat with you at length, but if you happen to catch me online and want to shoot me a quick question, go for it.