update

I found a some well written articles today on a site: http://www.toymaker.info/Games/html/picking.html . I thought the whole site was well written. I read the shader and effect articles and came away with a decent understanding of where the pixel and vertex shaders fit it in. I must include support for effect files - I should add that to my todo list.

Channel 9 has some great videos on it. Some are well worth a view.

I also found the theZbuffer , which has (amongst other things) a blog list of developers working on managed code. Basically the whole site is geared towards programmers developing with managed Directx. There is soo much to read there.

I read a blog today (http://gpxgame.blogspot.com/) last updated on the 22nd May 2005. Looks like he may have abandoned his plans of creating an engine. An interesting note is that he's set a milestone which he wishes to achieve.
Milestone 1:

• Simple Engine Managment - Windowed/fullscreen/D3D Device.
• State System - Each "view" of the game will be a state. e.g. Intro, Credits, Menu, Level.
• Event System - For controlling state changes etc.
• Rendering System - For rendering and updating the scene objects.
• Input Control - keyboard only.
• Scene Object System - Simple meshes and sprites (nowhere near the final version).
• Resource Manager - Meshes and Textures.
• Some kind of demo.

I thought it might be helpful for me to compare my efforts over the past month or two with this milestone, to give me a better idea of where I am. So far I've accomplished all the items on that list in some shape or other except Resource Management. That certainly made me feel a little better. I just hope I actualy get something produced and not abandon the project. Perhaps it's time to set my own milestone, so that I have something to work towards? The problem with a task list is being able to break it all down, that takes experience and since I've never used DirectX before, experience isn't something I have an abundance of!

As they say, when you're programming the last 10% of the program takes 90% of the time.