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Rapid Application Development of Games for Undergraduate and Postgraduate Projects using DirectX

ABSTRACT For several years the PC commercial games market has been dominated with the DirectX application-programming interface (API). This API is used extensively to simplify graphics, sound and networking during the games development lifecycle, with other APIs such as OpenGL struggling to make an impression. With such an overwhelming domination of the market it is of no surprise that the term DirectX is familiar to both PC gamers and many non-games programmers alike, though the level of understanding of what exactly DirectX is, seems varied. Couple this lack of understanding with the fact that the API undergoes periodic transformations to incorporate new technologies such as pixel shaders in graphics cards and it is obvious that the API can be difficult to work with outside the dedicated area of professional games developments, whose teams are using it on a daily basis. In parallel with Industry, academia is trying to educate and prepare Undergraduate and Postgraduate students so that on graduation these students are able to appreciate and work in a fast moving Industry. In order to provide this education and training it is necessary to have tools that are utilised by Industry but that are also capable of being used to teach fundamentals of computer science. The PC computer games market is presently dominated by both the Microsoft Visual Studio and DirectX SDK (Software Development Kit) for development of games which creates a dilemma in that many Undergraduate students have only 14-week blocks for each module and have very little experience of using SDK’s such as DirectX which can have a considerable learning curve associated with their use and this means that little meaningful work can be carried out by students new to the SDK in the time scale given. Therefore the purpose of this paper is to investigate how and why a standalone set-up tool for DirectX was developed to support undergraduate and postgraduate projects utilising the API.