Monthly Archives: August 2012

Windows 8

So I’m trying out Windows 8 (yes, it’s not released to the public, and yes I have it legally).

Dear God, what a mess this whole Metro/desktop thing is.  Someone over at Microsoft must have split personality disorder or something.  How in hell did they think that was a good idea??

Anyway, the OS does have some really nice improvements and it’s very responsive (except when it’s not… I get random freezes once in a while, apparently it’s something to do with my Intel SSD).  And more importantly, after installing VS2010, and the June 2010 DirectX SDK, the new (and presumably old since I haven’t tried it yet) Gorgon works fine.  What I knew, and was hoping I was wrong, is that they took out the D3DX library for the new DirectX, and as such things broke horribly under Gorgon because SharpDX uses the D3DX libraries to load/save textures.  After installing the June 2010 DXSDK, everything worked again, so there’s that.

I really really really don’t like this metro thing.  It’s just horrible with a mouse/keyboard and while I was ambivalent towards the Start Menu in previous versions, I really miss that I can’t group my applications (and I have a lot) under folders.  This made everything really horrible to organize, especially with how obsessive I am about organization on my machine.

That said, the desktop is real nice.  Love the new task manager, love the new copy/delete dialogs.   I even like the new look they put in (they got rid of Aero, or probably more likely, the glass effect).

Sadly, I now have to figure out how in hell I’m going to make Gorgon work without relying on D3DX (yes, I know, I could keep with developing for the June 2010 SDK, but at some point you know they’re going to drop that).  Apparently I can use WIC (Windows Imaging Component), but it looks pretty convoluted and I need something that’ll give me AnyCPU support.

All in all, the awfulness of Windows 8 outweighs its benefits in my opinion.  Someone really needs to kick Ballmer (I blame him wholeheartedly for this mess) out of that company and install someone with a fucking clue (i.e. we don’t all use/want a tablet, nor do we all want to develop for them).

Anyway, I am not dropping support for Windows 7/Vista from Gorgon.  So don’t ask about it.

That’s all for now.  Gorgon is still being worked on, a little, here and there.  It’ll be ready by 2213.

Dual monitor stuff

So here’s a screenshot of the dual monitor code in action:

It’s not much to look at, but it was a major pain in the ass to get working, and does indeed work.  Basically you create 2 forms, and 2 swap chains and set both swap chains to full screen and then add some special code to handle cases where focus is lost/restored on the primary form.

Gorgon would normally handle focus loss to reset your full screen mode for you when focus is returned (this is due to a bug in WinForms and DXGI).  And that’s all well and good, but this code really doesn’t work well with multiple monitor situations.  So, there’s a flag to tell Gorgon to turn off the automatic mode reset on focus, and that will let you, the user, handle the transition when dealing with multiple monitors.  It’s not an ideal situation, but it works

It’s a bit complicated to set up, but there’ll be an example included with Gorgon on how to use dual monitor setups that’ll guide you through the process.