What is it?
This is a small program which shows the basics of using Direct3D. It is my first Direct3D program, apart from a boring spinning cube which had no textures on it. You can walk around a textured scene in real time 3D. I'm no artist, but I did include some nice eye candy, including trees, a boat and an airplane. You'll probably laugh at the ridiculously low polygon count but it might teach you something interesting. For example, I copied something I saw in the Playstation game Tombraider. The trees are just flat polygons and they are rotated to towards the camera so that they always face you. Nifty trick huh? This program also demonstrates the use of matrices, texture mapping, transparency and scrolling backgrounds. The other useful bit is the fact that my modules, MOD_DX_DRAW.bas and MOD_DX_3D.bas are designed to be portable, I intend just to add and use them in other projects.
Requirements
You need Windows 95 or higher, DirectX 7, good speed computer (well, it works well with my 400Mhz PC), a 3D card might improve a little bit but not much since I didn't program it to use one (I don't have any cool 3D accelerator card thingy.
How to run
Close all other programs (to let my one have the most power it can get!), and run "Si's 3D Garden.exe", run the exe because it's faster than running from Visual Basic. Use the arrow keys to walk around, use PageUp and PageDown to look up/down (so you can see the plane in the sky and then look down at your feet, only to find that my program is so cheap I didn't draw in any feet at all). When you get bored (pretty soon since there's nothing much to do in the little paradise I've created) press Escape to end the program.
Feedback
Tell me what you think, my email address is Si@VBgames.co.uk . Also report any bugs, I hope there aren't many. I know that the collision detection doesn't work too well and allows you to walk to close to the polys so you can see through them sometimes.
If you like this, you can fins a good selection of other programs by me, mostly to do with games and graphics programs, some using DirectX, some don't. It's at www.VBgames.co.uk .