DirectX Media for Animation Programmer's Guide

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What is Direct Animation?

Direct Animation is a set of unified media services for the Active Platform. To discover what this means, we will break this definition into its components:

• The term "unified" means that Direct Animation is composed of several technologies that are tightly integrated. Different media, such as 2D, 3D, video and audio can be used in a single application, and are handled via a consistent interface. Direct Animation has been specifically designed for applications that require this type of media integration.
• The term "media" means that Direct Animation enables smooth, high-performance presentation of interactive graphics, sound and video in both two and three dimensions.
• The term "services" means that Direct Animation includes optimized runtime services for animation and media streaming. Direct Animation is a high-level interface. It also includes animation throughout the API. The runtime services are capable of controlling both the frame and event-generation loops for the application.
• The phrase "for the Active Platform" means that Direct Animation has been designed as a native part of the Active Platform. The Active Platform is Microsoft's comprehensive cross-platform set of client/server tools and interfaces. Direct Animation on the Active Platform provides the media infrastructure necessary for building a new generation of network-enabled productivity, entertainment and communications applications.

Direct Animation is an innovative architecture that includes a number of novel components which are discussed in this document. These components include:

• The behavior model. This document discusses behaviors, running behaviors, and events.
• Ways of visualizing Direct Animation behaviors. This document discusses some methods of thinking about very complex behaviors.
• The media data types. This document discusses the specific media data types, and the operations available on these types.

Certain sections represent more advanced aspects of the system, and can be safely skipped initially. These sections have their title preceded with "Advanced Topic."