DirectX Animation Release Notes

Welcome to the Beta 1 SDK of DirectX Media for Animation!

Requirements, Dependencies and Installation

Overview

DirectX Media for Animation is an API that enables different types of multimedia content to be tightly integrated and deployed, associating the media pieces with a timeline and user events. This technology allows developers to concentrate on putting together content, without having to worry about the underlying techonologies or APIs. The technology provides a content centric view of the development process, where the emphasis is on how the different media behave and interact with each other, and the end user. DirectX Media for Animation is based on COM and is accessible through Java classes. The supported media types are as follows:

2D images (bmp, GIF, and JPEG files)

3D models (.X and VRML files)

Sounds (wave and MIDI files)

Movies (avi, MPEG, mov files)

Text (serif, sans serif, and monospaced)

One of the key DirectX Media for Animation classes is the Behavior Class. Different types of media are incorporated into the animation by encapsulating them as DirectX Media for Animation Behavior objects. In turn, Behavior objects can be used interchageably, and have a number of methods applied to them, independent of the media type that they are encapsulating. Of course, one can still access methods that are specific to the different types of Behaviors, based on the type of media.

For the Beta 1 release, we are concentrating on Java developers. Future releases will provide VisualBasic and Visual C++ support. However, if you are familiar with COM, you don't have to wait for us to release wrappers or convenience functions for the other languages. You can access DirectX Media for Animation from any language directly through COM, once you become familiar with how our API works.

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Requirements, Dependencies, and Installation

The minimum requirements in order to run DirectX Media for Animation applications and content are as follows:

Pentium based computer
Windows 95 or NT 4.0
DirectX, including Direct3D (for NT users, we recommend SP3. As a minimum, NT users need Direct 3D from the Extras folder in the DX3 release)
Internet Explorer 3.0.1 or 4.0 Beta 1 (Netscape Navigator can also be used, see release notes)

DirectX Media for Animation relies on certain technologies for basic functionality. We have enclosed the technologies for which we need specific release versions in the Extras folder. These technologies are listed below:

ActiveMovie
Interactive Music Architecture

If you did not receive this package as part of the Java SDK 2.0, then you also need to install a version of the Java VM that is newer than build 1515. Note that if you install Internet Explorer 4.0 Beta 1 at a later time, you will need to re-install the Java VM. Please note that the components in the Extras folder are intended for your development usage and not for re-distribution.

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Release Notes

If you get a java.lang.SecurityException message when trying to run our demos, you need to re-run just the DirectX Media for Animation installation. There is a known bug whereby if you install a Java VM after installing DirectX Media for Animation, the path to the DirectX Media for Animation classes is removed from the registry (this would happen also if you install any other package that installs a Java VM, IE 4.0 Beta 1 for example).

The Direct X Media for Animation Java classes are dependent on version of the Java VM newer than build 1515, such as the one enclosed with the Java SDK 2.0.

The Beta 1 release has not been tunned for performance.

The API is close to its final form. A few classes may have changes to their methods in upcoming releases.

We used Microsoft Visual J++ 1.0 to author the samples.

There is an error throughout the documentation where DirectX Media for Animation is referred to only as DirectX media.

In order to use DirectX Media for Animation content within Netscape's Navigator, follow these instructions:

Microsoft has made a plug-in available to users of Netscape Navigator 2.02 and 3.0 which allows them to make use of the Microsoft Java VM. Netscape Communicator is not yet supported because of changes made to the plug-in interface. It is important to note that this plug-in does not replace the Netscape java VM, but it does provide access to the MS VM through the use of the <embed> tag. To get an applet up and running under Netscape follow, these simple steps:

1) Get the plug-in from the 1.5 Java SDKand place it in your Navigator\Program\Plugins directory.

2) Install the required MS Java virtual machine, if you haven’t already.

3) Change the applet tag in your source html from this:

<applet code="foo.class" width=100 height=100></applet>

To this: <embed src="foo.class" width=100 height=100>

Note - when using IE 4.0 Beta 1, you may experience problems loading the Flying Cubes and Encarta demos/samples, in relation to loading MIDI files.

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Known Bugs

This is a list of current problems. Some of them have already been fixed and those fixes will appear in upcoming releases.

General

This build has not been tuned for performance.
You may experience memory leaks with this release.
Sometimes, there is an extreme latency on mouse and pick events.
A "run" behavior is not sampled unless it’s part of the model.
substituteTime doesn’t work for reactive behaviors (switcher, until, cycler, etc).
All initialization of DxM Animation behaviors and events need to happen in methods (can not happen in classes outside of methods); however, it is okay to have declarations of behaviors outside methods to make them accessible from other classes and throughout the methods of a class.

Graphics

Translatting some matte-based images crops them.
Scaling an image to a value close to zero causes an assert.
strokeImage draws black line when white is specified.
complement(matte) does not produce a complemented image in the y-direction
Palette for movies is sometimes incorrect.
closedLineStyle in no longer the default for line images.
Cropped images' edges sometime don't line up.
Bounding boxes for images based on rendered text are sometimes off value.
yShear(1) gets an extra line of pixels copied.
Time based variable cropping causes line images to move around
Lines drawn from bouding box don't match cropped image.
Rotating rendered text causes it causes it to pulsate in the x direction.
Polyline hangs when given just one point

Audio

Audio not working with SB AWE64 sound card.
importSound has problems with invalid file name strings.
Stereo MIDI is not working properly.
Pan does not yet work on MIDI.
Sounds that are explicitly stopped, will not play more than once. These are sounds that played, for example, using switcher.
You may experience "Load section file failed" for some MIDI files.
MIDI does not respond to phase.
importSound reports incorrect lengths.

Picking incorrect for some geometries with transformed orthographic cameras.
Using gradientImage as texture produces incorrect visual results when lit.
Lighting state of one rendered geometry affects other geometries.
Use of hardware for 3D is curretly disabled.
Per face material doesn't work for VRML import.
Small bitmaps used for textures are not displayed correclty on 8bpp.
Picking obstructed by nearby, but not obstructing geometry.
Animated textures fail to work on 24 bits displays.

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Contact Info

Development questions, and feature requests- dxmabeta@microsoft.com.

Bugs should be reported to dxmabug@microsoft.com.

Business opportunities, for those developing tools or content based on DirectX Media for Animation - dxmabus@microsoft.com.

A newsgroup has been setup to discuss DirectX Media for Animation issues. The NNTP server is msnews.microsoft.com and the newsgroup is microsoft.public.dxmanimation.

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