MSDN Magazine - June 2008 - (Page 65)

can act out a scenario with a robot and see how the robot would interact with the world. Getting Started Figure 1 Basic Simulation Environment What Is a Simulation? If you’re not familiar with simulations, imagine a flip book—a little book with an image on each page that “moves” when you flip quickly through the pages. Simulations work in a similar manner. A simulation contains one or more entities and each of these entities is rendered inside a frame. The frame is equivalent to a page of paper in the flip book. The rate at which the frames are rendered depends on the hosting machine’s graphics card. The fundamental difference between the flip book and a simulation is that the flip book is static or predictable and the simulation is not. Each frame of a simulation is rendered dynamically and the forces that an entity encounters within each frame are not always known in advance. This is what makes simulations so useful. You If you have not already done so, now would be a good time to download and install the MSRS toolkit (available at go.microsoft.com/ fwlink/?LinkId=113902). The MSRS Web site currently offers a refresh installation for its 1.5 version. This includes the full version of MSRS 1.5, along with all available updates. MSRS provides templates for Visual Studio® 2005, but even if your machine is running Visual Studio 2008, you can still run the samples included with this article. Your development machine will need a graphics card that is compatible with DirectX® 9.0. Specifically, the card must support vertex shader VS_2_0 or higher and pixel shader PS_2_0 or higher. Most high-end desktop and laptops capable of running today’s graphics games will already have this. If you are not sure what your graphics card supports, you can go to go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=113904 for a list of graphics cards, along with the shaders they support. Additionally, you can install MSRS and use the help menu in VSE to view your supported pixel and vertex shaders. If you try to run one of the simulations included with MSRS or this article and your screen is blank, then your graphics card is not compatible. MSRS uses the AGEIA PhysX engine to provide physics for the simulation environment. Without physics, your simulation would be useless, since it would in no way represent the world it was trying to simulate. For example, entities would be able to float around without gravity. If you read the documentation that accompanies Figure 2 Edit Mode for Modifying Entity Properties msdnmagazine.com June 2008 65 http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=113902 http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=113902 http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=113904 http://msdnmagazine.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of MSDN Magazine - June 2008

MSDN Magazine - June 2008 Contents Toolbox CLR Inside Out Cutting Edge Patterns In Practice SAAS Concurrency Robotics Form Filler GUI Library Service Station Foundations Windows With C++ Concurrent Affairs Going Places { End Bracket }

MSDN Magazine - June 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.