Developing DirectX on Linux

[surge]

Hi, I have this urge to be able to develop (compile, link and execute - just to clarify) DirectX based applications from within Linux. Part of my university course is using DirectX, and quite frankly my 500MHz XP laptop just isn't fast enough, poor thing.

I have wine-20050725-r1 installed and am currently downloading the DirectX October 2005 SDK. I'm going to try both xmingw and the Microsoft Platform SDK running under wine.

I must confess, I have absolutely no idea how compatible anything will be.

My reason for posting is mainly just to ask if anyone has tried anything like this before with any success or failure, and to see if any of you have any tips on getting it working at all.


Anyway, thanks,
surge.

[BlackEdder]

I would install the newest version of wine (0.9.2) if I were you, it's implementation of directx is much more complete. I'm not sure how well it will work though for developing.

[NTT]

I wouldn't recommend doing that sort of thing, if you get into problems/bugs, just how do you think you'll be able to tell the difference between errors in your own code, the Wine abstraction layer, or other types of bugs? You take the risk of losing hours of development time debugging your code, when the problem was in Wine, or the function you're trying to use is not fully implemtented.

[nutbar21]

You should program in OpenGL and ditch DirectX altogether.
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[surge]

Hey again. I've managed to get it working nicely so far. I had a bit of a struggle at first, due to my inability to read xmingw man pages correctly it would seem.

I'm using the same wine version as stated above for executing the applications, although I realise that a later version is more likely to support more functions and work better generally. Thanks BlackEdder.

xmingw is working well to compile them. There were several problems with dll files not being found, however that was soon fixed by a bit of file copying. As my course progresses I will no doubt have to use more than two libraries, and will perhaps hit trouble as NTT suggests, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. If the worst comes to the worst, there is a whole university full of Windows machines just waiting for my buggy DirectX code to be compiled from within the confines of Visual Studio, yay!

r3solve, I couldn't agree more but as I mentioned in my first post, it is a requirement for my university course. I can therefore not ditch it.

The DirectX SDK installer makes a fuss about being run on an unsupported platform, shock horror... No problem though, by that stage it has already extracted all the necessary files to a folder from within wine. Then it's a simple case of calling the xmingw compiler, specifying the location of the include directory and the lib directory. Took me a while due to my man page problem and some reality TV show that I was, erm... forced *cough* to watch.

Thanks for your responses,
surge.

[-=GGW=- $ol!d $n4>|e]

[surge]

Our Tux, whose art is pixels,
Hallowed be thy kernel.
Thy features come.
Thy operations be done,
On ppc as it is in amd64.
Give us this day our daily dilbert.
And forgive us our cross compilations,
As we forgive those who withhold their source.
And lead us not into panics,
But deliver us from Microsoft.
For thine is the computer,
and the power management,
and the stability,
for ever and ever.
Daemon.

[deadstar]

Daemon.
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