DirectX and XNA Status Report

A few interesting things have been happening in the DirectX and XNA world, and I think people haven’t really noticed yet. It’s been done quietly, not because Microsoft is trying to hide anything but because they’ve always been big believers in the “fade into the night” approach to canceling projects. Or their communication ability sucks. Cancel may be the wrong word here, but the DirectX developer experience is going to be quite a bit different moving forward.

Let’s start with the DirectX SDK, which you may have noticed was last updated in June of 2010. That’s about a year and a half now, which is a bit of a lag for a product which has – sorry, had – scheduled quarterly releases. Unless of course that product is canceled, and it is. You heard me right: there is no more DirectX SDK. Its various useful components have been spun out into a hodge-podge of other places, and some pieces are simply discontinued. Everything outside DirectX Graphics is of course gone, and has been for several years now. That should not be a surprise. The graphics pieces and documentation, though, are being folded into the Windows SDK. D3DX is entirely gone. The math library was released as XNA Math (essentially a port from Xbox), then renamed to DirectXMath. It was a separate download for a while but I think it might be part of Windows SDK from Windows 8 also. I haven’t checked. The FX compiler has been spun off/abandoned as an open source block of code that is in the June 2010 SDK. There are no official patches for a wide range of known bugs, and I’m not aware of a central location for indie patches. Most of the remaining bits and pieces live on Chuck Walbourn’s blog. Yeah, I know.

In case it’s not obvious, this means that the DirectX release schedule is now the same as the Windows SDK, which always corresponds with major OS updates (service packs and full new versions). Don’t hold your breath on bug fixes. Last I heard, there’s only one person still working on the HLSL compiler. Maybe they’ve hired someone, or I assume they have a job opening on that ‘team’ at least. What I do know is that for all practical purposes, DirectX has been demoted to a standard, uninteresting Windows API just like all the others. I imagine there won’t be a lot more samples coming from Microsoft, especially big cool ones like the SDK used to have. Probably have to rely on AMD and NVIDIA for that stuff moving forward.

That covers the native side. What about managed? Well the Windows API Code Pack hasn’t been updated in a year and a half so we won’t worry about that. On the XNA front, two things are becoming very clear:

• XNA is not invited to Windows 8.
• XBLIG is not a serious effort. The point about XBLIG has been known by most of us MVP guys for a while now. Microsoft promised a lot of interesting news out of this past //BUILD/ conference, which I suppose was true. However you may have noticed that XNA was not mentioned at any point. That’s because XNA isn’t invited. All of that fancy new Metro stuff? None of it will work with XNA, at all, in any fashion. (Win8 will run XNA just like any other ‘classic’ app.) That also implies pretty minimal involvement with the Windows app store. Combined with the fact that XBLIG has never been a serious effort to begin with, I’m dubious about tablet support for managed games. XNA does work on WinPhone7 and Win8 does support Win7 apps, so it ought to work in principle. Maybe. Given the niche status of Windows Phone 7 at the moment, and major losses of tech like UDK and Unity from that ecosystem, I’m also expecting WinPhone8 to be much more friendly to native code. (If not, I expect that platform to fail entirely, and take Nokia with it.)

I’m also looking at this e-mail right now in my box, which starts as follows:

As you know, the 2012 Microsoft MVP Summit is Feb 28-Mar 2, 2012. We wanted to inform you that DirectX and XNA technologies will not be hosting sessions at the Summit. As MVPs, you are still encouraged to attend and be a part of the global MVP community, and you’ll have the ability to attend technical sessions offered by other product groups.

Really? No DX/XNA sessions at all? I don’t think DirectX is fading into the sunset because it’s a core technology. XNA will most likely disappear. For some reason, Microsoft is getting out of the business of helping developers produce games and other 3D applications at the exact same time that they’re adding core support for it. Yes, Visual Studio 11 has model and texture visualizing and editing. It even has a visually based shader editor. I’ll let you take a wild guess on how well that will work with XNA code.

I don’t know exactly what Microsoft is going for here, but every couple of days somebody asks me when the next DirectX SDK is going to be released and I think I’m just explicitly stating what Microsoft has vaguely hinted for a while now. There is no new DirectX SDK, soon or ever. And I’m not holding my breath for any XNA updates either. I am told there is an XNA 5, but they won’t be at the summit apparently. If there is some actual future in XNA, feel free to make yourselves heard on the mailing lists because right now it’s really difficult to understand why anyone would bother.

Important clarification: I do NOT think DirectX is being deprecated or vanished or even dramatically changed at the core. (I’m less confident in XNA.) The SDK is being vanished, subsumed into Windows SDK as a component just like all the rest of Windows. So coding DX is no more special than coding GDI or Winsock. There will still be 11.1 and 12 and all that, probably delivered with OS releases and service packs. “DirectX 11.1” will actually be synonymous with “Win7 SP2”. That has been the case for a while, actually. What’s going away is the wonderful developer support we’ve enjoyed as long as I can remember. Compare the D3DX libraries across 9, 10, and 11. Is this really a surprise? It’s been slowly happening for years.