Gaming guru J Allard makes his case for DirectX to attendees as lattes and lectures herald the start of the developer-only event.
This reporter is lucky to be here in Seattle at Microsoft"s Meltdown conference. Previously, the company"s annual event has only admitted game developers, but this year the company broke with that tradition and invited a handful of tech and gaming journals, GameSpot among them.
Meltdown kicked off its two-day run with opening remarks addressing the latest version of DirectX and how it fits into the game developer"s bag of tricks. DirectX 9.0c incorporates some tools from XNA: Preview Pipeline and PIX for Windows, an enthusiastic J Allard explained (in a style somewhat reminiscent of his GDC keynote). As previously touted, these additions represent an attempt to bring development pathways for the Xbox and PC closer together.