Search Failure

I’m on vacation after Christmas, and will be until Monday the 30^th.  Fun, fun, fun.

Anyways, I had a dream about a wacky adventure/puzzle/exploration game that I happen to be calling Spy Game at the moment.  I thought the idea was really cute in the dream.  You get several disguises and wander around a town, trying to find your way into different areas.  Because you are dressed as different things, you get different conversation responses.  And then if your disguise fails, you are kicked back out on to the street.  All it all looked kind of like Animal Crossing to me, except more at a 3d level instead of 2d.  I highly doubt I will complete the thing, but I want to at least give it a try. 

So I decided to write the whole thing in DirectX with C#.  Now, me and DirectX go back a while.  At one point, I had a fairly decent framework going in C++, but then I started trying to fix certain things and the code became unmanageable and I abandoned the entire thing.  Well, fast forward a decade or so and I decide to attack Direct X again.  Except I can’t figure out where to download the SDK. 

Now, to be fair I was searching through the MSDN website in order to find something that (should) be easily findable.  But no… all I find is the page, informing me “the Direct X SDK is implemented as part of Windows 8, and you don’t have to do anything”.  Which would be really great if I was trying to write something for Windows 8.  I’m not.  I have yet to adopt Windows 8, and am really happy with Windows 7.  Truthfully, I’d move to Windows 7 64 bit if the legacy apps I needed for work ran under it. 

Oh… and the other fun part.  I also spent a good 30 minutes searching for basic tutorials for C# and Direct X and get…  C++.   Way to go Microsoft.  Your website search sucks.  I eventually landed on a forum post that pointed out some decent introductory resources.  But as far as finding the info through the search?  HAH!

And for the SDK itself?  I gave up and searched Google.  Found it on the first search.

Now, I’m downloading the SDK and writing this, ready to jump into the world of Direct X and C#.  Maybe I’ll have something interesting to say about it all.