DirectX-Graphics-Samples VS GLM

I also looked at the Microsoft sample like this: https://github.com/microsoft/DirectX-Graphics-Samples

It looks like Microsoft has official DirectX samples available, including an SSAO demo if you want to take a look at that. It does seem very different compared to your approach though, so it may not be of any use to you.

In my post I was using the generate mipmaps example to illustrate what I'm saying. In order to generate mipmaps in realtime in OpenGL you would simply make a call to generatemipmaps() or whatever it is called. In Vulkan it is more challenging because you have to do explicit resource management, but it isn't that bad still. In D3D12 you have to write your own compute shader https://github.com/Microsoft/DirectX-Graphics-Samples/blob/master/MiniEngine/Core/Shaders/GenerateMipsCS.hlsli

I wrote a sample a few years ago which implements this technique.

I eventually moved on to the official DirectX 12 Graphic Samples, which had isolated examples that were easier to learn from incrementally. The “Hello World” sample is the best starting point to get the renderer setup with a triangle. This repo is a great reference when you need to verify process and structure (like the order of operation of APIs). Whenever I had a strange bug in my app, I’d go back to these examples to do a diff and see what I was missing.

You probably want to take a look at the officiel DirectX samples page: https://github.com/microsoft/DirectX-Graphics-Samples It’s got samples covering a single topic each, which make them easier to digest, but there’s also the MiniEngine which is a render engine.

MiniEngine game engine

Something about the Github sample did catch my eye:

Microsoft put out this: https://github.com/microsoft/DirectX-Graphics-Samples

There is also this thing, but I never figured out how to compile that.

I am a greenhorn at graphics programming. I just made an app in OpenGL with C++ that I now need to change over to a browser app with WebGL. WebGL looks pretty cool but since my app does a lot of calculations I assumed I should keep the heavier calculating parts in C++ with emscripten ( which I am also just learning ). So looking at it, it just looks like glm is the only library I seriously need for my c++ code and that seems pretty cool because it is a header only app it says. But in the github there are a lot of folders and files so I am not sure which are indispensable or not. Any advice?

GLM does it quite well, it has core includes then a detail folder with all the inl files that get added. https://github.com/g-truc/glm

I once ported an OpenGL code base over to Metal. For me, it was essential to do as much code sharing as possible. Because I was using the GLM library in that code base and generally found that library very useful I wanted to know whether I can use GLM with Metal. I had to do some research but it turned out it works really well, see here

I would also recommend GLM

Alongside MiniEngine, you’ll want to look into the DirectX Toolkit. This is a set of utilities by Microsoft that simplify graphics and game development. It contains libraries like DirectXMesh for parsing and optimizing meshes for DX12, or DirectXMath which handles 3D math operations like the OpenGL library glm. It also has utilities for gamepad input or sprite fonts. You can see a list of the headers here to get an idea of the features. You’ll definitely want to include this in your project if you don’t want to think about a lot of these solved problems (and don’t have to worry about cross-platform support).