Hello everyone,
I am trying to deploy an app for windows store, and I started at the documentation which says I should use Direct3D App as the template. Unfortunately Visual Studio 2017 Community doesn’t have this template. So my questions are:
Hello,
I wrote much of this documentation, but haven’t gotten to trying it out with VS 2017, as of yet. I might be able to within the next week or two, but no guarantees. In the meantime, I’ll try to answer questions about it.
Regarding ‘premium’ templates, I’ve never seen such for Direct3D apps. I’d be surprised if this was the case.
I do recall that VS 2017 split up their base-install a bit. Perhaps Direct3D templates are an optional install, now? Have you tried looking in the VS 2017 Community installer, to see if they’re listed anywhere? If not, what about installing the ‘Game Development with C++’ set of features?
Regarding a starting point of either a Direct3D 11 or a Direct3D 12 app-template, that should not make a difference, at least for getting a bare-bones, LibSDL app up and running. Assuming you’d be starting with the SDL_Render API, SDL would be issuing its own calls to Direct3D, and ignoring anything in the template.
If you want to use Direct3D directly, and in conjunction with LibSDL (which handles more than just rendering), that should be possible, but I’d still suggest using SDL_Render briefly, at first, just to get an app running. You can always remove + replace SDL_Render use, later on.
Does that make sense?
Cheers,
– David L.
Hello David,
Thank you for the quick response, and I will check your suggestions.
One last thing that I found as I was going along: One of the steps is to include the SDL_UWP project file as reference(this by the way is not working on 2017, I had to go back to 2015). My questions is what do we do with the SDL libs (image, net, mixer, ttf)? I see that the do not have a windowsRT folder in source.
Thanks again!
I suspect, but am not certain off-hand, that some of the latest releases of those libs, might not have been made when the UWP project files were added. In those case, grabbing the latest sources from LibSDL’s Mercurial server (at https://hg.libsdl.org) is probably sufficient.
To note, I don’t believe I ever added project files for SDL_net. I was able to get it compiling, but didn’t have the time to test them, so I didn’t add them in. You might be able to get that running, just by compiling its .c files directly into the app, or creating your own project files for them.
If someone was willing to test SDL_net support on UWP, I could look into adding project files for such, to hg.libsdl.org. 
Hello David,
Again thank you for the quick response, I will checkout the latest form mercurial and try to get it to work.
If I can make the SDL_net build with my project, I will certainly give feed back on how it works.