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GitHub Project Updates 2025

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Chuck Walbourn -

I’ve completed my first releases of 2025 for my various GitHub projects, and there are some changes I felt were worth highlighting. This includes updates to DirectX Tool Kit for both DX11 and DX12, DirectXTex, DirectXMesh, UVAtlas, and DirectXMath as well as a number of changes to my NuGet packages in particular.

Windows 7 and Windows 8.0 Retirement

I’ve removed all codepaths for supporting Windows 7 and Windows 8.0 from my libraries. The minimum supported operating system is now Windows 8.1 or later. Windows 7 hit end of life five years ago, and Windows 8.0 has been out of support for years as well. I could have gone so far as to remove Windows 8.1 support since that hit end of life two years ago, but I kept it for now primarily because I still have legacy Xbox One XDK support for a few of the libraries which uses the 0x0602 codepaths.

As part of these changes I simplified DirectX Tool Kit for Audio projects considerabilty and no longer have secondary vcxproj files for various XAudio2 versions. Instead, the DirectXTK_Desktop_20xx projects build for Windows 8.1 and XAudio 2.8. The DirectXTK_Desktop_20xx_Win10 projects build for Windows 10 or later and use XAudio 2.9.

The directxtk_desktop_2019 NuGet package no longer uses the XAudio2Redist package and just uses XAudio 2.8. The directxtk[12]_desktop_win10 NuGet packages continue to use XAudio 2.9. If you want to use XAudio2Redist, this is still supported by the CMake projects.

For GamePad and building using XInput, I assume XInput 1.4 is present rather than using XInput 9.1.0 for ‘downlevel’ support which was required for Windows 7. Note I actively avoid using legacy DirectX SDK XInput 1.3 as it requires legacy DXSetup to deploy and has known security bugs.

GameInput v1 API Support

Speaking of the DirectX Tool Kit input classes. The GameInput implementation now supports both the original GAMEINPUT_API_VERSION of 0 and can now build for the new GAMEINPUT_API_VERSION 1 release from Game Developer Conference last month. See Microsoft Learn for more details. GameInput v1 for PC is available on NuGet and vcpkg. Be sure to run GameInputRedist.msi on your development system and include it in your redistribution.

To make use of GameInput v1 on PC, use the CMake option BUILD_GAMEINPUT. The directxtk and directxk12 vcpkg ports both offer gameinput features.

For Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S using the Microsoft GDK with Xbox extensions, it still uses the GameInput v0 API.

DirectX Tool Kit for Audio

In my original implementation using X3DAudio for DirectX Toolkit for Audio, I made use of X3DAUDIO_CALCULATE_MATRIX | X3DAUDIO_CALCULATE_DOPPLER | X3DAUDIO_CALCULATE_LPF_DIRECT and if there was reverb I also added X3DAUDIO_CALCULATE_LPF_REVERB | X3DAUDIO_CALCULATE_REVERB. I also set the use of X3DAUDIO_CALCULATE_REDIRECT_TO_LFE for speaker configs with an LFE channel.

I reworked this implementation as follows:

  • AudioEngine_DisableLFERedirect turns off the default use of X3DAUDIO_CALCULATE_REDIRECT_TO_LFE if the speaker config has a LFE channel.

  • AudioEngine_DisableDopplerEffect turns off the use of X3DAUDIO_CALCULATE_DOPPLER for all cases.

  • AudioEngine_ZeroCenter3D adds the use of X3DAUDIO_CALCULATE_ZEROCENTER for all cases.

  • The SoundEffectInstance_UseRedirectLFE was originally marked as ‘internal only’ but is now used to enable X3DAUDIO_CALCULATE_REDIRECT_TO_LFE on a per-voice basis if you are also using AudioEngine_DisableLFERedirect.

  • The SoundEffectInstance_ZeroCenter3D flags allows setting X3DAUDIO_CALCULATE_ZEROCENTER on a per-voice basis if not using AudioEngine_ZeroCenter3D.

For the DirectX Tool Kit for DX11 CMake project, I renamed the option BUILD_XAUDIO_WIN7 to BUILD_XAUDIO_REDIST which is consistent with DirectX Tool Kit for DX12.

The latest XAudio2Redist now includes x86, x64, and ARM64 binaries.

Deprecation of ARM64 using VS 2019

In a recent service release of Windows 11 SDK (26100), support for VS 2019 when building for ARM64 was dropped. I have made all ARM64 binaries use VS 2022 per the recommendation of the compiler team.

  • The xyz_desktop_2019 NuGet packages now support only x86 and x64 and are built with VS 2019. This is forward compatible for VS 2022 as well.

  • The xyz_uwp NuGet packages all require VS 2022 as of last October 2024 releases.

  • The xyz_desktop_win10 NuGet packges are built with VS 2022 and include x86, x64, and ARM64. Note I added new directxtk12_desktop_win10 and uvatlas_desktop_win10 NuGet packages for this scenario.

Windows on ARM 32-bit support was removed last year due to deprecation per Microsoft Learn.

CMake support for generating shared library DLLs

For many years, I have focused on only supporting C++ static linking for my GitHub projects. I have occassionaly gotten requests for DLL shared lib support, but didn’t want to manage a lot of extra vcxproj files and macros. I’ve since added support to the CMake projects using BUILD_SHARED_LIBS. The GitHub projects can therefore be built as either static C++ libraries or DLLs using CMake. The MSBuild projects are all still C++ static libraries only.

For vcpkg scenarios, this means that if you use x64-windows then you will get a DLL instead of a static C++ library for these projects. The CMake target will automatically set the required import preprocessor define. For vcpkg+MSBuild integration, you have to define it in your project settings directly.

Library as a DLL Preprocessor define
DirectXTex DIRECTX_TEX_IMPORT
DirectXMesh DIRECTX_MESH_IMPORT
DirectXTK
DirectXTK12		 DIRECTX_TOOLKIT_IMPORT
UVAtlas UVATLAS_IMPORT

If you still want a static C++ library, then use -static or -static-md triplets instead (i.e. x64-windows-static-md).

In the process of adding this functionality, I found a bug in the xbox community triplets toolchain file when building for a DLL instead of as a static library. This is fixed as of this commit.

BTW, the ctest test suites for these projects all support either BUILD_SHARED_LIBS setting. Some of the additional ‘white box’ tests are skipped in the DLL version since those entry-points are not exported.

DirectXMath

The DirectXMath 3.20b release is a minor update. The only code change is that the XM_DEPRECATED macro will use the C++14 [[deprecated]] standard attribute instead of various compiler-specific solutions when appropriate.

The primary purpose of this release was to update the CMake project to add BUILD_XDSP, BUILD_SHMATH, BUILD_DX11, and BUILD_DX12 options for the optional XDSP and SHMath libraries, which are used by the latest vcpkg port.

Future plans

I have a few feature requests pending that I will be working on over the coming months. The main ‘break change’ I plan for later this year is to move the CMake minimum version up to 3.21 instead of 3.20. Visual Studio 2019 16.11 only came with CMake 3.20 which is why I currently use that, and Visual Studio 2022 originally shipped with 3.21. You can combine newer CMake installs with the VS 2019 toolset, but for now I wanted to keep it simple.