Research And Design Of The Analysis And Debug System For Direct3D Application

Direct3D is a set of3D API standard available for Windows operating systemdeveloped by Microsoft, which is widely adopted in professional workstation softwareand PC video games. Because of the complexity of Direct3D programming itself,Direct3D applications especially large video games usually are very difficult toanalyze and debug for application developers. In addition to this, it also makesDirect3D driver developers hard to locate and resolve driver defect if they are notaware of application behaviors. Based on this background, a new software tool used toanalyze and debug the behavior of Direct3D applications is proposed andimplemented in this paper. It is composed of two systems called Logger and Player.By installing virtual Direct3D driver in operation system, Logger system canintercept and log application behavior real-time when it is running, as well astranslating the log to self-defined format and saving as script file, in the case thatsource code of application is not available. Player system then can playback the savedscript file repeatedly, which can help the users analyze and debug the originalDirect3D applications. Player system supports script file editing and modifying duringplayback, it also offers various play mode and playback control, which enhances theability to operate and control the script playback enormously. In addition, Playersystem can view the rendering image and all kinds of resource content includingbuffer, shader and texture real-time when playback the script file, making it moreconvenient to analyze and debug script playback. Besides this, script simplifier featureis supported in Player system, it can trim the redundant and useless script commandwith every effort, on the condition that ensuring the final rendering image quality, andthis can definitely help reduce the scale of script file and increase the playback speedand debug efficiency.The experiment result shows that the new system has excellent compatibility andversatility, it is completely independent to the software and hardware environment,which means it can apply on almost all Direct3D applications and all GPUs. In termsof this, the new system is very suitable for Direct3D application developers andDirect3D driver developers to analyze and debug the application behavior.