Hi again.
First I'd like to say that I'm sorry about taking such a long time to respond, real life got in the way of my time on the internet, but I'm here now.
The program is basically a "control" window and a "render" window, the rendering window being moved to the second adapter(the bigscreen). The control window contains a set of tabs, one for each scene(such as the welcome scene on the picture, a next heat with a drivers list, and other competitions that get's information live from the internet). Each scene contains it's own scenegraph, and that scenegraph is chugged into an almost standard System class from your mdx tutorials. Coming improvements for the season of 2007(starts in april) will be a rewrite of the scene baseclass, the entire control ui, and quite a few new scenes(reading powerpoints, driver presentation(statistics)) and changing the workflow to being more of a preparation work than it was during 2006, when it was mostly panic during the races.
It was all developed midseason and had incremental updates every other week, and with me working fulltime that meant I had my hands full with just getting it to work correctly on time. Quite a few crashes occured, but the visitors were understanding.
The screen is 4(13 ft) meters high and 6(19.6 ft) meters wide, making a total of 24 square meters(258 square ft). It uses a LED matrix with 2xred, 1xgreen and 1xblue per pixel, making a total of 575 pixels wide and 476(I think, don't have the exact number in my head atm) pixels high. In other words, not alot of space to work on. Since all the scenes need to be somewhat readable from at most 150 meters(450 ft) away, I had quite alot of designrestrictions on me.
The native calls that are made aren't really about DirectX, they're about the timing. I experienced alot of lag trouble with a paint/invalidate loop where the application would basically stop responding after 20-30 minutes of running time, ruining not just the controller experience but also the bigscreen animations. Instead, I now use the ApplicationIdle event and a native call to get a count of waiting windows messages.
The application is made in MDX. I might make a bigger announcement after the 2007 season has started and version "2.0" of the application is basically done.
It's really hard to just "tell you more" about the whole thing, but you're very welcome to ask questions and I'll try to answer them as best I can. I'm not really much of a graphics programmer, which is why your tutorials helped me greatly.
Kind regards,
Eric
