Binary Encoding

This section details the binary version of the DirectX (.x) file format as introduced with the release of DirectX 3.0.

The binary format is a tokenized representation of the text format. Tokens can be stand-alone or accompanied by primitive data records. Stand-alone tokens give grammatical structure, and record-bearing tokens supply the necessary data.

Note that all data is stored in little-endian format. A valid binary data stream consists of a header followed by templates and/or data objects.

This section discusses the following components of the binary file format and provides an example template and binary data object.

• Header
• Tokens
• Token Records
• Templates
• Data
• Examples

Related topics

X File Format Reference