Quick Update
by Peter on Jul.24, 2005, under Programming
I’ve literally taken 5 minutes to get multitexture working while at a friend’s house. My respect for Direct3D has been moved up another notch.
So far I’ve only hit one platform difficulty. This isn’t particularly amazing, but it’s just something I’ve noted. On the laptop, I have no hardware vertex processing (because the laptop has a rubbish SiS graphics chipset), but otherwise everything works like normal. When I start implementing shader support in the renderer things are going to be different; although it could be worse: I could be doing it with GLSL instead of HLSL.
I look forward to the day where I would write some shaders and they worked first time on every chipset. I look forward to that so much. In fact, I spoke to the head of the Microsoft DirectX division (I have forgotten his name, shamefully.) about this “war of the graphics card vendors” at the GDCE last year. He suggested that I take this complaint to the culprits themselves – ATi and nVidia – in order to convince them that they should meet some kind of standard lest they kill eachother. While this would be a worthy cause, I don’t feel that I’m in a position to deliver such a message.
Yet.
Tomorrow I plan to implement a few things, the most important being a scenegraph. After that, I can move on to getting a stable world up and running – I was thinking of writing a DLL system as a temporary measure. Once I’ve done that I will hopefully have a decent foundation for implementing shaders.
6 Comments for this entry
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About
Peter J. B. Lewis is a graphics and games programmer, currently working for Lionhead Studios in the UK.
July 24th, 2005 on 8:28 am
At least you don’t have to deal with multiple extensions, like is it with OpenGL not only for each vendor but also for different card generations of the same vendor.
I hope they agree on something someday.
July 24th, 2005 on 2:44 pm
That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Heh.
The DirectX team does it’s best to cover most of the cards, however, so until that day DirectX will continue to abstract all the hardware that they can. They really do their best to keep everyone running. Their “SDK-every-month” is starting to get somewhat irritating, though. But hey – you can’t really complain about getting too much free stuff *. They seem like a bunch of cool guys. I went into that conference bearing a mild distrust of Microsoft, but I came out totally in love.
I really like the developer-friendly side of Microsoft. I mean, they’ve given me a free copy of Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Visual Studio with the whole MSDN and Office XP just because I’m getting a degree in Games Programming.
You could say that they “bought” my appreciation.
* Unless it’s AOL CDs.
July 24th, 2005 on 3:55 pm
Well, that explains why you like Microsoft that much, but I can’t blame you
You’re really lucky to studay game programming, it was my dream but couldn’t really afford it, so I tried learning by myself, and got pretty good after a while, but things has gotten busy lately and so I stopped coding.
I’m a dentist by the way, and I hate that.
July 24th, 2005 on 6:03 pm
Nothing wrong with being a dentist!
One of the best coders I know is, or at least was, a butcher.
Have you got any old demos around?
July 24th, 2005 on 8:18 pm
I’ve been flip-flopping between favoring GL and D3D for quite a while, and I’ve come to the con-solution that it all comes down to what you are targetting for systems…It’s a decision that really sucks – and we shouldn’t be needing to make such a choice. There are far too many catch-22′s involved.
Use D3D and snub *nix users…then rewrite to appease them.
Use Gl and write umpteen-million rendering paths…and still have issues.
Use GLIDE and be laughed at…for being a dinosaur (had to throw it in)..
There’s just no way to win at this…Especially when the term “standard” is so loosely applied from the hardware end.
July 25th, 2005 on 12:01 am
That’s quite a point and my major upset about shunning OpenGL at the moment. Disappointing any kind of user is a conflict of interest for a programmer as you need to reach for as broad a range of users as possible. Not supporting certain platforms is cutting down the amount of people that will be able to use your software which is unsatisfactory – yet at the moment we just have to put up with it.
I do wonder what OpenGL 2.0 will be like. I have heard that it’s going to be OO, which will be interesting. I am hoping that it’s going to be a less gross version of Direct3D with cross platform support. If that’s the case, bye-bye Direct3D.