[sldev] DirectX - feasible to replace?

[Soft]

On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 11:29 AM, Thomas Shikami
<thomas.shikami at online.de> wrote:
> Gareth Nelson wrote:
>>
>> The question is in the subject line - can the viewer use another API
>> instead of DirectX? Where is DirectX actually used currently?
>> We have OpenAL for sound, OpenGL for graphics, normal winsock stuff
>> for networking........... so where does DirectX come into play
>
> DirectX comes into play for hardware detection. OpenGL doesn't give all the
> informations DirectX can give. That's what I heard so far.

For Windows, DirectX works better than OpenGL for most lower end
chipsets. That's gradually changing, but for now, adding a DirectX
back end would add benefit for a couple years. A quick and dirty
substitution hack is feasible for someone who knows both rendering
subsystems well, but it would take quite a few eyes on it over many
releases to iron out all the eccentricities DX would introduce.

The better solution is to rework SL to replace all OpenGL use with a
retargetable engine like Ogre, which can speak GL, DX, and god knows
what else. At least one viewer project's working with Ogre. However
when last I looked, they only seemed to be using it to add features,
running it in parallel with the built in rendering instead of trying
to excise the OpenGL calls.