[sldev] DirectX - feasible to replace?

[Gareth Nelson]

Removing DirectX from the include paths is precisely what i'm doing -
by not adding it in the first place. Since i'm trying to get a decent
cross-compile environment up and running for linux-hosted compiles i'm
starting off with only the mingw32 includes and mesa includes.

On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 7:29 PM, Soft <soft at lindenlab.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 12:59 PM, Gareth Nelson <gareth at garethnelson.com> wrote:
>>>> DirectX comes into play for hardware detection. OpenGL doesn't give all the
>>>> informations DirectX can give. That's what I heard so far.
>> I'm going to be controversial here by asking "is that info really
>> required when users can scale down their quality settings manually?"
>
> It's a good idea if you'll be doing support. If you assume a user base
>  that's ready to experiment before calling on your time, it's not a
> huge deal.
>
>
>>> 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.
>> Which chipsets in particular? The 2 big names (ATI and NVidia) do
>> quite well in OpenGL on all platforms.
>
> ATI's lower end chipsets do far better with DirectX. AFAIK, all Intel
> chips do better and that userbase is HUGE.
>
>
>>> 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.
>> What is this other viewer? RealXtend?
>
> Yes.
>
>
>> The reason i'm asking about this is because i'm fiddling with my
>> cross-platform build right now and honestly dreading having to fiddle
>> with the DirectX SDK. My first thought is to just cut out all DirectX
>> use (from a first glance there's a bit of sound code which appears to
>> be now replaced by OpenAL and the hardware detection at startup) and
>> replace it. I actually couldn't find where the 3D rendering is done by
>> DirectX, so perhaps i'm missing something obvious.
>
> You could trivially remove DirectX. I believe there's some joystick
> use you would need to excise as well. If you aren't hesitant to start
> with Visual Studio and work your way free of it, you could just remove
> the DXSDK from the include paths and see what breaks.
>



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