Direct3D support

Moderator: Graf Zahl

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Rachael
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Direct3D support

Post by Rachael »

I know time and again, this has been shot down. However - using a wrapper I've been able to prove that older versions of GZDoom *CAN* support Direct3D but the wrapper needs a lot of work.

That being said, I'd like to put this out for consideration. And Graf - before you close this - maybe somebody in the community might be willing to help with this. I'll offer a hand with it when I can - I need to get a working Windows compiling platform first though (and that's going to take a while yet).

I think if the wrapper itself is improved upon a bit, it can easily be made into a special GZDoom-usable DLL which translates its internal OpenGL API calls to Direct3D. What it's missing is shader support and a few OpenGL 1.2+ (and later) features.

This won't help at all with cross-platform portability, but at least it will make GZDoom more usable with Intel and ATI cards since they seem to be a dime a dozen these days and both manufacturers are intent on breaking their drivers.

The wrapper in question can be downloaded here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gldirect/files/ (newer versions of GZDoom will reject the wrapper since it is only OpenGL 1.1, unfortunately :()

It is based on the Mesa3D project - a newer version of the wrapper can probably be compiled from here: http://www.mesa3d.org/ but I doubt it will offer much more than what's already there.

If this works it might even be possible to import some code from Mesa3D, and after a bit of optimization and removal of functions that are not used, offer a preliminary 32-bit software renderer within GZDoom itself.

The Direct3D portion is based on GLDirect which was for a long time developed and maintained by SciTech (though they apparently did not originally start this project).
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Graf Zahl
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Re: Direct3D support

Post by Graf Zahl »

Find me someone with the necessary time to do such a task and we are in business. It's not that it can't be done but that doing it is a lot of work. Also, the wrapper is close to useless with its lack of features GZDoom needs. That in particular concerns the missing shader support which, I'm afraid to say, will probably never happen.
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