Horde3D

I'm sorry, but under Vista the ATI OpenGL drivers suck so much that a DX-renderer would make a lot of sense.

So you will implement it?

I'm afraid those long hour weeks ain't over any time soon. :/

How is it going?

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Paul

If DirectX get supported, I will need to drop Horde3D and search for another thing that is not bloated... (yes, DirectX results in bloat)

Just my toughts: DirectX, works only on Windows, OpenGL works everywhere (really, even PDA and Cellphones), so DirectX is not needed, it will not make the market larger...

On the other side, supporting DirectX, means having to create code for several drivers when you want to implement something new, that means slow advancement, and bloat, also it will be REALLY annoying for people that does not want to have DirectX on windows (I needed to download DirectX SDK and plataform SDK to compile any API that used DirectX 9, and I dropped all those APIs after I decided that it was not worth the cost of disk space and download time).

And also, to content creation supporting both DirectX and OpenGL is annoying unless you annoy the engine coders with several conversion functions, that in the end will generate overhead for one side or the other, because of all that diffrent shader languages, diffrent coordinate systems, diffrent way to work with several things...

So, I am REALLY against DirectX, to me a MAJOR point of Horde3D is that it supports OpenGL AND NOT DirectX

If I wanted to use DirectX, I would use XNA

You left out the XBox, which is a pretty large market for anyone with a C++ devkit for it. But aside from that, D3D does offer much better fallback and feature detection than OpenGL, which may well make sense for Windows only development.

I think that the general idea is to make the choice between OpenGL and D3D a compile-time choice, so that you can completely disable DirectX support (and you wont even need the DX SDK), if you want to stick with OpenGL.

You will probably not want to work with both in parallel if you can help it, given the need for separate shaders, and separate optimisation paths (instancing needed for D3D, etc.), but most of the rest can be handled internally with little impact on the programmer.

If it can be disabled completely, I don't see any problem in having the renderer there.

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

Indeed, I would approve it was put in another "branch", so I would not even download it (even the Linux guys), something that I really like since I use dial-up

I second that. Branch the D3D project, having D3D is interesting for a lot of reasons, many people are familiar with it, it grows the community, it runs on exclusive MS platforms, the API moves faster than OGL (though extensionrama on OGL makes both apis essentially feature par as noted before). In conclusion there are plenty reasons to have a branch that uses D3D vs OGL.

However I think the felling of most people on the forum is to keep Horde3D "pure" and unbloated. The main reason many of us started paying attention to Horde3D is because of the motto "forget about blotted code and unnecessary complexity" having to handle two APIs plus extensions, plus shader language differences will soon turn our dream engine Horde3D into a nightmare, so i agree with speeder and others. Let's keep it friendly but separated. My 2€

Let's not talk about the philosophy of coding, how OGL is so good an DX is a corporate product made by the Microsoftian Devil and thus opposing it with all the forces.
I am astonished on how much egoism this has delivered into this discussion, actively denying the people in need of a such a renderer.

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Paul

Still waiting for a volunteer... come on, i know there is someone with D3D experience, on the forums.

I would love to have a D3D backend. Most of the engines I've used do have a dual backend anyway.

I still hope that noone will volunteer...

Lots of engines already support DirectX, if I want use DirectX I use those. I am happy to use a OpenGL only engine.

I don't get it...

If you don't want to use the D3D backend you don't have to. It's just an option for people that do want it. Dual backend is very commonplace, and helps to debug applications. Say you have some performance problems in your game, if you swith APIs used you can find out if it's a driver problem, and not a problem in your game code... there other scenarios where it's actually useful to have a dual, or even triple backend (software renderer).

I seriously do not get why you are so against having a d3d backend, since it won't affect you in any way, and will actually help other developers, and open the possibility of reaching new platforms (xbox).

not even for the xbox. the biggest reason for me starting this thread is for ati/vista targeted projects. i've done an archvis project for a client and was hunted by driver problems (i couldn't use skinning and the fact that i couldn't add animated people made the customer quite uneasy, insisting that i find a way to fix it, not wanting to listen to the driver "mambo jumbo") and low performance all together. the sad thing was it had a decent fps on my old pc that featured an nvidia 6200 gpu. after the client refusing the demo i became fed up with it and ditched the horde3d-based framework that i've developed for some time for such projects in favor of truevision3d and lost even more time learning the ins and outs of that.

i wish i would avoid that in the future.

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Paul

I don't honestly understand what you would gain from Horde remaining 'OpenGL only'? Choice is never a bad thing, and Vista/OpenGL is in quite a state these days - D3D would be a huge gain for anyone in that environment.

Getting the Horde source set up to handle multiple backends would also be beneficial - there are many other APIs that could be useful, and even necessary if anyone gets a chance to use Horde for a console title (although that would require a licensing change/exception as well).

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

Actually, the LGPL allows "tivoization", such as having the Horde3D DLL run from a read-only disc