Hardware T&L

scott · Post by **scott** » Wed Jul 20, 2005 2:08 am

how far away is it from being published? days, weeks,monthe or dare i say it years?

Post by **QuestOfDreams** » Wed Jul 20, 2005 3:26 am

I would say when it's done it's done

wxb1 · Post by **wxb1** » Wed Jul 20, 2005 3:21 pm

I hope it's not far away... I hope the problem is not fundamental to how I tried to code it... I hope it's just something simple that I've been missing...
My hope is that Quest will look at it and say "Here's your problem!"

and we can continue on...

wxb1 · Post by **wxb1** » Wed Jul 20, 2005 3:32 pm

The source code is on the FTP site:

Source.Zip is the genesis3d TnL source...
ActView.Zip is the actor viewer code that tests out the source..

Gamespider · Post by **Gamespider** » Thu Jul 21, 2005 12:20 pm

I guarantee.... when tnl's finished, and nou has integrated the physcs engine, i will be the first one to Dload the release

scott · Post by **scott** » Sat Jul 23, 2005 12:36 am

when this has been finished, how much wil it improve the engine?
and will it effect compile times.
what i am trying to say is what will change and by how much.

Gamespider · Post by **Gamespider** » Sun Jul 24, 2005 5:00 pm

Well guys.. Hows the tnl going? Im too eager for the news. Has the bug been fixed?

wxb1 · Post by **wxb1** » Mon Jul 25, 2005 1:45 am

QoD thinks he may have found the problem but he will keep us all posted... honestly he's found the problem then I don't know what i'll do? this is great!

Post by **Jay** » Tue Jul 26, 2005 9:44 am

scott wrote:when this has been finished, how much wil it improve the engine?
and will it effect compile times.
what i am trying to say is what will change and by how much.

A lot.

I don't think it will affect compile times, but the game will run a LOT smother.
No Hardware TnL has always been the bottleneck of RF, because without it the game does not take advance if you have a Geforce 2 instead of a Geforce 1 chip on your graghic card, as long as they have the same amount of memory. (Ok they're really old, but a Geforce2 is double as fast as a Geforce1)

So having TnL does mean you can have far more polygons on the screen than we could have before.

Post by **QuestOfDreams** » Wed Jul 27, 2005 10:34 pm

well, a quick update
the problem is that directx7 has only limited support for skeletal animations so we probably cannot use all the benefits of T&L here
dx8 and up have better support for skinned meshes so I started to convert the d3d driver to dx9...
perhaps wxb1 will find a way around the problem in dx7 so we can use this driver soon
however I'd like to get the driver working under directx9
here's a screen of a 1st test of the dx9 driver:

Gamespider · Post by **Gamespider** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 10:13 am

Whoa! a directx 9 renderer!

Im elated.

Will this mean we can use supre duper shader effects in rf and fix the dot3 one light only bug?

One doubt though....
1.We have been using skeletal animations with dx7 for a long time. Why the problem now?

2. whats tnl got to do with skeletal animation?

Post by **Jay** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 10:21 am

A directx9 renderer is cool, yes!

I think it would be possible to use shaders then.

Post by **QuestOfDreams** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 12:11 pm

One doubt though....
1.We have been using skeletal animations with dx7 for a long time. Why the problem now?

2. whats tnl got to do with skeletal animation?

in genesis all transformation are done on the cpu not using the graphic cards TnL capabilities, this is also true for the transformations that you have to apply to the vertices when rotating a joint (bone) in an animation

now we want to do all these transformations on the gpu, but the problem is that you can only set 1 (bone) transformation matrix for a primitive (triangle) but you might need 2 or 3 (because the vertices of a triangle may belong to different bones)

Spyrewolf · Post by **Spyrewolf** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 1:00 pm

hmm i can't tell to much from that model you posted quest, it may just be the size of the image,

dunno would you be able to put a comparrison shot of DX7 vs DX9 say?

now we want to do all these transformations on the gpu, but the problem is that you can only set 1 (bone) transformation matrix for a primitive (triangle) but you might need 2 or 3 (because the vertices of a triangle may belong to different bones)

eep!....that sounds tricky like it would take a massive code work around!?! is that the case here or no?....er hang on, or is this refering to DX7.

cool i hope this can be solved, cos this would update genesis so much good luck guys!

Post by **QuestOfDreams** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 1:52 pm

hmm i can't tell to much from that model you posted quest, it may just be the size of the image,

dunno would you be able to put a comparrison shot of DX7 vs DX9 say?

you won't see any difference between dx7 and dx9 here, the picture should just show you that the directx9 driver can already render textured geometry (there are pretty large differences in the code since directx7 used directdraw and direct3d which are only one component in directx9)

eep!....that sounds tricky like it would take a massive code work around!?! is that the case here or no?....er hang on, or is this refering to DX7.

I was referring to dx7 here