Reality Factory

so your saying that you plan to convert to DX9 and then integrate T&L? that would be great! DX9 is a major step forward.

i think this is the major addition we've been waiting for!

Quest,
I know for sure u can pull it off! Lots of luck!

Looks like u have the basic renderer going already! Now for all those cheesy special efects.....

In the world of Genesis site, you somewhere have what they call a genesis dx9 renderer for genesis3d. Could check it out!

I couldnt make head or tail out of it (basically since I know nothing of c++ eexcept for what they taught at school, which is next to nothing)

@QoD:

Does the dx8 or dx9 solve the problem you described in with the skeletal animation? That is have you found a different way to transform the verts using the GPU under dx8/dx9?

Does this advancement take a load of work off the CPU? I mean RF didnt use much gpu power right? So will this make the CPU requirments for RF less? Also, would this allow for acurate full skined actor-blend animations?(because in the tech demo of 072 the blending animations are very choppy) And can somebody please enlighten me on what exactly this advancement is? Im a bit clueless here on this subject . But whatever it is keep up the good work!

MakerOfGames wrote:Does this advancement take a load of work off the CPU? I mean RF didnt use much gpu power right? So will this make the CPU requirments for RF less?

Exactly.

With TnL RF will be much faster. And you can have much more polygons on the screen at one time, which means you can have much more detail, assuming you have a graphics card that is at least a Geforce1.

Thats great!

@QoD:

Does the dx8 or dx9 solve the problem you described in with the skeletal animation? That is have you found a different way to transform the verts using the GPU under dx8/dx9?

Yes, what I do in dx9 is using a skinned mesh (D3DXMESHCONTAINER with a D3DXFRAME hierachy) and indexed vertex blending
took me a while to figure out how it works because all samples use .x-files, for which there are special load and create functions

I also went back to the dx7 docs and I think you can do something similar in dx7: you can use the vertex buffer as you already did but assign weights to the vertices and use several world matrices to transform them (you can set them with the D3DTransformStateTypes)
you might look at the Bend sample that comes with the dx7 sdk for more details

yes I looked it over this weekend and it seems like it will solve the problems... I'm going to continue working on my version of the dx7 and dx9 driver for my own personal use, since you seem to be making pretty good progress on the one your working on... thanks again for your help...

SWEET!

im slightly confused here does this mean that this will be 2 upgrades
from dx 7 to dx 9
and T&L?
and if so how long till the dx9 upgrade?

PS. and hows it going near to completion, how long do you think?
i wouldnt be so impatient but i could realy use this upgrade, my frps are geting wose with every new object i add to my room.

With Hardware T&L, just how many ploys will be able to be displayed onscreen at a time? I want to max out the polys in my game onscreen for maximum detail. And how many polys can RF render now?

With Hardware T&L, just how many ploys will be able to be displayed onscreen at a time? I want to max out the polys in my game onscreen for maximum detail. And how many polys can RF render now?

i beleive it still will be as it is now and hardware dependant, however newer graphics cards will be ableto take advantage of the T&L and greatly increase the amount of detail then that which is possible now.

update: world and actor rendering with full hardware TnL (using vertex and index buffers)
lightmaps are giving me a headache right now, since they cause a lot of texture switches and each poly would have to be rendered separately ruining the benefits of vertex and index buffers...

hey it's running! nice work!

I don't understand. What role does Hardware TnL play in this screenshot?