[cerberus]

Greetings everybody.

I wrote some suggestions around the graphics part
and resource management part of the engine.

If anybody is interested I uploaded a pdf
here: http://cyph3r.dynalias.com/fs.pdf

[Bob-san]

Why don't you write all that information in a post? It'd be easier to view, especially if images when up to ImageShack.

[karajorma]

Can't say I've looked at the graphics code much but I agree about the teddy bear thing.

[StarSlayer]

I do believe I'll see that image whenever a Snuggle Fabric Softener commercial is on TV.

[DaBrain]

Quite a bit of informations... although I didn't understand much of it.

...Then again I'm just an artist, so I guess this wasn't ment for me.


I suppose this is something Hery or Aardwolf could give you more feedback on.

[General Battuta]

I don't know much code, but from input we've had in the past (like the D2-XL guy), it sounds like graphics code modularity would be awesome.

[Aardwolf]

It looks an awful lot like what FS2's rendering system used to be like, before everything but OpenGL got discontinued. IIRC people got sick of having to make changes to all 3 (2?) API's simultaneously, and OpenGL won out.

Also, having mostly just looked at the illustrations, that angry teddy bear is kind of ... weird.

[cerberus]

It looks an awful lot like what FS2's rendering system used to be like, before everything but OpenGL got discontinued. IIRC people got sick of having to make changes to all 3 (2?) API's simultaneously, and OpenGL won out.

Also, having mostly just looked at the illustrations, that angry teddy bear is kind of ... weird.

Well I thought I answered that in the core part... as I mentioned in the document, the purpose is not to maintain 2 or 3 API core. On the contrary, we maintain only opengl. The whole point is that when the team will decide to change the used API it will be very very simple. And one quite logical question would be: why the heck would we wonna change the API? and a quite reasonable answer would follow: well why the heck did we change from dx to gl?

What we should take into consideration is that an API commitment is not something you can predict, cause simply thats how technology works. Something considered cutting edge today can easily be museum material tomorrow.

Also I am talking about c++ structures. It's not at all what it looks like now and although I haven't seen the previous version, I am quite sure it looks nothing like it either. I am 100% sure that even a non coder can easilly understand how the core concept is something concrete with specific and easy to recon functionality.

I made some suggestions about the resource management system too. what do you think about it?

Finally, sorry if the image was bad taste, I was just making a joke.

[Mongoose]

It looks an awful lot like what FS2's rendering system used to be like, before everything but OpenGL got discontinued. IIRC people got sick of having to make changes to all 3 (2?) API's simultaneously, and OpenGL won out.

From what I understand (and keep in mind that I am not a coder), this isn't what happened at all.  Retail FS2 supported Direct3D and Glide as graphics APIs.  I'd imagine that Glide was lopped off pretty early in the Source Code Project's history because, well, you don't exactly see Voodoo still making video cards.  In the process of making the game cross-platform, the members of the team with the requisite talents added OpenGL as a second option.  For a long while, Direct3D development was kept up-to-date at least somewhat in-step with OpenGL (primarily by Bobboau, I think), but as time went on, there simply weren't active coders who were well-versed in it, and it slowly became a buggy, out-of-date mess.  Relatively recently, Direct3D was disabled as a rendering option, and even more recently, its code was removed from the engine.  It wasn't really the team making a "choice" to support one single API; if there had been active people well-versed in Direct3D, we'd presumably still have it as an option.  But as it stands, there aren't, so we stick with what the coders actually know.

[Tomo]

I suspect it has far more to do with cross-platform.

DirectX is Windows-Only, and always will be, while OpenGL is cross-platform.
There's not a lot of point in maintaining one option that is 'just as good' but only works on one platform, when you can spend your efforts on the option that does the same stuff on all three supported platforms.

[karajorma]

Nope, Mongoose pretty much hit the nail on the head as to why D3D was removed as far as I remember it.

Having both was useful as when one had a bug everyone simply swapped over to the other API instead.

[Nuke]

thing is i have a collection of games going back to the dos era. i find that the majority of the games that dont work under newer oses, are the ones based on direct3d. over 50% of the dx 5-7 games i have do not work under xp or vista with dx 9 and 10 respectively. on the contrary 80% of the glide games work with at least one glide wrapper, but 100% of the opengl based games i played still work. this is why i perfer opengl over d3d.

[cerberus]

Just a reminder: whether DirectX or OpenGL is better API to use, or whether we should use multiple APIs, is completely irrelevant to what I suggested...