#direct x

And to celebrate this occasion, here is information from Andrew Willmott’s presentation (audio) about the role of DirectX 8 (DX8) in the development of The Sims 2:

DX8 as a Target Platform and Technical Configuration

DirectX 8 was one of the target platforms for The Sims 2’s graphics system.

However, the main target hardware for the developers was still machines with DX7-level graphics cards.

The technical features planned for DX8 included:

• Hardware Vertex Processing (HWVP)

• Software skinning

• Vertex/Pixel Shader lighting (VS/PS lighting)

For comparison, the DX9 path included HWVP, hardware skinning, VS/PS lighting, and framebuffer effects.

Development Investment and Final Decisions

The shader path planned for DX8 consumed most of the graphics development time, but was ultimately dropped in the final weeks of the project.

The system was too inefficient to handle the large number of different shaders required for that path.

DX8 development was significant: during the final year, one engineer was almost fully dedicated to material scripting, which included working on DX8, writing code in Azim, and handling many different edge cases.

Associated Technical Challenges

Older drivers (DX8-level) did not support depth buffer copies. This caused compatibility issues, especially due to the “dirty rect” rendering system.

The FX series graphics card line was treated as a DX8 component because its performance was too low to fully utilize the features of DX9.

Extracted from the presentation using NotebookLM.

Read more about the historical impact of DirectX 8 here:

Sega and Microsoft had been buddy-buddy for a while. Remember, Bill Gates endorsed the Dreamcast and it included the ability to run Windows CE apps. 

This was born out of a fear that home game consoles would diminish interest in personal computing. Remember, we were coming out of the PS1 era of gaming. The PS1 was notable for essentially kicking off the era of polygonal graphics not just on consoles, but for the entire consumer industry. The Playstation debuted in 1995, and 3D accelerator adoption in home PCs for gaming didn’t start becoming common until 1997 or 1998, and it wouldn’t be standardized until well in to the 2000′s. The PS1 was shockingly bleeding edge for its time. Microsoft had just launched the first version of Direct X for 2D graphics around 1995, intending to bolster Windows to run games better, so they were definitely feeling the threat from game consoles.

Partnering with Sega for the Dreamcast was a way to ease that pressure a little bit. It brought them in to the console space, they could dip their toe in to the pool and maybe figure out if there was financial security in that realm. Microsoft had also apparently offered something similar for the Playstation 2, but Sony declined.

Sega failing with the Dreamcast is part of what pushed Microsoft to pursue their own gaming console. The fear of home consoles threatening their business still pervaded, so they simply tried to beat them at their own game. You also have to keep in mind that while Microsoft was investing in Direct X for PC gaming, they were still very much a business-focused company. Windows was somewhere you wrote spreadsheets, did your taxes, managed databases, printed reports, etc. If they could get game developers on board for the Xbox, that would drive them all to code their games in Windows.

The thing is, after Sega failed with the Dreamcast, Microsoft kind of wanted to keep their distance. If Sega was more successful, there were apparently plans to buy out the company, but once the Dreamcast fell to the Playstation, Microsoft backed off. Sega then reportedly went to Microsoft for help, hoping to make the Xbox backwards compatible with Dreamcast games, but Microsoft was pretty cold on the idea.

Still, those meetings between Sega’s President and Bill Gates probably kept their relationship stronger than Sega undoubtedly had with the Playstation. Sega didn’t really seem super hot on making PS2 games at first, as evidenced by the fact that early PS2 ports like Crazy Taxi or Space Channel 5 were handled by outside publishers like Acclaim and Agetec.

So, Xbox got a lot of Sega’s A-list games like Jet Set Radio Future, Panzer Dragoon Orta, and Crazy Taxi 3. Nintendo got the more family-friendly stuff like Sonic Adventure, Monkey Ball and Billy Hatcher. And the Playstation 2 got a lot of scraps – ports, mainly, with games like Shinobi or Yakuza being rare bright spots.

I recently noticed in unused lines on the TCRF site that one of The Sims 2 files mentions switching from DirectX 9 to DirectX 9.0c back on July 25, 2004, even though that version wasn't officially released until August 9. This begs the question: how and why developers have gotten access to DirectX 9.0c beforehand?

Before switching to DirectX 9.0c, The Sims 2 focused on DirectX 9.0, which was released on December 24, 2002. However, on July 25, 2004, the developers updated the requirements to DirectX 9.0c. Perhaps Microsoft provided this version to the major studios long before the official release. It would be interesting to learn more about such processes in the game industry.

...So our target hardware was very much kind of DX7 level, so we had to keep most of our graphics tricks pretty simple...

Demos with Direct X7:

Audio Recording of presentation:

Slides from presentation:

Here is the auto-generated transcription of the audio recording of the presentation:

DirectX 7 is an old version of Microsoft's DirectX API that was released in 1999. It was included in Windows 98 and Windows 2000 operating systems. DirectX is a collection of APIs that are used to handle multimedia tasks such as video and game programming on Microsoft platforms. DirectX 7 introduced new features such as hardware-accelerated Transform and Lighting (T&L) for 3D graphics, support for DirectSound3D positional audio, and DirectMusic for music playback.

На русском языке:

Answer on question in this post:

@pattykittynana These are not graphic modifications for The Sims 2. That would be what the game would have looked like if the developers had not changed the version of Direct X to a newer versions.

And renders was found here:

installing managed direct x, aka directx 9c.