#directx

I wrote a glass-like post-effect for MMD!

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:

A few weeks ago I decided I am fed up with the current state of things particularly in the demoscene (but also a bit in game development) when it comes to using a prepackaged engine versus people knowing or learning how to use their own thing, so I put together a quick tutorial for how to write the beginnings of a framework that renders a mesh and plays some music - it took less than 400 lines of C++ and about 40 steps.

" Behind the scenes with the creators of the most powerful game machine on the planet! "

This project is still active, though I didn’t have as much time to work on it as I wanted during the pandemic. The one major piece that’s missing is some way to animate the models, and that’s still on the roadmap somewhere.

I’ve worked a lot on various bug fixes. To mention just a couple of major ones that come to mind: there was an important fix for the shift-reduce parser that reads the modeling script. And another one involved the function that simplifies the voxel octrees that are (sometimes) used to define a visible surface and render models. There are two screenshots here, and the first one is supposed to show the latter fix. This is a set of voxels (cubes) of various sizes. If it hadn’t been simplified to remove voxels that had no useful data in them, all of the voxels would have an edge length of 1. But as you can see, the voxel at the upper right has an edge length as large as 8. Being able simplify these voxel trees like this will be useful however they are ultimately used, even if it’s only to create models for use later.

Az Archívumból c. rovatunkkal a korábbi oldalunkkal együtt elveszett régebbi, ám nem kevésbé érdekes cikkeinket igyekszünk feltámasztani, kellemes olvasást! (Az alábbi cikkünk még a The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt megjelenése előtt készült, 2014-ben.) Akik gyakrabban látogatnak minket, már észrevehették, hogy elég sokat cikkezünk a Witcher szerepjátékok készülöben lévő 3. részéről. Bár mostanában…