>> DirectX comes into play for hardware detection. OpenGL doesn't give all the >> informations DirectX can give. That's what I heard so far. I'm going to be controversial here by asking "is that info really required when users can scale down their quality settings manually?"
> For Windows, DirectX works better than OpenGL for most lower end > chipsets. That's gradually changing, but for now, adding a DirectX > back end would add benefit for a couple years. A quick and dirty > substitution hack is feasible for someone who knows both rendering > subsystems well, but it would take quite a few eyes on it over many > releases to iron out all the eccentricities DX would introduce. Which chipsets in particular? The 2 big names (ATI and NVidia) do quite well in OpenGL on all platforms. > The better solution is to rework SL to replace all OpenGL use with a > retargetable engine like Ogre, which can speak GL, DX, and god knows > what else. At least one viewer project's working with Ogre. However > when last I looked, they only seemed to be using it to add features, > running it in parallel with the built in rendering instead of trying > to excise the OpenGL calls. What is this other viewer? RealXtend? The reason i'm asking about this is because i'm fiddling with my cross-platform build right now and honestly dreading having to fiddle with the DirectX SDK. My first thought is to just cut out all DirectX use (from a first glance there's a bit of sound code which appears to be now replaced by OpenAL and the hardware detection at startup) and replace it. I actually couldn't find where the 3D rendering is done by DirectX, so perhaps i'm missing something obvious. -- Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLDev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
