Direct3D7Renderer?

[MarkR]

Hi there,

I know I already started a thread (months ago) concerning D3D8 support, but after solving this one, I now also want to have D3D7 support.
Searching through the forums, I found that some (assumably pretty old) version contained D3D7 support, but unfortunately I wasn't able to find out what version.
Checking all the "dead" branches of the svn repo only showed d3d8 renderers. Can anyone give me a hint, or probably sources? No problem if the code is outdated, I think, I'd be able to port it to the new renderer module system, but it would probably be a better starting point (to be honest, I never worked with d3d7 before, and it seems to be pretty different than d3d8) -.-

Cheers
- Mark

[Mikademus]

DX7 is very much a different beast to DX8. Version 8 fundamentally changed the way to render graphics by managing all data in index and vertex buffers. In DX7, iirc, D3D was in practice a 3D addition to the 2D-oriented DirectGraphics system and 3D rendered to DirectGraphics' 2D surfaces (generally a back buffer). In DX8 3D was revamped to stand-alone and primacy and since 3D was the Future For All Things they actually did away with the 2D layer altogether, leaving developers of 2D games to use DX7. Bad call there, since a few years after that casual games became as lucrative as AAA titles and there now is a D2D layer in DX10 onward...

Anyway, this might be to your advantage since in a DX7 context you will actually have full unrestricted access to the buffer memory in terms of 2D front and back-buffers, which might allow you to make interesting optimisations! I look forward to hear about how your project unfolds!

[MarkR]

Yeah, I thought so... The D3D8 backport was pretty easy (mainly a global search & replace from the D3D9 renderer), however D3D7 seems to be a beast indeed. It's probably a better idea to start from scratch (NullRenderer?).
I hoped to get around the "deeper" internals of cegui, but it seems, I cannot get around this