Planning on removing the D3D10 and D3D9 Renderers in 1.0

[Ident]

We came to the conclusion we want to remove D3D10 renderer because D3D11 is backwards compatible to it and therefore there is no reason to keep D3D10. We also intend to remove D3D9renderer.

Feel free to discuss about this decision.


P.S.: this is not an april's fool

[superpws]

Just asking out of curiosity (since I'm an ogre user), will that break Ogre's Direct3D9 renderer? Or is CEGUI's ogre renderer independent of Direct3D9/OpenGL?

[Ident]

Nothing changes about OgreRenderer. We dont touch D3D and OGL in Ogre. As a positive side-note regarding OgreRenderer: I have kept CEGUI (default branch) compatible to Ogre (default branch) lately, while keeping it still compatible to 1.9 (and probably 1.8 too altho i didnt test that), specifically it supports OGRE OGL3+ Renderer with my changes.

[superpws]

That's fine, I guess. I think most Ogre users use CEGUI for their GUIs or the other way I'm using current (unstable) branch of Ogre and it is working fine with CEGUI (stable - 0.8.3). I haven't tested GL3+ Renderer yet because Direct3D9/Direct3D11 suffices as I'm on windows.

[Ident]

We don't have the means to know what most of our users use, as most users might not even be vocal about this unless problems occur. However I think that OpenGL and Ogre users are the biggest group. Personally I use both the OpenGL 3.2+ Renderer and the Ogre Renderer a lot. We want to support as much as possible of course, but if we can drop D3D10 due to the forward compatibility to D3D11 that helps us a lot because it removes a chunk of code we otherwise need to support and test and change continuously.

D3D9 doesn't have the compatibility, so it looks differently here. Since we are doing HUGE changes to the Renderers in our default branch (that's probably gonna be going to be 1.0 Release) we currently try to drop everything that is not used/needed/supportable.

DirectFB will also be dropped probably.

I am currently rewriting the D3D11 renderer btw. It should be faster and cleaner when I am done, and it will work with our latest changes. This applies only to default branch btw., so don't expect any of these changes to happen to any 0.8.X releases, and probably also not to any 0.X.Y releases.

[superpws]

In case you missed it:

http://yosoygames.com.ar/wp/2014/04/dx9 ... 2-0-final/

I guess the difference between D3D9 and D3D11 is so huge that they can't be developed simultaneously. This has to be done sooner or later as everyone is going towards D3D11 and OpenGL 3.3+.

[Ident]

In case you missed it:

http://yosoygames.com.ar/wp/2014/04/dx9 ... 2-0-final/

That's interesting, i didn't see that. Also it was posted on the same day. I assume they must have spied on us in the #cegui channel and just copied our idea! that's what they always do! Joke aside, yea I think it is good to drop D3D9, but the question is when? I feel it might be too early now. On the other hand we won't release default branch anytime soon anyways. Rather in about a half year or so. But that might still be too soon to entirely drop D3D.

I guess the difference between D3D9 and D3D11 is so huge that they can't be developed simultaneously. This has to be done sooner or later as everyone is going towards D3D11 and OpenGL 3.3+.

In case D3D9 can be developed simultaneously I wil ltry to do so. Right now I removed the very annoying (to me) Effects library, and removed all dependencies on Effects, so all commands a lower level. Since D3D9 is so old, i however fear that this will not change much. But I haven't gotten D3D11 running yet so that's not my concer yet.

[Ident]

D3D11 is running without any additional dependencies. I managed to get it working using GLM, which we already use for OpenGL and which we decided to integrate into CEGUI in general, because we need certain math funtionalities at many spots. So basically this means - CEGUI will use GLM as a core dependency, D3D11 will not have Effects library dependency anymore. This is the state of default branch and will go into 1.0 Release.

[Ident]

Based on my current knowledge, it is possible to drop D3D9 and D3D10 because it is possible to create a D3D9 device using D3D11 libs.
The feature levels can be seen here: Link
Also interesting: Link

My current suggestion is to have one single Direct3D renderer and allow to pass an enumerator to define the feature set, for example in the constructor of the Renderer or the bootstrap function.

[Ident]

Here a link to shader versions: D3D11 Shader targets

I tried the D3D9 hardware compatible targets "ps_4_0_level_9_1" and "vs_4_0_level_9_1" and they worked with the existing shader. This effectively means that we could support D3D9 hardware in theory.

In reality the computers that have only D3D9 hardware are probably running on old machines that might also have XP. However XP support will soon be entirely stopped anyways (or was already stopped). Vista with SP1 or 2 (or some KB-patch installed) will be able to use D3D11 normally. Since XP support will be stopped I suggest we drop it. Who uses XP anyways anymore? Once the support is gone it is just big security hazard. Nevertheless it is "27.69%" of desktop users right now that have XP running. That's according to web-analytics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_shar ... ng_systems
This number is dropping though. It might fall below a relevant percentage in some months. From then on supporting D3D9 seems pointless to me. Supporting D3D hardware is fine but we can do that with our D3D11 Renderer.

I suggest we stop riding a dead horse and just kill D3D9 Renderer on default branch.

What I can do is to add an enumerator specifying D3D feature set to be used to the constructor/bootstrap of the D3D11 renderer. This would allow to support D3D9 hardware using the featureset. I can test the differnt feature sets on my PC, If anything not supported in the feature set is being used in the renderer then there should be a warning or crash. Whenever there are features that require different handling then if/else section can be used. Seems better to me than having entirely different Renderers.

[nicoo]

Who uses XP anyways anymore?

my mom

[Ident]

Who uses XP anyways anymore?

my mom

is she aware that future windows updates for vista/7/8 can be backwards engineered to figure out security holes and exploit them on the not-anymore updated XP system?
also your mom isnt our target group

[nicoo]

Who uses XP anyways anymore?

my mom

is she aware that future windows updates for vista/7/8 can be backwards engineered to figure out security holes and exploit them on the not-anymore updated XP system?
also your mom isnt our target group

my mom don't know how to install windows... I told her to be aware of security holes, but I live at 5000km from her home so I can't do miracle... she's using office2003 because she feels lost with any more recent version... so I just pray her to never use her computer to buy something online...

but yes, she's not a CEGUI user (I mean... I think she's not... who really knows?)

sorry it's first time I hijack a topic with my mom...

[Ident]

I think your mom doesnt even have to open her browser, once her PC is connected to the internet all kind of security holes could be exploited.

I removed D3D10 and D3D9 from default branch and made D3D11 backwards compatible up to feature set 9_1. However at this feature set the max tex size (width and height) is 2048 so an imageset loaded may not be bigger than that. 9_3 allows up to 4096, so that works with all our current datafiles.

[superpws]

On the other hand we won't release default branch anytime soon anyways. Rather in about a half year or so. But that might still be too soon to entirely drop D3D.

Ogre developers aren't releasing 2.0 branch very soon either (they would do in about "half year or so"). I highly doubt it as a coincidence, either you spied on them or they spied on this post

I removed D3D10 and D3D9 from default branch and made D3D11 backwards compatible up to feature set 9_1. However at this feature set the max tex size (width and height) is 2048 so an imageset loaded may not be bigger than that. 9_3 allows up to 4096, so that works with all our current datafiles.

By 9_1 and 9_3 did you mean Direct3D9a and Direct3D9c respectively?

I think it's not a big deal to remove it (which you already did anyway) as it seems people didn't take interest in it (both in this forum and in Ogre forums). They can still use 0.8.x branch if they desperately need Direct3D9.