Finally, a DirectX 10 video driver for Irrlicht

[ACE247]

Duh I know...
And trust me I have seen more discusions.
Ok the End...

How is the DX10 Driver going? any comment from evandromillian?
What can we do to help maybe? (Probably not spam the forum... )

[Radikalizm]

This project is probably dead, so I believe someone will have to start this from scratch
I'd love to help, but I really can't add yet another project to my pile of work...

[Granyte]

sad no one know how to contact him?

do we even have any one who has the knowledge to code a driver

[ACE247]

You can find his mail in his profile, under the msn link
I take it, quite a lot of people here have the ability/capability to write a driver, but most are simply too occupied elsewhere.

[Radikalizm]

sad no one know how to contact him?

do we even have any one who has the knowledge to code a driver

Writing a driver is not too hard as long as the person writing it has good knowledge of the D3D10/11 API, the only tricky part would be to design it in such a way so you don't break irrlicht's API, and seeing as irrlicht was designed with a fixed function pipeline in mind this could require some (ugly) workarounds

My D3D10/11 rendering system for my engine has some small similarities to irrlicht's driver interface, maybe I could try to port it over some day...

[RdR]

My D3D10/11 rendering system for my engine has some small similarities to irrlicht's driver interface, maybe I could try to port it over some day...

That would be nice!

[hendu]

Some dx9-level features aren't taken full advantage of yet. Shouldn't they be higher priority than dx1x? (my opinion)

[Radikalizm]

Some dx9-level features aren't taken full advantage of yet. Shouldn't they be higher priority than dx1x? (my opinion)

True, some features are not taken care of yet, but the longer we stall the implementation of D3D10/11 the more archaic D3D9 will become, which will make irrlicht a less attractive choice
There's also nothing preventing us from developing both the missing features from D3D9 and a new D3D10/11 driver, we're talking about an open source and community-driven project here, you can work on multiple things at a time as long as you take the initiative to actually complete your work

We really need a to-do list containing all of these things..

[RdR]

We really need a to-do list containing all of these things..

http://www.irrlicht3d.org/wiki/index.php?n=Dev.TODOList

[Radikalizm]

We really need a to-do list containing all of these things..

http://www.irrlicht3d.org/wiki/index.php?n=Dev.TODOList

I don't check the wiki a lot, so thanks for pointing that out It's pretty incomplete though, maybe we should expand it?

[Granyte]

Some dx9-level features aren't taken full advantage of yet. Shouldn't they be higher priority than dx1x? (my opinion)

ofcourse but i think that irrlicht should have dx 10 befor dx12 comes out ...........

also the current dx9 driver could be replaced with a dx9-10-11 unified driver much like open gl does

(well that would mess with xp user so maybe we could keep the curent dx9 driver as legacy or something)

[ACE247]

WOW the wiki TODO is 'quite' outdated...
Will Definetly have to maintain and expand on it.

Maybe create a new Thread Topic somewhere on the forum about Irrlichts Future and planning?

[hendu]

Oh hey, will irr take part in the coming gsoc?

[Radikalizm]

Some dx9-level features aren't taken full advantage of yet. Shouldn't they be higher priority than dx1x? (my opinion)

ofcourse but i think that irrlicht should have dx 10 befor dx12 comes out ...........

also the current dx9 driver could be replaced with a dx9-10-11 unified driver much like open gl does

(well that would mess with xp user so maybe we could keep the curent dx9 driver as legacy or something)

Yeah, that'd only work for vista/7 users, the D3D11 API with feature levels is not supported on XP, so we'll always have to maintain 2 D3D drivers to have support for WinXP

And you're right that a D3D10/11 driver should get some priority, it's been almost 6 years since D3D10 went gold so I believe it would benefit irrlicht a lot if it would catch up with current technology. The inclusion of geometry shaders for D3D would be a huge improvement together with the inclusion of hull, domain and compute shaders presented in D3D11. Compute shaders could provide a massive improvement to irrlicht's so called "lightning fast" speeds if it were to be made available to those GPUs supporting it

[hendu]

I'm tempted to say "if you need geometry shaders / [insert feature here], use opengl". Though I'm quite aware it's not an option for many.

On compute shaders, I don't think they belong in a 3d engine. Irrlicht has so far stayed clear of being a game engine and focusing only on drawing, compute IMHO falls outside that.