Friday, April 2, 2010

Of course the screenshot WAS from Tenebrae

And everything else was a load of nonsense too.....

Hope you all had a good April Fools day nonetheless. Some genuine stuff now. Here's the full change log for 1.8.3 so far:

  • Added test and failure cases to web download code for several less likely scenarios.
  • Added more robust OS versioning.
  • Allowed a PS version that's downlevel from the VS version and enabled shader optimizations.
  • Optimized surface bbox culling by only checking on surfs where both the leaf and the node intersect the frustum.
  • Removed "hard-coding" of release version from the splash screen.
  • Removed all static linking dependencies from DirectX DLLs.
  • Added d3dx_version cvar to switch between different versions of the D3DX DLLs (default 42).
  • Resolved massive speed drain from drawing the console and strings on some platforms.
  • Tidied up interpolation somewhat and switched it to cubic interpolation.
  • Removed fixed pipeline fog (shader model 3 compatibility).
  • Added HLSL path for underwater warp and optimized by incorporating polyblend with the post-process.
  • Improved timer to only wrap if DirectQ itself is running for > ~49 days.
  • Reworked FPS counter more to my liking.
  • Optimized vertex buffers a little better.
Regarding that d3dx_version cvar: it's coded so that if version 42 is not available it will test for successive downlevel versions until it finds one that is available. The lowest version has now been fixed at 32, as it's the lowest version of D3DX that my shaders will compile against. I haven't yet tested it with version 42 when the full app is compiled against an earlier version of the SDK, but that will be done.

Overall performance is up a few percent on 1.8.2 owing to some sneaky optimizations. I'm moving towards being able to put everything into vertex buffers and fully decouple the actual render from the client/server processing, but it might take a few more revisions of the code to actually get there. But in general it's looking nice.

3 comments:

Coranth said...

*Coranth slaps his face with a wing* Gah! I was fooled! Damn, I should have realized... but Tenebrae looks so good; I thought you -were- really doing what you wrote previously (about switching to DirectX 11). Hm, maybe you might do that in the future, eh... but without the awesome lighting... D'OH!

meTch said...

I like how DirectQ gets faster and faster every release. Soon it will go so fast computer screens everywhere will melt.


MELT!

Andy said...

I agree, this blazes! I'd like a Q melt, on rye, please, and hold the Google/Quake II.