Following the recent success with waterwarps, I've started becoming interested in going back down the HLSL route for the next release. This time however I intend providing a fixed path as well, and you will be able to toggle between the two paths in realtime. It's going to be nice to get that done because HLSL does genuinely enable a much leaner and more optimal setup, with a huge number of state changes simply removed. I want to put DirectQ in a position where it can take advantage of this, but also be able to run on older hardware that doesn't support HLSL (especially hardware that doesn't support Shader Model 2).
Other differences with the old 1.6 and earlier versions include that I'll be intending to replicate the non-HLSL look exactly, and won't be providing a means for supplying your own shaders. I thought about the latter option, but I'm convinced it's the right way now. A Quake engine isn't a general purpose scene graph, it's intended to do precise effects in a known and predictable way. I don't think it's too contentious as I suspect it's something that only a very small number of people would actually want, and those who want it would likely also have the means and ability to recompile the engine themselves anyway. The fixed path of version 1.7.x certainly didn't hurt the number of downloads that the engine got, and it's hard to argue with that.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Fun with HLSL
Posted by
mhquake
at
8:23 PM
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