ENIGMA Development Environment

As some of you may not be aware, vector graphics require a half pixel align or else there are edge artifacts, anybody who has worked with SVG's knows about this. Anyway, DX and OGL require you do the half pixel alignment yourself for 2D rendering. Now Josh's original proposal to me was to just shift the ortho projection function by (-0.5,-0.5) and that appeared to work because I was using draw_rectangle. Now this does not fix it for every draw function, as x and y are by default float because of gs_scalar and what both graphics API's use internally. This means if you call say draw_sprite(random(room_width), random(room_height)); you'll end up with half the sprites half pixel aligned and the other half of them not. The only way I could resolve it locally was to cast to integer before passing the coordinates to the draw functions and then letting the projection matrix shift (-0.5, -0.5)

The only solution to this I can think of is to either explicitly require integer for x and y with 2D drawing functions (which breaks them for transforming say a sprite into a 3D billboard as float is still the highest precision allowed). We could create a separate scalar for 2D x and y drawing functions so people can easily choose their cast. Or we can manually enter (-0.5, -0.5) to every single 2D drawing function. Looking for input on this you guys, specifically you, Josh Dreamyland.

Yes, I already spoke on this a bit before, but Direct3D offers an internal mesh class that can do optimization and has interfaces for dynamic level of detail (LOD), and can also by default load (*.x) model files, which models can be exported from Blender in.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb147196%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

From what I can gather however, the mesh class works with triangle lists internally, however you can get a pointer and control locking and unlocking of its index and vertex buffer, however I was looking at the specification for DrawSubet()

D3DX Meshes use indexed triangle lists, and are therefore drawn with IDirect3DDevice9::DrawIndexedPrimitive.

So I am unsure if we can use this to create models that can have other primitive types. It is however possible for us to make it so that people only thing they are using the other primitive types and just hack them all into triangle lists, after all that is the fastest way to do it, that is *the* primitive of the GPU. Quads all that shit are on there way out and are already software processed in OpenGL 3 and later.

Also, when the base mesh interface loads a (*.x) model file it also gives you the file name from its material telling you where its texture is located. The base mesh interface holds transformation, texture, and material information, so we would also need to add a d3d_model_get_texture() function to avoid having inaccessible textures in memory. Just looking for some input guys... I want to say just go ahead and use it but idk, I would have to hack in and fake other primitive types, which albeit would be really fast anyway, but idk if you guys are ok with me doing that or what or if we should just write our own mesh interface like I did with OpenGL 3.

d3d_transform_set_identity();
d3d_transform_add_rotation_x(90);
draw_sprite(spr_wall, 0, 0);



That is possible in Game Maker and using the DX batching class. DX can also outperform this with different textured sprites, I presume because of batching, and it must be mixing it with a shader. If we add all that to the OpenGL one Harri committed, we could make it a LOT faster than what he has right now.

I am using the zip installer which comes with MinGW64 Harri, if that is the case, first try to install the DX runtime, then try to install the DX SDK and see which of those fixes it, but do it in that order, as I'd rather have people download the runtime than the SDK.

d3d9.h contains most of the rendering headers
d3dx9.h contains math functions, vector classes, and matrix transformation stuffs

There is also a lib for both of those which is linked, -ld3d9 and -ld3dx9

And why can't you do this now in OGL? Do you mean just using d3d_transform functions to rotate sprites?

No I was just ensuring everyone that the behavior has not been lost with this new sprite batching class.

Yes, these were all the things I was originally planning to do with OpenGL 3. But Harri, for that I was thinking of a common interface for vertex formats of all the basic shapes like a plane and what not, and include them from a common header, thats what those GLshapes.cpp and GL3shapes.cpp files are about. I just didn't have the energy to do it. Also, that is why there's a shaders folder, we need to rewrote all the behavior expected into GPU programs as well. Especially for particle effects.

We use VBO's instead of lists as it is just better usually. But even lists cannot be changed. So if you turn this into a list:

It was in response to that I was not sure if you were aware that OpenGL 1 still uses call lists.

Harri, OpenGL3 uses VBO's, OpenGL 1 still uses call lists, and it is likely to remain that way.

Ok well this something we need to discuss.  ENIGMA has its own code for loading various image formats, but Direct3D has a S*** TON of built in formats supported...

from...
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb172801%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
".. the following file formats: .bmp, .dds, .dib, .hdr, .jpg, .pfm, .png, .ppm, and .tga"

DirectX also has internal classes for dealing with fonts, you can simply request them by name and tell it to render, it takes like 5 lines of code...
http://www.two-kings.de/tutorials/dxgraphics/dxgraphics09.html
You can also ask it to build a mesh from font numerics and it will do so.

So this begs the question as to what to do about our fontstruct as it obviously needs moved so that its not included in our DX system when it doesn't need to be.

DirectX also provides internal classes for drawing sprites and batching them...
http://www.two-kings.de/tutorials/dxgraphics/dxgraphics09.html

Now this also leads to another thing as to whether or not we want to use those sprite functions for backgrounds as well. Not to mention in GameMaker sometimes people will apply transformations to text and sprite drawing functions to use them as 3D billboards. I would like some input from you guys Harri, forthevin, Josh.

Edit:

I have managed to get texture loading and draw_sprite implemented...

As you can see there is a tad bit of a problem, DX uses ARGB, ENIGMA loads textures into RGBA You can tell by the sprites pixel color being off.