How big is the Direct3D stuff?

[Chris]

Alright, so, are there any people out there that would like to work on a
Direct3D implementation for the winehq.com tree? I'd love to contribute
but I don't know D3D well enough (I'll read up on it). I'm hoping
there're a few people out there that would like to, yes?

On Thu, 2002-06-06 at 09:00, Lionel Ulmer wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> As I once started working on Direct3D in Wine and was one of the contributor
> to the DDraw code, let me answer some of these questions :-)
> 
> >  * What are the tasks for implementing Direct3D?
> 
> It's not easy to separate the tasks. For one, documenting and
> re-appropriating the DDraw code would be the first thing to do.
> 
> <start of minor rant>
> 
> As other people discussed it, the current DDraw code in WineHQ's CVS tree is
> from TransGaming. I do not say that it's worse than the previous code (it's
> certainly better and respects the DLL separation stuff), but my biggest
> problem with it is that it was entirely developped 'in-house' and sumbitted
> 'as is' to the WineHQ tree without really involving any of the WineHQ
> DirectX developpers (like Marcus or me). Now don't undertand this wrong, I
> am certainly also to blame because I found other interests at that time and
> mostly stopped working on Wine.
> 
> This means that now that TG does not really contribute back much to WineHQ
> (even in pure 2D stuff), we have a large piece of code that nobody really
> bothered to undertand and is largely unmaintained.
> 
> Now I understand why Linus absolutely refuses big patches doing a lot of
> stuff in one go and wants small incremental patches :-)
> 
> Finally, saying 'now let's start working on Direct3D' will not help much if
> we do not find at least 3 or 4 people interested in working on it. I once
> submitted some D3D work but nobody ever contributed to it and it was mostly
> unmaintained once I stopped working on it (and I fear that would be the same
> for other parts of Wine like Multimedia, the debugger for example, if Eric
> did take some prolonged vacations :-) )
> 
> So the current situation is *not* TransGaming fault, but largely the
> community's for not doing anything at all and letting things in the state it
> was (well, not TG's fault except if you consider that they 'bought out' the
> people who would have worked on it in their free time, but that is just
> plain good business sense :-) ).
> 
> <end of minor rant>
> 
> >  * Can older versions be implemented independently from the newer ones?
> 
> This is the big problem when doing DDraw work, designing stuff that :
> 
>  a) can work accross multiple DDraw versions (ie find the common stuff and
>     implement hardware acceleration here and then doing the rest in some
>     'emulation' layer).
>     
>  b) can work accross multiple object 'types' (for example, a surface can be
>     the front / back buffer, a texture, a ZBuffer, a compressed texture, some
>     random buffer, an overlay, ...).
> 
>  c) respects the DLL separation (ie puts all 'hardware' related stuff like
>     X11 calls or OpenGL in the X11drv).
> 
> >  * Do we have nothing at all or do we have something? What changes need
> > to be done to this something to make it better.
> 
> We still have the old Direct3D code that I wrote to support DirectX 5 / 6 in
> CVS (not functionnal, but enough to see the ideas :-) ).
> 
> >  * What modifications are necessary to other parts (x11drv, DirectDraw)
> > to implement Direct3D?
> 
> As said before, a lot of X11drv work and a DDraw rework :-)
> 
> >  * Are there other DirectX areas that are lacking and that will prevent
> > games from working even if we get Direct3D working (DirectPlay,
> > DirectInput)?
> 
> Mostly all the DirectX 8 (Dinput and DSound 8) if we want to support
> Direct3D 3. Otherwise, we should have almost everything needed in the other
> DirectX stuff to implement Direct3D.
> 
> >  * One item I can suggest is adding support for XVideo to DirectDraw (I
> > believe that's where it fits) to enable hardware scaling and YUV
> > conversion when playing videos. This would be more for media players
> > than games but could be useful anyway.
> 
> I have a patch than I am slowly working on to re-add the Xv support to DDraw
> (it's based on some work that Marcus did). But as explained before, it's not
> that easy to do :-)
> 
>                             Lionel
> 
> -- 
> 		 Lionel Ulmer - http://www.bbrox.org/
> 
-- 
Chris
chris at luethy.net