DirectX 10 start as a SoC project?

[Stefan Dösinger]

Am Dienstag 13 März 2007 03:27 schrieb Kovács András:
Seems that there are 3 people interested in that now. I think it should not 
fail due to the lack of work :-)

In case someone has his own idea, feel free to suggest it :-)

A few more Direct3D related ideas from me:

1) d3dx9_xy.dll, d3dxof.dll
Some helper DLLs. d3dx9 is supposed to be shipped by the game, d3dxof is part 
of the dx runtime. The problem is that many games do not ship them because 
windows tends to have them(either shipped, or from another game). The legal 
situation regarding d3dxof.dll is difficult.

They contain various helper functions, from a shader compiler to texture 
loading. To my knowledge it is no problem to implement a subset for starting, 
somtthing your favorite game likes, then it can be extended as needed. I 
think this is interesting for people who like math, and specifically linear 
algebra.

Ivan said he had a look at this DLL, maybe he can comment more on it, and if 
it is suitable at all.

2) Software Vertex Shaders
Not a project for fancy new graphics, but rather to help compatiblity with 
older cards, for feature completeness and most notably testing. Native 
DirectX supports Vertex(not pixel) shaders in the CPU, for cards which can't 
do them, if the application specifically requests this, and for 
IDirect3DDevice9::ProcessVertices. The use for old cards should be 
obvious :-) , and ProcessVertices would allow us to test the results of a 
vertex shader in a more direct way than the visual test does.

This will require a lot of x86 assembler work. For performance reasons the d3d 
asm should be cross-compiled to x86 mmx instructions and then executed 
directly. The main challenge will be to overcome the architectural 
differences between a gpu and a normal cpu.

Any other ideas? Feel free to suggest :-)

> Hi,
>
> I think, that start working on Dx10 is a great opportunity to learn about
> wined3d, and Microsoft's new platform. I would like to apply, because i
> want to contribute to open source projects, and i'm really interested in
> wine, especially in wined3d. I have some patches in the tree, and I really
> would like to work on together.
>
> Best Regards,
> 	Andras kovacs