Back again
Monday, January 6, 2003 | Permalink
Hi everyone!
Sorry for the silence lately, but I've been away over the holidays spending some time with the family. Oh, it's been a great time. A little cold though, we've had tempeatures ranging from -25C to -37C most of the time. My sister gave birth to her second child during the holidays too, a real cutie.
I'll put up some pictures later tonight.
I have spent some time with DX9 during the holidays too and the DX9 backend of my framework is mostly done. I must say that while DirectX is improving with every version the API is still fundamentally flawed in a couple of ways and will most likely remain that way. MS tend to map the API too much to how the hardware works instead of how the applications works, which often makes it more cumbersome to work with without offering any advantages. For instance binding texture filtering and wrapping behaviour to texture stages instead of texture objects like in OpenGL. I have yet find any circumstances where this behaviour would be desired or advantageous. And when MS decide to change the API in such a way that it's incompatible with previous versions it just amazes me that they don't fix these fundamental errors when they are redesigning it anyway. In the end though, DX9 is a quite good API in many ways, and there certainly are a number of problems with OpenGL's design too, like the texture target hierarchy which doesn't makes a whole lot of sense either.
Anyway, you'll probably see a couple of DX9 demos here in the not too distance future.
yarpen
Thursday, January 16, 2003
I'm not so convinced about this wrapping/filtering, frankly. Maybe it sometimes make sense to have the same texture at stage 'i' and 'k' but with different properties... Hmm, never found a use for this, but maybe someone, somewhere?
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Humus
Saturday, February 8, 2003
I don't think making the API less convenient over a case like that thats hardly ever going to matter is the greatest thing you can do.
