Irrlicht future, DirectX11 / Metro

[mightypanda]

Hello there,
i am a long-time user of Irrlicht, my dreams came true thanks to it.

However, the world is quickly changing, and with the Windows8 platform hurricane a DX9 based engine is very likely to die soon..
What is the status of DX10/DX11 ports of irrlicht?

With a dx11 driver, a SharpDX port of it would be easy, and Irrlicht would immediately jump on the Windows/Metro bandwagon, ready for the marketplace and the future of Windows platform.

What do you think?

Stefano

[hendu]

I think XP and 7 will continue to have a big marketshare for years, see how everyone hates Metro.

[mightypanda]

I am an old-seasoned Windows developer, and don't get scared about the latest buzz.

However, i think the pace at which these technologies change user/market habits has greatly increased, the whole tablet market thing is disrupting.
Yes, it is hard to admit it, but i think the world of shareware and custom desktop apps is already going down the hill.. will be a slow downhill.. but that's the future.
(all of my products are desktop windows apps!!)

[hendu]

Maybe move to mobile? I hear the money's on iProducts nowadays

[CuteAlien]

Metro is the x-th try of Microsoft catching on with phones and tablets - this time I have the feeling it's by trying to make the desktop so ugly that people no longer want to work with it. Thought I'm still not sure why they think people will switch to their mobile gadgets then.

Well, jokes aside - you are certainly right that this is the future and Irrlicht will have to support Metro and newer DX versions. Nadro's branch will hopefully lead towards that. Myself I'm planning to spend some spare-time next weeks on learning to work with shaders, but will still be some time until I'm really of help there I guess.

But search around the forum and you find the discussions about Nadro's branch and the other approaches to DX 10/11 - if you want to help with testing or ideas you are always welcome.

[Bl00drav3n]

At least OpenGL drivers should work fine, as far as M$ does not introduce artificial barriers.

[CuteAlien]

As far as I know so far OpenGL won't work with Metro. But maybe they change that as well (they did listen to a few protests in other areas recently).

[Mel]

Seeing how M$ has done things lately, it is likely they dropped the support for Open GL, simply because having Open GL in Windows makes little sense now. They already have their own graphics library, why keeping GL?

[Bl00drav3n]

Well there already exist drivers for Win8, for example here: http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pa ... ivers.aspx

[CuteAlien]

OpenGL drivers will certainly continue to exist, they are written by the card vendors anyway. The problem is just accessing those with Metro applications - for that there needs to be wrapper which didn't seem to exist yet last time I checked.

[Bl00drav3n]

You mean things like glew would stop working? Now that'd be a really jerkish move.

[Nadro]

You mean things like glew would stop working? Now that'd be a really jerkish move.

Yep, WinRT (ARM version of Windows doesn't expose a methods for create an OpenGL context. For x86 version a Win32 still exist so we will be allowed to use WGL for create a context.

Personally I'm not a fan of MS standards, so for me Metro, DirectX, even Windows may die as quick as possible Of course this cause that I'm not too familiar with a DirectX, so personally I haven't got plans to write a DX10/11 driver for Irrlicht, but I know that many users likes this MS standard, so will be nice, if someone will write working DX10+ driver for this engine. One of these persons is Granyte As the other devs said this driver will be quickly included into a shader-pipeline branch when it will be ready.

[fmx]

me too, I mainly have experience with GL so I cant care less what horrible atrocities will need to be dealt with by Win8/Metro developers
But I'm still glad people are willing to work on updated DX drivers, for the greater good of irrlicht and all that

[Granyte]

on 1.8 the dx10/11 driver just needed a quick fix for 2d and some minor detail for the material renderer to be functional

how ever for the shader-pipeline branch it might take longer to ship cause i still don't fully understand the changes made to irrlicht for the shader branch.



I doubt anything good will come out of windows on arm and for the X86 version i doubt they will sucedde to impose anything or the dev will simply go away and m$oft really does not wan this

[Mel]

Well, on ARM it is their choice, like with XBOX360, but for the rest of the PC market, they shouldn't behave like that, or else, people will finally flee from them.

For instance, i would remove the metro style from windows completely on PC, or at least, to give the choice to disable it completely. I am not friend of "metro" applications precisely, not even they are capable of providing good metro programs, the latest office is a desktop app, after all...

being able to use DirectX 11 under metro isn't enough. And the whole metro stuff only adds another layer of complexity just to work with Windows. With regard to Irrlicht, as soon as it is able to make full use of the DX11 capabilities, the better

Not that i can't think of a shader that performs tesellation and skinning in hardware in Open GL anyways!