Game Development Community

Question on Future Additions...

by William Todd Scott · in Torque Game Engine · 01/22/2006 (8:38 pm) · 4 replies

Are there plans to provide .dds support in TGE?

Are there plans to support DX8 graphics cards with TSE?

Thanks
Todd

#1
02/16/2006 (9:17 am)
William - TSE supports shader models 1.0 - 3.0 ... if I'm not mistaken, it runs with DirectX 9, and there are probably no plans to support DX8. You can't get the newest effects with it. (Im not a GG employee)

I wasn't sure what dds was so I looked it up. It appears to be a image file format that supports mip mapping. If you want dds support you can probably add it yourself. I don't know how you'll set up mip mapping, but Im sure you can figure a way ;)
#2
02/16/2006 (9:25 am)
Hey Chris,

Thanks for getting back to me.

I was able to add .dds support to TGE.

I appreciate the heads-up on TSE and DX8. One of the guys I am working with has a laptop with a DX8 card, so I was just curious about that for TSE.

Todd
#3
02/16/2006 (9:31 am)
William - you should be able to install the DriectX 9 drivers, and TSE has fallback shaders that will fallback to your shader version.

Did you post a resrouce for dds suppport? I'm sure someone else could find it useful as well.
#4
02/16/2006 (9:51 am)
Chris,

Thanks for the help here...I am going to take another shot at getting him up and running. I took his comment that TSE wasn't working on his DX8 graphics card, and didn't look any deeper.

On the DDS support... I have been going back and forth on submitting this as a resource. The primary reason being that it isn't a clean integration. The right way to integrate it into the engine would have been to either extend or replace the BitMap class. I did not do that. The drawbacks are 1) I have not integrated DDS support for the terrain, 2) I had to add dynamic_cast calls (which are slow) to determine if a resource being loaded is a bitmap or a DDS_Image, and 3) it isn't nearly as elegant (or correct) as having a single Bitmap class for all textures, and 4) I can't remember if all the openGL calls for compressed textures have been implemented in DirectX (which means it may not support DirectX rendering).

So, I am going to hold off on posting this as a resource.

However, if anyone is interested in the DDS code (despite its drawbacks) I am happy to email it to them.

Todd