DirectX8 first impressions

#1 The game that Same and I are working on is in its early stages and right now we are using DX7 and OpenGL so when DX8 came out I figured I should see what its all about. I have read as many forum posts as I could find and as many articles/reviews that I could find and this is what I have surmised.

1) The new api is much better than before and alot easier to work with, making it even compareable to opengl's api.

2) Since directdraw is now gone the initial impressions of 2D performance is not good, in fact horrible. Most people have tried as hard as they could to make the 2d/3d sprite mechanism work efficiently but could not get it even close to that of dx7. Most wonder if there is a trick they are missing or if the performance is really that bad. Mikeysoft claims that directdraw will be back in dx9 however. It appears that microsoft's plan was to get desktop developers to think like console developers and program as such so that their games will port more easily to the x-box (well thats my guesss since most new consoles from what i have read use 2d/3d sprites rather than direct bit copies).

3) DirectPlay has been overhauled completely. It appears they now use UDP and support both guaranteed and unguaranteed messages (good addition) as well as voice communication. They claim that directplay is good enough to be the basis for a massive multiplayer game, but thats yet to be seen.

4) They added some cool stuff to directinput but it seems quite a few people are having problems with it.


I have read so much more on it, but I cant recall it all at the moment. Our decision for now was to stick with OGL/DX7 until more people become familiar with dx8 and determine whether it is really all it's cracked up to be. So, for anyone out there that is just starting a project and isnt ready for the move then I can offer this piece of advice. Make sure you graphics engine is as modular as i can be so that you can create a DX8 version of it in the future if you choose to do so. For our game we are taking extra measures to ensure we are not locked into ogl and can move to dx8 if we see fit in the near future.

Bryan Dube
XenWars Developer

#2 I have not seen a lot about DirectX 8 yet. I mainly know what Bryan knows from what he has told me. I think it's looking a lot more modular, and calls seem to parallel DX8 function calls more closely, which makes it much easier to add in OpenGL and DX8 support or to port across from one to the other.

My main issue with DX8 is that at this point, the lack of tutorials and books about its ins and outs mean that it would be slower for me to develop a game with than would openGL.

DX also seems to change significantly from version to version (for the better it seems) but that means a lot of extra work everytime a new DX API is released. By the time Xenwars is ready, who knows what version of DX will be out there :) By comparison, the OpenGL core is quite stable.

In the future, DX may become my first choice for performance reasons, but at the moment, OpenGL seems fine.

Sam Hinton
Xenwars Developer

#3 Two niceties are the integrated initialization of D3D and DD, since what once was something like 10 lines became 3. Minor, but for someone getting his feet wet, it reduced a lot of the intimidation factor. Also, DirectShow includes something like 50 different transitions between buffers, but I'd rarely use them since I didn't want to burden the customer with having to install DX AND DirectShow. For quick and dirty apps like autoruns, application pickers, etc this is a nice thing.

Jeff