More Adventures in Texture Land: I want my DX9!!!

Daily 08/28/03 am

from JoeUser Forums

I can’t believe this…

 

I spent all afternoon hacking and slashing through the DirectX docs trying to find the right combination of flags to get a colored ship on the screen. Not only that, but every iteration meant a recompile and link.

 

Time consuming? Yes

Hassle? Yes

Avoidable? YES!!!

 

I was playing around with the DX9 SDK and found the ever sooo cool EffectEdit program. This program essentially allows me to prototype vertex and pixel shaders on the fly without the edit/compile/link cycle.

 

In a couple of hours (which includes n00b time), I’ve gotten our ship on the screen with a nicer glow than I had this afternoon. The interface is easy and the interpreter is wonderful. It appears to be a rich edit interpreter because I can use cut and paste code with different fonts and it works perfectly.

 

Anyways, if the efficiency of this tool isn’t enough to get us to switch to DX9, I don’t know what is.

 

[Actually, I could probably port the shader to dx8]

 

 

 

Another breakthrough…

 

Remember how I mentioned that I think the alpha screwed me up last time? Well, it turns out that, if done properly, the alpha in the texture is a real boon. No more glow map, add it to the alpha channel. Of course, this doesn’t solve the problem of the glow emitting off the model, but it’s a start.

 

Anyways, with a little finagling and the TextureTool, I was able to get the glow map into the texture as the alpha channel. Really Cool!! Alex is going to love this.

Thanks again to Scott for getting me the kick ass glow map.

 

9,619 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from JoeUser Forums Top
I want your job.. This is too cool! How long does it take to learn C++, DX9?? 10-15 minutes, right?
Reply #2 from JoeUser Forums Top
I think that there was an Effect Editor for DX8 too. I actually have the DX9 sdk installed on all the machines that I use now, so I can't check. There are two reasons why I haven't upgraded my code to DX9. The first was that my primary reference book is in DX8. The second is that I figure that if we're using the DX8 SDK, we'll be more compatible with more video card drivers without having to worry as much about it.
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Reply #3 from JoeUser Forums Top
Darkstar: I'm sure that it wouldn't take you long to pick it up. You can borrow any of my reference books that you want, and I'll give you a copy of my test app. :)