Tim Sweeney heeft een update gepost op de Unreal Technology page, waarin hij het een en ander zegt over verbeteringen in DirectX 7:
Unreal Tournament demo scheduleTo quote Voodoo Extreme quoting me
, here's the Unreal Tournament demo release plan:
- Windows 3dfx demo this week.
- Windows Direct3D/OpenGL next week.
- Linux Glide/OpenGL soon after.
- Mac timing not figured out yet.DirectX7
Microsoft's new DirectX7 API will be released soon. I've already ported Unreal Tournament's Direct3D code to DirectX7 and have noticed a nice speedup on the TNT2 and GeForce256, primarily due to improved texture management.
The API's simplicity has also improved, which is something you don't often see: usually code just gets more complex as it evolves. Porting Unreal Tournament's code from DirectX6 to DirectX7 only took 3.5 hours, and mostly consisted of deleting now-redundant code and changing function calls and interfaces. I'm very glad to see the IDirect3DTexture, IDirect3DViewport, and IDirect3DLight interfaces gone, and replaced by much simpler state-setting code. Direct3D's abuses of object-oriented programming are now gone.
With DirectX7, Microsoft did something I welcome, and would like to see more of: they designed the new Direct3D interfaces to not be backwards-compatible with the old ones. This enabled them to remove from view a bunch of the old baggage that obfuscated Direct3D: execute buffers are gone, unnecessary intermediate objects are gone, and much less weird COM QueryInterface stuff is necessary.
Ripping out old code and replacing it with new, better designed code is a great practice which too many software developers are afraid of.
-Tim Sweeney
