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Author Topic: Blacksun Engine -- DirectX vs. Open GL  (Read 7793 times)

Offline EmeraldReporter

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Blacksun Engine -- DirectX vs. Open GL
« on: August 31, 2011, 03:41:36 »
With the Blacksun Engine having been upgraded, (I hope) looking like a brand new Shiny apple, do you think the developers (Most Wanted Entertainment ere Mithis, are going to stay Windows Vista/7/8 only?

I would really hope that they branch out to the Mac, and if not. By staying Windows only, they BETTER release a touchscreen (tablet, All-in-One Touchscreen Desktop) compatible Windows 8 version! At least rereleasing Nexus One in a touch-friendly form!

So what would you want guys? A superb, Magnifisent well developed version being Windows only?
Or a possibly buggy, not-completely-finished Windows release, but with multi-platform compatibility, i.e. Mac OS X, Android, WebOS, and Windows Phone support.

Which one?

Anyways! To my original topic, maybe not related to OpenGL directly, but DirectX. Through the various improvements from DirectX 10, and 11, what can we expect to see from DirectX 10, and 11 alone?

I've heard of:
•"Tesselation" (think of FINNALY meaningful, actual Anti-Ailiasing.
•"multi-threaded resource handling" (Video games (developers) being able to expertly make use of multi-core CPU's (and maybe GPU's too?)

Those are the two things that I know for sure are going to be implemented in Nexus 2.

Your responses?

« Last Edit: December 09, 2011, 22:02:10 by EmeraldReporter »
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Offline Arparso

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Re: Blacksun Engine -- DirectX vs. Open GL
« Reply #1 on: August 31, 2011, 12:08:28 »
In an ideal world I'd hope for Nexus 2 to support every major operating system, game console and mobile computing device out there, but I doubt very much it'll happen. It's a (relatively) small developer with a (relatively) small budget and making your game work flawlessly on multiple platforms (such as Windows, Linux and Mac) is always a headache. I'd prefer them concentrating on gameplay, bugfixing, great mod support and tools and just general polish instead of spending months on porting their DirectX engine to other platforms. Going multiplatform makes the most sense, if you plan for it right from the start... especially if it's only a "small" indie game project. Nexus, however, is a rather complex title and the engine was built for Windows/DirectX, so there'd be major work investment involved to port this over.

... however, I'm a Windows user at heart, so I'm probably somewhat biased :P



Regarding DX10/DX11:

First of all, Tesselation doesn't have anything to do with Anti-Aliasing: It's a technique to generate actual geometry (= more triangles/polygons) directly on the GPU. This is very useful for dynamically adjusting the level of detail of objects based on their distance to the camera, for example... or for generating really fine-grained details on the fly. Popular examples include the bricks of a wall made up of actual polygons and not just being a flat texture on a large, flat surface. Have a look at this video and notice all the detail on the stones and surfaces:

Hardware tessellation with DirectX 11 (Unigine "Heaven" benchmark)


Multi-threaded rendering might prove very useful indeed - with DX10 and below you have to do all your rendering on one CPU core. Well, the rendering mainly happens on the GPU, of course, but someone has to talk to the GPU telling it what to render next (as well as to transfer data to the GPU and/or VRAM such as textures, triangles, shaders, etc.). Previously you could only talk to the GPU from a single CPU core... with DX11 you can split the work to multiple CPU cores, letting your engine make better use of multicore CPUs.

There are a couple of other interesting features in DX10/DX11, such as Compute Shaders doing all sorts of expensive calculations on the much much faster GPU instead of the CPU and other, more subtle features like anti-aliasing support for multiple rendertargets, etc.

The downside is, of course, having to stick to Windows Vista and above when making your game exclusively for DX10 or even DX11 while lots of people still use Windows XP. You're effectively going to lose customers this way, if you don't also plan for a DX9 renderer, further adding to the development time and costs.