DirectQ Update - 18th January 2012

Another slight code reorganization - recovering default pool resources from a lost device or video restart has moved to the start of a frame rather than happening in place. This was done to prevent an old problem where you'd lose the device, then recover it, then a system event (such as a window resize) might cause you to lose it again immediately afterwards. Now it only recovers these resources once and only when it's been definitively determined that the device is good and we're running again.

This will all go away with D3D11, which much more sensibly has ResizeBuffers and ResizeTarget, allowing an almost complete bypassing of window system events (the only one you really need to handle is a WM_SIZE, and the handling for that is very well-defined, rather than the mix of voodoo incantations required by D3D9).

Mapshots have another small but important improvement. In order to take a mapshot properly it's necessary to go into a special mode in which 2D GUI overlay stuff is not drawn, then redraw the scene (twice because of the buffer swap), then exit the mode. In addition to the second screen redraw (required to put the original back buffer back where it was otherwise we'd be capturing from the former front buffer, which would still have the 2D stuff in it) this caused a momentary flicker on-screen. Simple solution was just to suppress the buffer swap at the end of the first redraw - goodbye second redraw, goodbye flicker, all is nice and solid looking.

That will also go away with D3D11 where I can just call R_RenderScene to overwrite the backbuffer, and will no longer need to fool around with BeginScene/EndScene calls and making sure that they're being called on the correct render target.

TGA screenshots are about 10 times faster than they were. This was inspired by my D3D11 screenshot code, and is mostly the D3D9 equivalent of it. The old code round-tripped through several IDirect3DSurface9s before saving out, which was painful. Screenshot gamma adjustment (scr_screenshotgamma, if I remember correctly) is now effectively free (previously it added a few more IDirect3DSurface9s to the round-trip - sheesh, what was I thinking?) PNG, JPG and DDS screenshots remain slow because of needing to compress, BMP screenshots are as fast as TGA, and I really recommend that nobody uses PCX (scr_screenshotformat). Only TGA has gamma adjustment right now, and is the recommended format. I'll very likely drop the other formats and go TGA only when I move to D3D11.

Not sure if I'm going to add multisampling to the video options menu after all; this would be nice to do but is complicated by the fact that available multisampling modes are dependent on the current video mode, and also the fact that it would be hugely stretching the capabilities of my current menu code to deal with that.

With hindsight I should have been passing a \0 delimited string (terminated with a second \0) to spin control types, but I'm not willing to do such an overhaul right now. Maybe another time.

Until then, the cvar is d3d_multisample, 0 (default) will disable it, values of 1 or up enable, the limit is hardware and video mode dependent, and be aware that some hardware can't support multisampling in windowed modes. It's name will be changing to vid_multisample in the next release, by the way (now that I have robust detection of when the mode list changes I want to go back to standardizing on "vid_" for all of these cvars - this will be the last time that happens; promise).

When exiting DirectQ from a fullscreen mode it will temporarily switch back to windowed before shutting down. This isn't for some cutesy reason like I think it looks cool or anything; it's a requirement of D3D11 and will be the behaviour once I port.