DirectQ Update - 24th January 2012 - Here be Textures

I've started on reworking DirectQ's external texture loader, meaning that the release will be delayed.

I'd come really close to not doing this at all, but in the end it feels like the right decision: as this will be the last major D3D9 release it deserves to be a higher quality release, and it will give me a cleaner codebase to move to D3D11 from.

I won't go into the reasons why the external texture loader turned out the way it did, other than to say that with hindsight it was a clearly misguided case of trying to be all things to all people (being most things to most people and not creating a mess while doing so is infinitely preferable).

There's been a lot of new code and changed code in this version (even aside from the texture loader) so I expect that I'm going to have to do a patch version or two as follow-on, but for the most part I now feel that it's on fundamentally solid ground in parts of the codebase that previously weren't.

The major remaining things that I'm unhappy about are my use of the D3D effects framework for managing shaders, and memory allocation for server-side entities.

The effects framework is worth covering first, because my earlier HLSL ports didn't even use it at all. I brought it in to make some aspects of dealing with shaders easier, but there was a tradeoff that began to bite some time back, which is in terms of mixing and matching vertex and pixel shaders. I can't just take this vertex shader, pair it with that pixel shader and draw something - I need to write an effect pair for it. That's only a coupla lines of code, but as requirements to more flexibly handle options build up, the number of such pairs begins to balloon out of control.

My D3D11 code doesn't use the effects framework at all and is much cleaner and more flexible as a result. Things like a proper r_showtris mode (which I can't currently do without adding 30-odd more effect pairs) would be easy to add there.

The effects framework also has some small overhead of it's own, resulting in a few percent performance dip.

In the end I'm making the decision to not rework that for this release, as I'll need to be revisiting and reworking my shaders anyway when I move to D3D11. That's a job I would have had to do twice if I had taken it on now. For something like video startup and the modes list it's different - that's isolated in a very specific part of the engine and can be beaten into shape while not affecting how e.g. MDLs are drawn. The shaders permeate the entire renderer, are used everywhere, and one change in the handling of them will upset everything. That's the kind of job that you really only want to be doing once.

Server-side entities is not that big a deal by comparison; it's just a code quality and cleanliness thing. I do have this fear that some day it's going to explode in my face, but it's passed some fairly brutal tests so far and has been doing well enough to not merit raising it above other priorities.