Unite 2010GDC ChinaAsia Game Show 2010GDC 2011
 DirectX 8 |
While at the GDC, we had an opportunity to sit down with Ted Hase, group program manager for DirectX at Microsoft, to talk about DirectX 8. Here's what we found out.
First off, although definitely not a technological breakthrough, the change to DirectX 8 that will probably be most welcome is that initialization will now be done with a single call.
The biggest changes in DirectX 8 will actually be in DirectMusic and DirectSound, which are being merged into one, and in DirectPlay. DirectPlay has added voice communication, which will allow gamers to communicate verbally in real time.
Several additions have been made to Direct3D as well, primarily centered around a new slew of per-vertex operations. Several developers we had talked to at the show indicated that they weren't particularly excited about this addition, because it is only useful in a small subset of games. However, as Ted pointed out, if you don't like a particular feature, you don't have to use it, and it's better to have it there should you ever need it.
For a while, Direct3D was playing catch-up with OpenGL. Now, however, Ted feels that with the last several releases, Direct3D is at least as full-featured, if not more so, as OpenGL. He also said that because Direct3D now supports almost everything appearing in other APIs, they can explore new areas that haven't been seen yet. Although he did not elaborate on any specifics they may be planning, he did state that Microsoft does not feel that it should dictate which features are made available to game developers. He said that their role is to provide flexible tools and be responsive to feedback so that it is the game developers themselves that mold emerging technologies.
In addition to D3D's steady progression Microsoft has taken a new interest in both DirectMusic and DirectPlay as features that separate the PC from the console market. As consoles move more and more into areas other than their old domains, MS is interested in developing the PC's strong points, which is specifically sees in networking and music and sound. We were happy to hear about MS's concetration on DirectMusic and Sound as important technology for creating more depth and immersion in games, and hopefully will be seeing more focus on things besides 3D in the future as well. (I would be interested in more Text-to-Speech technology myself.)
A few years ago, Microsoft and Silicon Graphics announced that they would be working together on a project dubbed Fahrenheit. Many people, perhaps erroneously, looked at Fahrenheit as a merger of OpenGL and Direct3D. Since the announcement, we haven't heard much, other than reports last year that SGI was dropping out. We asked Ted about the current state of Fahrenheit, and what, if anything, would result from the joint effort. He said that the Scene Graph portion of the API was complete, and we'd be seeing it eventually. However the Fahrenheit Low-Level API, the most relevant component to game developers, never generated much interest and thus is basically dead.
While our interview concentrated on DirectX, we couldn't help but pop a few questions about the X-Box which was announced just a day before. Of particular interest to developers is that unlike the Dreamcast, the X-Box will not run a version of Windows CE, but will instead run a slimmed down version of Windows 2000, which should provide a much better core. As you've probably seen the X-Box will use some form of NVidia chipset, we were hinted that it would be over NV-20 technology, and run whatever version of DirectX was available before launch, which appears to be DirectX 8.0. Since the machine is laid out similarly to a PC, and its running Windows development ports may not be considerably more than a re-compile, so all of you wishing for an X-Box dev kit can rest easy, as you are probably reading this on one now.