hi, the title suggests I dont yet have DirectX8 - which is true; but I was wondering if someone who does have it could fill me in on whether it''s actually worth porting DirectX7 code to DirectX8... y''see my games early in development, and could easily be switched to DirectX8..... and I need to decide sooner rather than later.... Jack;

DirectX8 involved radical changes in all interfaces, so even if you use an abstracted rendering class, it will be a lot of work to get everything running correctly under DX8.
One one the changes is the complete takeout of DirectDraw, absolutely no 2D functionality anymore.

So to say, if you''ve got a project you already spent months of work on, you might want to upgrade it to DX8, but anything else (especially 2D games) are certainly not worth the effort.
Althought conversion to DX8 is hard, starting a new project with DX8 isn''t. Microsoft put a lot of work into the examples and finally we''ve got a production quality framework (CD3DApp) instead of the old D3DUtil library.

-Markus-

Cygon''s right. DirectDraw is no more. Now its just D3D but with locking and surfacing abilities to perform 2D operations. Kinda sucks for anyone trying to port 2D to DX8 - cause ya can''t!! However, I think this is a hell of a lot better. I was always hesitant to learn D3D, instead sticking to 2D for the beginning. Now I''ll have to just plunge right in and only have one graphics interface to worry about. Not too bad.

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"Need more eeenput..."

- #5, "Short Circuit"
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What are the options for someone who liked DirectDraw and wishes it was still here? Do we have to try and find DirectX 7.0? I want to do 2d stuff, but it seems really annoying in dx8. I personally kinda wish that they had left them separate.

I thought DirectDraw was still there, just wrapped up together with D3D

And you could use DD7 and DP8 or DS8 together...
Direct Play8 looks good, I''m trying it out now.
They added a few spiffy features to d3d & ds

My DI7 code took about thirty seconds to update to DI8.

DirectX is really really COM''patible. If you have Dx8, you can use Dx1 (or Dx3,5,6,7) if you want...

So what about 2D overlay type stuff.... y''know, like the HUD for the spaceship or the health monitor etc... How can we draw them then??

Jack;

Pretransformed/lit vertices.

(hardware acceleration in 2d )

Look at the DDraw Demos in the DirectX8 SDK.

Thanks,
Etnu

Sometimes I think I know what I really don''t, but then again usually I do know what I don''t, but just don''t realize it, maybe its because I am so young, but then again it could be because I am insane.

I am writing a series of tutorials on using Direct3D for 2D. The first one is on my website, which there is a link to in my sig.


Please state the nature of the debugging emergency.

sharewaregames.20m.com

cheers;

I''ll have a read through it....

I''m waiting for the SDK to arrive on CD (another 2-3 weeks), which is rather annoying; as it''s very impracticle to download it with my setup (2 computers, no network)......

Jack;

It''s not like you can''t still use DirectDraw...as you have all said, MS no longer officially supports it and as far as I know it will receive no further work, but the IDirectDraw7 interface still is there and ready to use. I''m sure it would be beneficial in the long run to go with the D3D approach, but for anyone worried, DirectDraw IS still in there, they didn''t totally rip out the code !

Anthracks