[casual_games] DirectDraw or Direct3D

[Lennard Feddersen]

I would be interested in hearing the opinions of others - my D3D 
experience is admittedly dated.  Here are my arguments:

1.  I can't see M$ dropping DDraw anytime soon.  Legacy code.

2.  My previous experience with D3D, admittedly dated, was that those 
modes are supported differently on different HW as each vendor writes 
their own drivers.  Lots of texture rotation code laying around on the 
net if you don't have your own - you can rotate at load time and shove 
them into RAM if performance is an issue.

3.  Are you finding that GDI is as fast as DDdraw?  Not my experience at 
all.

Lennard Feddersen
CEO, Rusty Axe Games, Inc.
www.RustyAxe.com

Lennard at RustyAxe.com
P. 250-635-7623 F. 1-309-422-2466
3521 Dogwood, Terrace, BC, Canada, V8G-4Y7




Jonas Beckeman wrote:

>I have to disagree with Lennard: *definitely* Direct3D, because DirectDraw
>
>* is deprecated - means you never know when MS is going to drop it. Might
>not exist in the next release of DirectX. 
>
>* doesn't support blend modes such as alpha or additive. No rotation either.
>
>* isn't that optimized these days (HW and driver manufacturers don't care
>much about it)
>
>If you're on a really old computer with no 3D, I think you're better off
>with GDI+ (you can use the strategy pattern so your framework just switches
>to another dll for the actual rendering).
>
>I used to have GDI+, D3D and DD rendering modes in my open source framework
>Endogine, but I dropped DD as I didn't see any reason to keep it around.
>
>
>If you want to create games that run in-browser, then you should probably
>consider one of the existing frameworks, taking advantage of the install
>base.
>Judging by my own behavior, online demos are worth the trouble. I hardly
>ever download games where I can't look at the gameplay first (a well
>produced video can also work though).
>
>/Jonas
>
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