[casual_games] DirectDraw or Direct3D

[Jonas Beckeman]

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

Yeah, DX9 will be available on Vista, so the old DirectX 7 DirectDraw API
will probably work - in theory. But there's no guarantee that HW/driver
manufacturers will continue supporting it, from what I can understand.


> 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.

This is something I've never heard about, sounds like a mid-90's problem.
Definitely not a topic on the D3D mailing lists these days.


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

With proper dirty rects handling, GDI should be in the same ballpark as
DDraw except for the lean'n'mean blits with no alpha, rotation or other
effects. Almost all my gfx contains alpha, so that speed boost is pretty
much useless to me. Full-screen mode will often be faster in DD though.

Anyway, as Gabriel states, a good abstraction layer that allows for any
technology to do the actual rendering - be it GDI, D3D, DD, OGL - makes the
choice less important. If you find you need a new renderer, it won't take
many days to write it. (I even have an ASCII renderer for Endogine, so I
should be OK on typewriters too. Animation: just flip the pages.)

/Jonas