github.com/panda3d/panda3d/comm … 1b002fb7d9
We made a remake for an old game that used DX8, but still allowed it to run on old hardware as the original game, by letting the player choose between DX8, DX9 and OGL.
Would be nice if DX8 wasn’t removed. I know we’re talking about 10+ year old PCs here but we have such users too.
For the record, DirectX 8 is 15 years old. DirectX 9 is 13 years old. (I feel so old after looking that up…)
I removed the Direct3D 8 renderer because it’s an unnecessary and unused maintenance burden, and a space waster in the runtime distribution. Also because we don’t support Windows 95 any more in our builds anyway, and because we’re going to be supporting 64-bit, and I can’t for the life of me find versions of the Windows SDK that include 64-bit Direct3D 8 libraries (I’m guessing it doesn’t exist).
You are always free to try and make a build of Panda with a compiler and version of Python that support such old systems, of course, and if you’re already doing that, it’d be fairly easy to drop in the DirectX 8 directory from an older download of Panda. It’s perhaps easier to stick to using an old version of Panda then, though.
I’m theoretically willing to restore DirectX 8 support, but only if you can find some evidence that there are in fact users who have such old machines and who wouldn’t be satisfied with OpenGL, so that I’m not just wasting my time having to make 32-bit Panda builds just for testing the DirectX 8 renderer and porting every new architectural change (ie. sampler states in 1.9) back to the DirectX 8 renderer.
The old machines I’m talking about don’t support the OpenGL version of Panda last time I checked.
It will probably be the most effective use of everyone’s time then to just keep using 1.8.1 (or the commit before dx8 was removed).
ATI’s oldest DX8 cards support OpenGL 1.4, NVIDIA’s oldest cards support at least OpenGL 1.3. If Panda doesn’t work with those OpenGL versions, I would probably consider that a bug.
Do you actually know of users who actually have Direct3D 8 (or a Windows version old enough to run it) or are you just speculating about your user base? Out of curiosity, which Python version and compiler version do you use to generate your builds?
Why would I spend my time making a thread just out of pure speculation?
And I don’t seem to have a problem running DirectX8 mode on my Windows 7 machine myself. And that’s Panda3D 1.8.0 official build.
Well, I’m willing to consider it. Are you proposing we keep shipping DirectX 8 support in our 32-bit Windows builds but not our 64-bit Windows builds?
I guess that’s the only possible way.